My Deepest Secret

I have never talked about this to anyone before. Whenever it comes to my mind I am again overwhelmed by the guilt of it. I certainly did not tell what I knew at the time because it was all my fault.

It happened when I was in my last year at Benton Towers which is one of the lesser known boarding schools for girls. My best friend was a lovely girl called Gilly Parker and, as two eighteen year olds who shared a room, we were inseparable. Well that Easter holiday Gilly invited me to spend a week staying on the Dorset farm where her family had lived and worked for generations. Gilly was a proper country girl, slim and fresh faced with a silvery laugh. I always thought her a bit of an innocent but then I suppose we all were; we talked and giggled about boys but most of us knew very little about – that side of things.

Anyway it was a lovely week, like something out of an Enid Blyton book but there was that fateful afternoon. The two of us climbed to the top of Treech Hill from where we could lean on a fence and look down at the surrounding countryside. We picked out Gilly's family farm and I noticed a think patch of woodland bordering the farm. It was dense and dark and triangular and made me think a bit of the soft furry bush inside my knickers. Anyway I asked Gilly if the woods were part of her land and if we could explore there as I love woodland even though there was something about the sight of these woods which somehow gave me an uncomfortable feeling.

She hesitated and I had the feeling which one gets when one knows one has said something wrong. I could tell that she did not want to talk about the subject but, fool that I was, I kept asking about it.

"It's a bad place," she said. "We don't go there."

It sounded to me like a bit of old country folklore. "Don't go near the witch's cottage." But I could tell that Gilly took it seriously. Well she didn't want me to think she was a fool so she began to tell me the tale and I tell it to you as far as I remember her words.

It all goes back to Sir Francis Walsingham who was Queen Elizabeth I's spymaster. Walsingham had spies everywhere mainly to uncover Catholic plots against The Queen but what hardly anyone knows is that he unofficially started or at least sanctioned something called The Guild of Inquisitors. It was said that these men were ingenious at dreaming up horrible ways of getting information out of anyone and their leader was a man called Sir John Favenham whose history is obscure if not downright nonexistent. No-one knows where he came from or how he came to the attention of Walsingham; many said that he was an agent sent direct from the devil or even that he was the devil so great was his evil reputation. It is certainly amazing how many of the "plotters" whom he discovered and broke in his torture chambers were nubile young girls.

Well Favenham and his guild uncovered one plot which had been so secret and came so near to succeeding in assassinating The Queen that she, in gratitude for saving her life, gave him the right to build himself Treech Castle on the site of the woodland at which we were looking. It has since been suggested that Favenham himself had started the plot against The Queen just so that he could discover it and profit from her gratitude but, of course, no-one knows.

Treech Castle was built and is said to have been a squat dark tower incorporating a prison and The Convent of The Sisters of St Sade. Once built the castle did not remain static but it grew organically and mainly underground not from stone but from the very evil which came out of Favenham's mind. The castle and its miles of cellars, torture chambers and dark passages was actually the visible form of Favenham's mind itself and he peopled it with torturers, agents of evil pleasure and demons.

Being so close to The Queen and her servant, Walsingham, made Favenham infinitely powerful and he could do anything he chose without anyone being able to speak a word against him. He would choose the ripest maidens from miles around and they would be taken into the castle and never seen or even spoken of again. One day the virgin daughter of a good Irish family came to Sir John's special attention. Her name was Lady Constance and Favenham was so besotted with her that he wanted her for his wife but the sweet girl was repelled by him and anyway she was in love with a local man of upstanding background. Of course that did not discourage Favenham and he had the man tried at Dorchester Assizes and found guilty of treason. He then had the man tortured to death and forced Lady Constance to watch at point of a sword.

Unsurprisingly this did not cause Lady Constance to love Sir John but he was determined to have her and such was the effect that her sweet innocence had upon him that he abstained from simply taking her as was his normal custom. He wanted her to publically say that she would be his wife and when she refused he had her dragged screaming into his darkest dungeon where she was subject to the constant attention of an evil brute named Flynn. Sir John never came near her as he said that he would not touch her body until she had consented to be his bride.

After a whole year of constant torture confined in that dark place Lady Constance could endure no more and she gave Sir John his wish. In exchange he gave her the secret of immortality so that the two of them could consort forever. What married life was like for Lady Constance can hardly be imagined but the outcome was that her rough treatment so warped her poor sweet being that she became a nymphomaniac and addicted to pain and humiliation so that even Sir John could not satisfy her foul lusts.

As a solution to this problem Sir John, who was now sick of the monster which he had created, had Lady Constance sent to a house somewhere near to the Palace of Westminster where she serviced the highest in the land and thus earned her owner and husband even more political favour.

Of course Sir John did not cease his activities in his Dorset castle and his evil increased and multiplied as evil will. So great was the force of this evil that it pierced the fabric of time and space itself and one dark night the castle simply imploded and ceased to exist. Not even a stone or a mark on the earth remained; there was just a patch of earth where no blade of grass grew or any bird sang or rabbit ran.

So great was the fear of that place that parents would not speak of it to their children and no-one dared to write a single word about the evil saga. That is the reason why you will find no mention of Treech castle in any history and, even in Dorset, hardly anyone has heard any rumour or legend so much as mentioning the name of the place.

As Gilly's family had always farmed the land adjoining the castle and had lost daughters to its dark activities that family alone knew the story and passed it down the generations but it was never to be spoken of outside the family – until Gilly shared it with myself.

Gilly went on to remind me that Sir John and Lady Constance had the gift, or is it a curse, of immortality so the story went that he is able to use the site of his castle as a sort of doorway back into the mortal realm whenever he wishes to once again indulge his lusts. And Lady Constance and her secret house of debauchery for the leaders of the land still ply that dark trade where to this day they corrupt and abase those who are party to the secret of that house of easy virtue and perverted pleasure laced with pain.

Well I found it an intriguing tale but I am afraid it only made that forbidden patch of foliage even more exciting and I wanted to go down there to explore but Gilly stood firm and would not let me go down to that inviting triangle. I accused her of being scared of fairy tales but still she would not bend despite everything I could do to seduce her into joining in my plan. Gilly made me promise that I would keep away from the woods and in the end I gave her that pledge so the subject was closed.

My week in Dorset soon came to an end and I went home to join my family on a pre planned trip to spend some time in a cottage in France. When we returned to England Gilly's face was all over the news. She had disappeared leaving no trace and no clue to what had become of her. The police did talk to me to ask if she might have said anything to me which could help to explain the mystery but it would have sounded so silly to tell them about such an old wives tale as the tale of Treech Castle. Apart from that I could not bring myself to admit that I had tempted my friend to go to that terrible place where I am sure she went and met with some unspeakable fate.