Chapter 15 - Enchantment

During Margery's apprenticeship, her mistress, Morag had drawn a distinction between enchanting someone and bewitching them. Enchanting someone was usually fast and even a stage hypnotist can come close. Bewitching a person requires more with reinforcement and repetition and therefore takes time. It's at the culmination of the witches' art.

***

Bianca was still unsure as to why she'd agreed to meet Margery for lunch. Anyway, she was happy with Margery's choice. It was at a bushland restaurant that caters for a lunch crowd, overlooking the wide blue harbour. So, before this puzzling engagement Bianca asked Isis for a summary of Margery's recent movements.

After agreeing about the pleasant outlook, the nice day and so on, Margery opened the conversation by asking Bianca if she would like an update on her progress with Mohandas over the weekend but Bianca was unexpectedly disinterested and firmly refused to discuss him.

"Your sex life is your business Margery," she said, "but it's also the private business of the men in your life. You shouldn't be discussing either Phillip or Mohandas with me. If I meet one of them with you, I don't want to have the responsibility of having to lie to either about the other. What if Mohandas was to ask me about your boating activities or about that episode in the park with Phillip this weekend?"

Margery was nonplussed. How could Bianca know about what she had done with Phillip? She'd been so careful neither of them would be recognised.

"What are you talking about?"

"You know perfectly well. Don't worry, no one's going to talk about it. But I don't want to know any more than I've learnt already."

Margery had sat silently eating her meal, obviously, worried. How could Bianca know about Phillip?  Her plans for trying her 'ring thing' again this lunchtime may have to be abandoned until she discovered why Phillip had opened his big mouth, because that was the only possible explanation. It was annoying because she'd been looking forward to having Bianca 'on side' over the holiday period.

Bianca was pleased to see Margery so concerned. She let the information brew before she took pity on her; ordering her favourite bottle of wine; and asking her where she'd learnt her seduction methods. Margery immediately brightened up and explained that she'd used her knicker-less technique on many men after developing them as a school girl, seducing somebody called Derrick.

"As I've already told you, you should try it. It's easy to do," she said. "But be careful, even the most innocent seeming men are inclined to misunderstand and will try to go further in private."

"Misunderstand. What's there to misunderstand?"

"Well, if you tell a man to stop and he doesn't, it's rape. Even if he doesn't actually penetrate you, it's still attempted rape."

"There's such a thing a provocation; and what about a reasonable assumption that you had acquiesced?"

"That's what rapists always claim. I once had a man convicted of rape. He now has a criminal record as a paedophile. I have a recording of another man actually raping me when I was fourteen."

"So, you were underage when you gave him a Christmas present somewhere private and he raped you?"

"No, it wasn't the Christmas present, although it might have been. He was certainly thrilled when he got his Christmas present on our first date. He would've actually raped me then and there, if I hadn't screamed and got people running.   Greg was one of those men who think they own you the moment you seem to like them. They're the dim boofy ones, nearer to the basic animal. He spent a lot of time building his body, pumped up on chemicals, hormones and sildenafil to treat his consequential erectile dysfunction. Men like him want to fight any other man who looks at you and they think they own you. For a young girl that's exciting. You can have them running in circles for you if you're smart. If you're not smart, or have a child by one, they'll have you living in a shelter for abused women."

"Were you smart?"

"Oh yes. I chose Greg carefully from a dating site and flirted. On our second date he was contrite and we had respectful sex; and on our third I had him beat up a couple of guys in a nightclub, just for fun. It's a great feeling for a twelve-year-old girl to have a muscleman at your beck and call. But sooner or later they'll hit you. That's when he had to go. He was so pathetically sorry that he'd bruised my face that I reprimanded him and shamed him until he punched a hole in a door in frustration. He was so easy to play.  And then I let him have sex. After that I had enough evidence to turn him in; showing them how he'd forced his way in through the door and then raped me. It didn't go well for him that I was under-age. I claimed he knew my true age and had been grooming me on-line. Of course, it was the other way around. Greg hadn't the brains to groom anyone. Needless to say, he spent some time in remedial therapy and he's been chipped, with a cute little RFI tag under the skin behind his neck, and then chemically castrated. They use hormones and then other gonad targeting chemicals."

"That's terrible Margery, I don't know who to feel most sorry for, him or you."

Margery looked as if she was about to cry. Bianca realised that there was more to this story than she was being told. Margery obviously, wanted to brush the experience off as quickly as possible and changed the topic of discussion.

"You know the difference between a hormone and an enzyme?  You can't hear an enzyme!"

Margery finished her own joke before Bianca could respond. She'd long ago discovered that almost everyone knew the answer to that one. But this was her introduction to a lecture about male and female hormones, as if she was telling Bianca something new.

Bianca realised that although Margery was a renowned organiser, she lacked a formal education. She was self-taught, asking Circe her VPA, to look up the literature and learning by experience, whereas Bianca had known the theory long before she got an opportunity to practice. Bianca grudging admired her for her drive and persistence.

"But some men with the right hormones have never had a taste of the real thing," Margery finally concluded.

"Yet many men seem indifferent to women. What about men who are gay?"

"Gays are seldom indifferent. They are among the most sex addicted. It's just that they have somehow, been pointed in the wrong direction by genes or circumstance. Why else would a married man or a judge or a priest be found hanging out in some sordid place, like a smelly toilet, hoping for a quick fix?"

"There are men who are neither," objected Bianca.

"True. They are the drones. They go through life never really understanding what it's all about. Very few great men have been indifferent to sex."

"What about the man you recorded raping you?  Was he arrested?"

"No! I didn't want him to be arrested.  He's done very well in the Church."

"Does he still have his manhood? I suppose the Catholic Church is an ideal career choice for a castrati." 

"Oh he's very much a man," said Margery, "even though his church forbids it. Ironic, isn't it?  I still have sex with him occasionally just to remind him. He can be hard to get to."

Bianca looked at her questioningly. There was something fundamentally unbelievable about the stories that Margery liked to tell after she'd had a wine or two and a second bottle had just arrived. This was sounding more and more like one of her elaborations.

"There's a part of him that doesn't want to see me; he's torn between his goddess and his god. You see he's no longer a priest. He's done very well in the Church. Under my tutelage, and my occasional intervention to remove rivals, he's risen to become a Bishop."

"If he's a bishop why does he see you at all? Surely that's very dangerous for him?" Bianca asked, now very sceptical of Margery's tale.

"He has no choice."

"Why not?"

"Two reasons. I have a recording of him violently raping me when I was fourteen. And I've bewitched him, he can't resist me."

"He was your priest and he raped you? That's dreadful," said Bianca sympathetically. If it was true Margery had obviously, had a tough life.

"You misunderstand. By then I was learning The Craft. So, it was the other way about. My teacher, Morag, chose him for me. She wanted to have a 'sleeper' in the Catholic Church. When Morag settled on him, he was a young priest in his first parish. His seduction was my mission.

"Like many, he was heterosexual, but sexually deprived and frustrated. I moved into his parish and told everyone at his church that I was seventeen. I was tall and had matured early. I had a nice figure with full breasts and had been coached on how to appear four years older. At Mass, in my matronly Sunday clothes, I looked the part and they all believed I was a young woman, even though I hadn't yet turned fourteen.

"I went to him one afternoon in December asking him to privately hear my confession. The proximity an extraordinarily captivating seventeen-year-old woman was very arousing for him. Then I gave him his Christmas present. I helped him to relieve years of frustration. When he came, he ran off in horror at what he'd done.

"The next day I accused him of molesting me."

"How did you prove it? Lots of people have stories of being abused by priests and no one believing them."

"As I've already told you, I record all my interactions with men. In those days I just turned on the sound recorder on my hand-held and streamed it to The Cloud. And the reason that some whistle blowers are not believed is that some senior church officials, like my Bishop, believe, privately, that there are two sides to some of these stories. Lovers spurned; unrequited love and all that."

"You haven't lived life to the full if you haven't had at least one love affair that broke your heart."

"That's a dreadful thing to say. Child abuse is never excusable. Even in your case. You were still underage and adults need to be more cautious and check properly."

"Quite right," said Margery, not wanting to be diverted.

Bianca was sceptical.

"So, you'd trapped him into molesting you when you were underage?  How did you turn that into a rape recording? 

"The rape was later, after we'd been 'seeing each other' secretly for over five months."

"You were having sex with him for five months when you were not yet fourteen!  And he didn't realise how young you were?  How often?"

"Sometimes several times a day. And no, he was young and naive. My task was to bewitch him, then entrap him."

Bianca was now finding all this a bit unlikely. "So, when did the rape take place," she asked?

"When my fourteenth birthday was approaching, I told him I would soon be eighteen. On the day, I attacked him. By then he was accustomed to me initiating a bit of violence as part of our sex games before a vigorous session of sex. it was outdoors and we struggled about in the dirt. I managed to get a few cuts and bruises."

"That afternoon I appeared at a Medical Centre as a young girl, in tears and very confused, whimpering that a big man had hurt me. I was examined and it was confirmed that I was around fourteen and had been violently raped. A medical report was prepared and I was given a copy. Semen swabs failed to match the DNA of any known rapist."

"When did you plan to use the report?"

"I didn't plan to actually use it. It was simply for insurance for later. Using it would have destroyed those months of careful grooming. If I'd wanted to blackmail him, I had plenty of recordings of our couplings already, streamed into my audio library in The Cloud. This one was the ultimate weapon that couldn't be escaped."

"So, it was for blackmail?"

"Not blackmail, suasion. The Catholic Church is very familiar with using this technique to bring people to heel. When they wanted Galileo to recant, they simply showed him their torture chambers and what they had done to those who foolishly had sufficient commitment to their 'wrong ideas' to resist. Galileo was a rational man and decided that his view of the truth was not worth the pain."

"But the Church was subsequently forced to admit that he was right all along and apologise."

"Yes, but that was useless to Galileo. He had been dead a hundred years before the relevant texts were unbanned and another two hundred and fifty years before they finally conceded that he had been forced to recant the truth in the face of their falsehoods. He never knew."

"As it turned out I had to show my priest the Implements of the Inquisition sooner than I'd anticipated."

Although Bianca was intrigued, she had to get back. "Why don't we save this for another day/" she asked.

That suited Margery's purposes fine. The girl had been impossible to get the better of today and she needed more preparation. "How are you placed on next Friday?  Same place same time and cancel our afternoon appointments?"

"It's a date."