The Countess of Warwick
When the Countess married the Earl, and moved to Fensmere, she had brought her own entourage with her. These included those she called nieces (Eleanor, Frances, Jane, Chas, and Penny), nephews (Roger, Cutter, Isaac, and Martin), and staff including her Lady’s Maids (Mary and Rebecca), carpenter Big George, and the children’s governess Sindonie.
Years later, came the day—Penny’s eighteenth birthday—when the Countess found out: That the Defalais sisters knew her nieces were transgendered. That Penny was teaching the girls even when they were being punished. That in addition to Latin and religion, she had been continuing to teach them the subjects their mother had wanted them to learn, but Anne had forbidden to them, like grammar, Greek, Hebrew, rhetoric, philosophy, math, geometry, astronomy, and heretical ideas from Germany about the Church. And that she had even let them dabble in some of the secret subjects Anne Batonnoir taught all her lost boys and girls, like fighting, spy craft, and the principles of magic.
She burst into Hellinore’s closet, finding Mary, Catherine, Beatrice, and Hellinore there.
“Hiding.” she growled.
“With boys!” she raged.
“Of… lower… station,” she spat in contempt.
“Aunt Anne! I’m not a boy!” Chas began, looking stricken and betrayed, almost crying, and completely missing the point, bless her heart.
Penny looked guilty, ashamed, scared, a little relieved, and almost… almost, the tiniest bit proud, apologizing profusely and trying to explain she hadn’t meant to sleight her guardian, but only to help the girls, and pleaded to be allowed to continue. It was a pronouncement as honest, and in its own way as misplaced, as Chas’s.
The sisters mainly looked terrified, as well they might have, although Hellinore, now 11, stoutly volunteered that when she found out Penny was transgender she had threatened to tell the Countess what they knew if Penny wouldn’t keep teaching. It was a quarter-truth, at best, but strayed from the truth for loyalty’s sake, and would have been dead on-point if the Countess had been interested.
The Countess’s retribution was terrible and swift. The five girls were birched in the Great Chamber, out of line of sight from the upstairs kitchen but in hearing range of half the house proper, to humiliate them as much as possible without allowing any of the servants ideas or feelings above their stations. Of course, every decent or sensible servant but one fled the house the instant the birchings began, but the point was made, the girls embarrassed, and the stories spread. Only the Countess’s carpenter, Big George, remained in the house, installing locks on all the girls’ closet doors, securing them against escape even while imperiling them from any fire or other calamity should one overtake the manor. Then she locked her stepdaughters in their closets for days, having her lady’s maids supervise the servants who brought them food and water and changed out their chamber pots, to prevent them from showing the girls any additional or emotional kindnesses.
While the Countess herself, focused on attending to those she regarded as her own. As always, the lowest in rank suffered the worst. Even though, in this case, “lowest” was a relative term—at least as importantly, the three remaining offenders were from the Countess’s household, utterly beholden to her, with no other sources of support or care, nothing else to turn to, nowhere else to go. They were all members of the gentry, the lowest rank of the English nobility, as far below the Defalaises as they were above the rest of the population. But she had facilitated Sindonie’s escape, kept Chas from the orphanage, and bought Penny outright.
From the sisters’ perspective, they disappeared for days; and when they finally reappeared, the girls, at least, were subdued, almost timid, and in some kind of shock, more distant from everyone and everything around them, than they had been before. If it had been secretly suspected in certain quarters on the manor estate before, that Penny and Chas were not quite what they appeared, it now became more or less an open secret that Penny and the tutor occasionally seen slipping to and from the manor to Cambridge—which did not allow women—were one and the same person.
Around the same time, the residents of the manor learned the King was planning to visit, a fairly rare event this far East. Perhaps it was the stories of the progressive home built by three generations of Defalaises that attracted him. But more likely, according to rumors that eventually even reached the older sisters’ ears, were that something else might have lured him here. The same thing that had so impressed and befuddled the Earl and most of the young men in the county.
The Queen of Lust
Chas and Penny had been carefully selected for their respective adoption and purchase by Channah, the Succubus Queen of the Hell of Lust, who in her human guise had lately adopted the name Anne Batonnoir, married the Earl of Warwick, and now was slowly draining his wits and life away. Since acquiring her wards, she and her vassals and collaborators and minions had worked together, like an orchestra, to mold and condition and train the boys—now girls—for the special purpose for which they had been recruited. It was the same with all the thousands of the Queen’s wards, nephews and nieces alike, here in Cambridge today, and in innumerable other cities and villages and campsites scattered across the world since humanity had begun.
The succubae and their incubi had started the game with… certain advantages. Reading and manipulating humans wasn’t just something they did, it was what they were. And with every round of the game, every human soul they worked on, every human lifetime of experience they gained, they had continued to pull further ahead of their human prospects. They could, literally, seduce and drain humans of their very life without even waking up. How much more were they capable of wide awake in the flesh?
Before they even set hands on the children—or occasionally adults—they wanted, the ancient, eldritch Queen and her Court had used their powers to discern things in their hearts and minds that neither the children nor any adult caretakers understood. She did not adopt babies, but young children. They were not just raw material like clay, indifferently mined from acres of the same ore to be given form by the succubae. They were raw puppets, picked out from shelves stuffed to the brim with the world’s unfortunates, already animated by birth, already endowed by early childhood with the basic shapes Hell required. All she and her servants had to do was to finish them, polish them, and set them on their paths.
PART 3 OF STORY RECAP
Literature Section “06-36 Grimm Transformations III: The Evil Plan”—Accompanying Images: 1514-1519. 1115 words—©2025 The Remainderman. This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions. It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.
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