Maeve’s tastes in carnality and cruelty began as a punishment when she was fourteen years old and caught with a stable boy from her father’s stable. The boy Kurt was a handsome and not yet stooped by hard labor. The boy’s good looks had already gotten him initiated into the pleasures of the flesh by servant women and girls. Maeve wasn’t rough and coarse like the servant girls he was used to and this made her fatally attractive. The couple was caught and Maeve’s father the outraged lord ordered the boy to be castrated. The father decided Maeve should watch her illicit lover’s castration. What Maeve saw a heavy workbench turned on its side so that the top became a wall for the boy to be tied to. Betta the old household nurse and midwife would castrate the boy. She had castrated men who committed rape as ordered by the court and she regularly castrated immature boys to preserve their high-pitched voices for the church choirs. While the boy cried and protested Betta calmly took down his clothes, then warmed his scrotum with her making his balls hang lower. Once his balls were far down Betta cut his scrotum down the middle and then exposed and removed one ball after another. This sight instead of chastening Maeve excited her and she envied Betta, wishing she could have castrated her former lover.

When it was common knowledge that Maeve lost her virginity and to a peasant boy she was no longer fit to make an advantageous marriage so her father exiled her to a convent. There were no males allowed whatsoever within the convent walls even a tomcat got chased out. Male mice would have been expelled if it had been possible. Maeve seemed to be condemned to a lifetime of imprisonment at the convent and because she wasn’t a virgin she wouldn’t be allowed to become a nun. There were three other girls exiled at the convent for the same reason as Maeve. The girls did the dirtiest work at the convent, scrubbing floors, cleaning out chamberpots and scullery work in the convent kitchen. Maeve and the other three girls dreaded growing old and dying inside the convent walls. Only then would they taken out of the convent to be buried in a corner of the convent cemetery away from the nuns. Maeve and the three girls told each other about their lovers and the affairs that got them exiled from their families. Maeve had the best story of how her lover had been plucked like a flower and how she would like to have done the plucking. The girls came to believe that their male lover should like flower should be cut at the height of its bloom before it could wither with age. They decided that if they ever got the chance they would take a man to the height of sexual pleasure and then like the blooming flower they would take his manhood suddenly rather that letting it wither away with age.

One day a coach came to the convent and the driver had official orders to take Maeve home. A fever plague had struck her household and killed her entire family. A magistrate despite legal maneuvers reluctantly decided that he had no choice but to turn over title, land, and money to Maeve. Life was even lonelier in the castle that it had been at the convent. At least at the convent she had her three impure friends. No one of aristocratic rank would associate with her and servants performed their duties and left. After several months Maeve came to realize just how rich and powerful she was. She used her power to have her friends released from the convent. Together again and free at Maeve’s castle they decided that could act on the nighttime fantasies they weaved in the convent. Their first opportunity came with a lone young traveler. The evening began with wining and dining the traveler than an orgy with all four women, and ended the castration of the terrified traveler.

They realized that they had been too hasty with the first unfortunate traveler with later victims they would refine their carnal pleasures into days and even weeks before they indulged their ultimate pleasure of plucking the flower in bloom by castrating their lover. They decided that university students and seminarians could provide them with a steady supply of young handsome victims. Students at the university and seminarians were particularly good because they were away from home and friends and family many had not established permanent friendships at the university. They were usually not missed at school and by the time their families discovered they were missing there was not trace of them left. A student or seminarian was usually lured to the castle by a letter offering the position as a tutor or some other job in the castle requiring an educated man. When a student or seminarian got a letter inviting him to spend time with some ladies and earn money few could resist. As the spider women got more men to visit they became more choosey with their victims. There men who didn’t know how lucky they were that they were because they were unappealing by the four women. These men got a free meal with wine and a bed by themselves for the night and next morning put out and told they were not welcome. Many times the men didn’t survive their ordeal at the castle those who did told tales that highwaymen who never took off their masks had taken their manhood because they didn’t have enough money.

The years did wither the four women and they lost their allurement for young men and their appetite for cruelty. They would read the accounts of young men victims written by Maeve in numerous diaries. They again lived in isolation as they had once lived in the convent only now servants did the dirty menial labor for them. As for the servants they were the only persons who came and went at the castle and they would never speak a word of what they had seen or heard.