I stayed in a hotel in the deep Hampshire countryside last month: a lovely little rural pub converted into a very chic little restaurant-with-rooms. Everything was quite perfect – until a power cut at three in the morning, which caused something electronic to splutter a dying bleep, waking me with a start.

It was *dark*. Not your normal dark – dark backlit by the faint glow of city lights, of street lamps, of distant passing cars – but properly, I’m-in-the-middle-of-nowhere dark.

As I lay on the bed, unable to get back to sleep, I whiled away some of the time imagining a kinky variant of this pitch black world. The prison cells lined a narrow corridor, deep in some dank stone dungeon. No natural light here, just the flicker of the torches flaming on the walls. And before the guards departed for the evening, even those would be extinguished, leaving the women – the king’s captured enemies? - engulfed by the absolute darkness until morning.

Except, some nights, their captors would return in the middle of the night. The prisoners would wake at the sound of the dungeon door being unbolted, at the stomp of approaching boots. Each girl would be praying: don’t let it be my turn. The guards, carrying candles, would stop outside the designated cell; would open it; would enter and step through the crowd of occupants to unlock the chains of the girl who was to be taken and whipped.

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