The Tides of Time - Book 2, The Porth Kerensa Series

Chapter Sixteen

“Are you some kind of fucking imbecile?” Rory screamed at his crying wife as she sat hunched up on the floor. “What did you want to go and say something like that for you stupid bitch?”

   “I’m sorry Rory, I’m so sorry” Vanessa sobbed.

   “Look at the fucking mess you made” he roared indicating to the smashed ruins of the cup of tea his wife had made him. The cup was shattered on the floor and tea pooled all over the floor. The cup had caught Vanessa a glancing blow to the forehead when he threw it and blood mingled on the floor with the tea.

   “I thought you’d want to know what Ruth said” Vanessa wept.

   “I don’t want to know what any of your brain dead family has to say, especially that nosey interfering old hag” Rory sneered. “Do you think I’m ashamed Vanessa? Do you think I have something to hide? That I should be worried because your sister is home?”

   Vanessa turned and looked at her husband for the first time in a long time. Her eyes met his and she stared at him with a disdain in her blue eyes that infuriated him.

   “You should be Rory. You raped her.”

   “You fucking little bitch! Your sister was a slag and you know it. A little whore.”

   “My sister was not a slag” Vanessa said quietly. “She was a young girl who you raped and now she’s home a very rich woman, with a lot of power. You should be very worried you raping bastard. Very fucking worried indeed.”

   Rory’s’ arm swung round and smashed Vanessa sideways before she could move. The pain exploded in her head immediately but Vanessa didn’t care. She didn’t care when he kicked her in the ribs or when he took her violently on the lounge floor and spat on her afterwards. It was nothing he hadn’t done before. She on the other hand had for the first time in a long time told her husband the truth, and she felt much better for it.

   When he left the house and Vanessa hobbled painfully into the bathroom to tend her injuries, she was able to meet her eyes in the mirror properly since Jessie had left Porth Kerensa. She looked at the woman she had become and she shivered with disgust. Her husband, the man who had stood in Gods house and promised to love and cherish her had made her nothing more than his punch bag.

   He had belittled her, beaten the life out of her, humiliated her in front of her children and violated her and her sister in the worst way a man could, he had hurt her son and she had been too cowed to do anything about it, or to stop it even when she had her father-in-law and her mother to help her. She had let Rory do what he wanted with her, was it any wonder she looked the way she did?

   Enough was enough now as far as Vanessa was concerned. All of her life she had been pliant and submissive but now it was time to make a stand. Her father had been awake for two days now and he had been moved from Intensive Care onto a ward. Vanessa had been there when he had been told about Jessie and the public circus that was her life, she had watched him cry when Ruth told him that his daughter had been raped by persons unknown and Vanessa felt guilty; for she could give them all justice.

   She could change her children’s lives, she could release Jessie from the shadow she lived under and give her a chance to start again with Jace and she could free herself from her violent oppressive husband if she would only tell the truth and speak up. She knew that Jessie would not tell the truth, she knew that Jessie would wait until Vanessa was ready.

   The two sisters had walked the beach together yesterday; they had walked and talked about everything. Jessie quiet and respective of Vanessa’s reasons for staying in her marriage even though she must have felt like screaming and Vanessa cried silent tears when Jessie told her the horrifying truth of the night Vanessa had been in hospital. They had talked and they had cried and they had held onto each other.