“Tell me,” said Elinor, and so I did, at last. The whole of it. All his brutalities; all the neglect and ill use of my lost and lonely childhood. I told her then what I had learned of what lay behind his depravities, the same terrible stories he had poured into the unwilling ears of a frightened child who had not wished to hear them. How he had been buggered as a boy by the rough men of the fleet and learned to swill down the rum until he did not mind it. How he had gone under the lash of a boatswain’s mate who had not troubled to comb the cat between each stroke, so that the tails landed all
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