I couldn’t scream or move, or understand what had happened to me or why, which was the worst thing of all. At first I was alone in the garden, alone with my terror. Then she came out of the house. She laughed when she saw me, and told me she’d take the gag out of my mouth if I promised not to scream or cry out. I nodded, because I’d been crying and my nose was starting to block up—I was afraid I’d suffocate.

She took the sponge out of my mouth. ‘You’ve been fucking my partner, and thinking you could get away with it,’ she said.

I told her it wasn’t true.

‘Yes, you have. Don’t lie.’

I swore to her that I hadn’t, begged her to untie me.

‘You told him to leave me, didn’t you?’

That I couldn’t deny. She stuffed the sponge back in my mouth, taped it shut again and went back into the house.

The next time she came outside, it was almost dark. She reached down and picked up a handful of gravel from one of the new paths. She threw a small pebble at me from a distance of about a metre, and it hit my cheek. It hurt more than I’d have thought a tiny stone could. ‘In some parts of the world, they stone you to death for fucking another woman’s man,’ she said. That was when it got worse. I couldn’t speak to defend myself. She kept throwing the stones, some from further away, some from right in front of my face—at my head, my chest, my arms and legs. It went on for hours. After a while, the pain became unbearable.

She brought a table and chair out into the garden, then a bottle of wine, a corkscrew and a glass. All night she drank wine—two more bottles after the first one—and threw stones at me, stones I’d ordered for her. I’d brought samples in two sizes for her to look at, and she’d chosen the smaller ones, thank goodness. If they’d been any larger I’d have died—that’s what I was told later. She didn’t throw them constantly. Sometimes she stopped and sat down, drank, lectured me. She said I was lucky I lived in England and not lots of other places, because this was nothing compared to what would happen to me in some countries.

The next morning it got worse. She took the sponge out of my mouth and pushed in a handful of gravel. She told me to eat it. I spat it out but she forced more in and tried to push it down my throat. In the end I swallowed and she did it again, kept doing it. She preferred making me eat the stones to throwing them at me, once she’d tried it.