Her debasement was the most exhilarating horror I have ever witnessed.
From the essence of the Brute, the Sorcerer annihilated a lifetime of indulgence. The haughty Patron’s Daughter was reduced to a desperate whore in weeks.
Looking back from the perspective of the particular experience I’ve had with the upper classes, I long ago realized the hideous disservice my former Patron and Patroness did their progeny.
Raised with excessive vanity and convinced of their superiority, their daughter and son were rendered helpless faced with the predators who would be their undoing.
They had no skills to make their way through life.
This is the tale about the ruin of the Patron’s Daughter, yet her brother’s fall from grace was no less drastic.
In some ways, it was worse.
A little more than ten years after I came to the Capital City, I heard how their son ended up destitute.
The estate where I grew up had been in that horrid family for more generations than could be counted. Early in his patronage, the son would lose everything because of an elaborate and exceedingly brilliant swindle.
Although the son was as spoiled as his sister, he wasn’t nearly as difficult to please when it came to marriage.
Perhaps it was because he was less beautiful. He married fairly young and seemingly well to a girl as highborn and indulged as he was.
His bride was said to be rather beautiful, not so much as the Patron’s Daughter, but enough that the spoiled son and his parents were pleased with the marriage.
Two years after their lavish wedding, the patron died, and his wife followed within months.
Thus the young couple became the new patron and patroness of the village.
Yet there was already trouble between them.
Like most marriages between the upper classes, there was very little courtship between the betrothed couple. So unless there were strong objections on one side or the other, the parents went ahead with the wedding plans.
It wasn’t long after the sumptuous nuptials, when the couple spent real time together that the blushing bride decided her husband was insufferable and their life tedious.
Rumor had it that she refused to take her place in the marriage bed after their honeymoon.
The sudden rise in stature did nothing to ease her dissatisfaction or make her more agreeable to the intimacy of a husband and wife.
They were in a uniquely vulnerable state.
The wife’s loathing of highborn married respectability and the fact that the young couple was ill prepared for their new responsibilities made them succulent prey.
So of course, predators were quick to appear.
Within months of their ascension, a family of intelligent bandits moved into the village.
This breed of outlaw was not violent. These were the criminal minds who preferred to use their brains to separate fools from their wealth.
The gang of ambitious con artists had their sights on the foolish young patron, new to his position, uncertain in how to wield power, and with nobody to guide him.
How these never-do-wells gained entry to the social circle of the patron and patroness is beyond my experience to figure out.
I heard they had an extravagant story, that they had flair and charisma, and plenty of props to support the illusion of false respectability.
However it happened that such opposites should cross paths, the young patroness fell hungrily in love with the ringleader as soon as she saw him.
Wily creature that young man must have been, he took full advantage of the unexpected gift Fortune had bestowed and seduced the young patroness.
Word had it that the wife’s role was crucial to the elaborate scheme played upon her husband.
Good lord, how she must have despised him!
The swindle cost him everything, and thus, the interminable lineage of that awful family came to an end.
Their fortune made and evidence against the bandits impossible to obtain, the young patroness ran off with her lover and his unscrupulous family, leaving her husband wretchedly poor and suddenly dependent on his sister.
I heard the Patron’s Daughter had been so furious with her brother she made him live in the gardener’s cottage at the back of her property, rather than in the house with her.
Yes, darling Shepherd, the Patron’s Daughter had been able to get on with life.
I hope it reassures you that she fared much better than most girls taken in by the Sorcerer.
Her ruin was subtle enough for camouflage. She even married within her social class. Less than a year after I left, I heard the Patron’s Daughter married a man much older than she, a few years older than her father.
Because she did not sell her heart, her scandalous nature was suspected and gossiped about for years. Her reputation was shaky for the rest of her life.
But she was never caught, nothing was ever proven, and appearances were maintained.
I believe the marriage of convenience suited her rather well, and I’m sure her parents must have been relieved to see her go.
