House of Dark Delights

by Louisa Burton

“God’s balls!” he cried. “Have mercy, my lady.”

  “Is that you, Your Grace?” asked the whoremistress. “Came all the way to France for a good caning, eh?”

  The prostrate gentleman, a duke judging from the term of address, raised his head and grinned like a basket of chips. “Mrs. Hayes! I see you’ve brought the cherries for the banquet.”

  “Did I say you could speak?” demanded the masked lady. “You shall take a dozen more strokes for that,” she said as she brought the cane down with whistling speed.

  The duke emitted an ecstatic little moan even as he reached between his legs to frig himself.

  “Fie!” His tormenter smacked the offending hand with her cane, saying, “You may spend when I say you may spend, and not a moment sooner.”

  “As you please, my lady,” muttered the duke as he lowered his head and raised his rosy ass.

  “Come, poppets,” said Mrs. Hayes as she led them, along with Darius, through the arched doorway and into a little vestibule.

  A burly guard, one of the expansive retinue who’d accompanied the chateau’s current guests from England, said, “’Tis high time, Mrs. Hayes. I was thinkin’ you’d been set upon by bandits.”

  “Sorry, Tommy. Two of the wenches tried to hold out for more money, so it took a bit of dickering to get them to come.”

  “Aye, but they’ll all come before the night’s through,” Tommy snickered.

  Extending her hand, Mrs. Hayes said, “Fifty quid apiece, as usual, plus my traveling expenses.”

  Tommy made a quick count of the girls, then pulled a sack of coins from inside his coat and handed it to the procuress. “Come along, then.”

  Unlocking the door behind him, he gestured the group into the chapel withdrawing room, a candlelit chamber furnished with silk settees and low marble tables. The centuries-old tapestries that normally graced these walls had been taken down and replaced with paintings depicting men in white monks’ robes disporting themselves with nubile, half-naked nuns. Over the central dining table, where a crystal chandelier normally hung, dangled a lamp shaped like a batlike monster with an erection almost as big as itself. A carved wooden sign hanging over the doorway to the chapel read Fay ce que voudras: “Do what thou wilt,” the motto of England’s Order of the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe, better known as the Hellfire Club.

  About two dozen gentlemen and half as many ladies occupied the room, some standing and some reclining, all exquisitely attired. The ladies, he saw, all wore silver brooches inscribed Love and Friendship on the bosoms of their deeply décolleté gowns. Two of them had their gowns half-unlaced, exhibiting embroidered satin stays so low cut as to display their breasts in their entirety. One lady’s gown had been fashioned with a skirt that opened to the waist in back; her petticoats and panniers had likewise been split to reveal tantalizing glimpses of flesh every time she moved.

  The perfumes and scented accoutrements of the assembled company—handkerchiefs, sachets, and powders—merged in a flowery-sweet miasma. There were two maidservants, as well, serving wine and such aphrodisiacal delicacies as oysters, caviar, almonds, pine nuts, and figs. They all turned to watch as Mrs. Hayes ushered in the young women, but the only man who was mannerly enough to rise was Darius’s fellow follet, Inigo.

  “Bonsoir, mesdemoiselles,” Inigo said with a bow. The charming young satyr was attired for the evening in a gold-embroidered satin coat of some dark hue which Darius’s feline eyes couldn’t quite place—something reddish or brownish, most likely. His unruly curls were caught in a ribbon at his nape, leaving just enough on the sides to cover those telltale ears. He captured Darius’s gaze and winked.

  Darius winked back.

  The rest of the gentlemen appraised the procession with a frankness that would have seemed grossly rude under ordinary circumstances. Two ladies lounging side by side, one wearing a mask trimmed in peacock feathers, conferred behind their fans as they pointed to this girl and that. Darius swiveled his ears to home in on their whispered comments. “…in the yellow stripes, with those big blue eyes? Wouldn’t you just love to bend her over your knee?”

  Darius wove his way between the ladies’ rustling silk skirts and the men’s white-stockinged legs to the doorway that led to the chapel, where he was less likely to be noticed and pestered. If he’d thought about it, he would have made himself invisible before coming in here; it was the safest course of action in a room this crowded.

  “Mrs. Hayes! You are late,” said a gentleman seated at a dining table in the center of the room as he snapped an enameled snuffbox shut. He was a gangly fellow of perhaps forty, with a long nose and a pale, oddly soft-featured visage. Like some of the other men, he wore a wig, but his was by far the most ornate and heavily powdered.

  “My apologies, Lord Sandwich, and my compliments,” said Mrs. Hayes with a little curtsey. “Pray, where might Sir Francis be? I was to deliver these charming lambs to him personally.”

  “The chief friar grew weary of waiting and retired to the chapel to make ready for the mass. These are the virgins, then?”

  “Yes, and please you, m’lord.” Herding the girls into a semicircle, the better for viewing, Mrs. Hayes announced, “For your delight and diversion, gentlemen, eight unpolluted and intact maidenheads, fresh from the local villages. In the roseate bloom of youth, each and every one, virgin rosebuds as yet uncropped. I have tutored these innocents myself in the many and varied arts of love, the better to enhance their defloration during your rites of Venus.”

  The whoremistress clapped her hands twice, a signal to the girls to execute awkward curtseys, glancing at one another as if to make sure they were doing it right. From the way they jostled each other, it was clear they were unused to the wide, hooped skirts in which they’d been outfitted for their presentation.

  Scanning them with a critical expression, Sandwich said, “Intact, you say?”

  “Pure and unsullied, one and all.”

  “We shall see.” Lord Sandwich snapped his fingers at the girl closest to him, a buxom beauty with coppery hair, and signaled for her to approach. “Come, come,” he said, pushing his chair away from the table so that there was room for her to stand before him.

  “Step lively, Nadine,” urged Mrs. Hayes as she prodded the girl.

  He gestured her closer until she stood between his outstretched, cat-stick legs. “I shan’t hurt you.”

  “He’d rather she hurt him—eh, Sandwich?” some wag remarked.

  “Lift your skirts, then,” Sandwich said.

  Nadine greeted that command with a blink of bewilderment.

  Mrs. Hayes said, “They only speak the parleyvoo, your lordship.”

  “Soulevez votre robe.” Indicating the girl’s skirts, Sandwich flicked his hand, cloaked to the fingertips in frilly lace cuffs.

  Nadine looked around at the raptly attentive audience, cheeks blossoming with color.

  “I’ll have that one,” someone remarked. “I do so love it when they squirm and blush.”

  “I daresay they’ve been well trained to do so,” someone else observed. “Is that not right, Mrs. H?”

  Ignoring the taunt, Mrs. Hayes stepped forward and started lifting the young woman’s dress, but Sandwich slapped her hand away. “What’s the chit being paid for, if not to do our bidding? Soulevez-le, mademoiselle.”

  Closing her eyes, Nadine gathered her skirts and raised them to her knees.

  “Oh, for pity’s sake,” Sandwich growled. “Plus haut. Like this.” Leaning forward, he grabbed her hands and forced her to raise the mass of dimity, stiffened petticoats and panniers chest-high, leaving her naked from the waist down.

  “By Jove, her cunny’s as red as her face,” someone chuckled.

  “A ripe little split apricot, just begging to be licked.”

  “Be a sport, Sandwich,” said an Italian-accented fellow who was craning his neck to see. “Turn her ’round so the rest of us can have a peek.”

  “Unlace her! Let’s have a taste of those apple
dumplings.”

  “All in good time, gentlemen.” Nudging the girl’s slippered feet apart with a high-heeled shoe, Sandwich parted her redtufted slit and pushed his middle finger in. She sucked in a breath, her eyes shut tight, as he probed that which had ostensibly never felt the touch of a male hand.

  “Right. She’ll do.” Pointing to a row of nuns’habits hanging by hooks in the robing alcove behind him, Sandwich told her, in French, to change into one of them, leaving herself completely unclothed beneath. He instructed one of the ladies, a Mademoiselle de Beaumont, to assist the virgins in their disrobing, which for reasons beyond Darius’s ken prompted much appreciative laughter.

  “So soon?” asked Mrs. Hayes. “It took me all day to get them properly flashed up, and now you want them to take it all off?”

  “’Tis your fault for being late. They need to be ready for the banquet as soon as the mass has ended.” Sandwich beckoned to the next girl in line, who lifted her skirts without being asked and barely flinched during the examination. “You may take your leave, Mrs. Hayes. I’d say we have the matter well in hand here.”

  He inspected the girls one by one, pronouncing them either intact or “close enough,” before sending them off to the alcove to disrobe in full view of the guests. The gentlemen—some of the ladies, too—opined liberally on their various charms as they unlaced their dresses and peeled off their underpinnings, assisted by the fair-haired, French-accented Mademoiselle de Beaumont. A few of the maidens struck Darius as remarkably blasé about the lewd exhibition, one or two genuinely embarrassed. Others appeared so overwrought despite their cooperation that he suspected they were acting the part they’d been taught to act.

  In any event, their spectators seemed appreciative enough. Several of the men stroked themselves as they took in the little performance. Darius noticed Inigo ushering a pretty little thing from the room, his front trouser panel already half undone, one hand fisted around a wine bottle.

  A strikingly handsome man lowered his raven-haired lady companion from his lap to the floor between his legs and unbuttoned his knee-breeches to free his erection. Those sitting nearby watched with undisguised interest as the lady licked and fondled the rigid organ. “Brava,” they praised when she swallowed it to the very root, causing the recipient of her ministrations to clutch her head, moaning, “Ah, Lili, but you are a talented wench.”

  On a red silken couch in the corner, two men positioned the lady with the split skirt on her hands and knees so that one of them could roger her from behind as she took the other in her mouth. A bewigged gentleman whom Darius recognized from newspaper illustrations as Frederick, Prince of Wales, bent a masked lady over the back of that same couch and canted up her petticoats. He lubricated his weapon with spittle and slammed it into her so hard she shrieked.

  “Good show, Your Highness,” praised a bacon-faced fellow in a too-tight, fancily embroidered coat who’d come over to watch the bawdy tableau while working himself off. “Give her a taste of the royal cutlass,” he grunted as he thrust into a lace handkerchief. “Stab it in and twist it! Split the wench! Spank her arse! That’s it, good and hard. Aye, that’s it…”

  “What have we here?” The voice was male, softly deep, German accented—and far too close.

  Darius’s whiskers thrummed a warning just in time for him to leap away from the hand that was about to scoop him up.

  There came a chuckle as his would-be captor straightened up, tugging a scented handkerchief from his voluminous, fancily embroidered coat sleeve. He was Prussian-pale, with gray eyes, full lips, and a hard, outthrust jaw. Although his hair was concealed beneath a fashionably small powdered wig, Darius could tell from his eyebrows that he was blond. Like many of the other gentlemen, he had a ceremonial sword hanging in a sheath at his side.

  “Bashful, are you, mein kleiner freund?” he asked. “Methinks thou hast wandered into the wrong place.”

  “Chatting to yourself, Lord Turek?” inquired a lady who sauntered toward them, fluttering her fan. “’Tis the sign of a degenerated mind. I knew there was something about you I fancied.”

  It was the woman in the silver mask who’d been caning the duke out by the fountain. Although English, judging from her voice, she wore, like all ladies of fashion, a luxuriant robe à la française, its overskirt of quilted silver brocade extending a good three feet to either side. The weapon she’d wielded earlier, a slim rattan crook, like that of a British schoolmaster, hung from a silken ribbon around her waist. Her face was artfully painted, right down to the little black silk patch near a corner of her mouth; her flaxen hair was styled in a complicated arrangement studded with diamonds, and more diamonds adorned the velvet ribbon around her throat.

  “Oh, a cat!” she exclaimed. “I loathe the wretched things. Go! Shoo!”

  She lifted her skirts and made kicking motions at Darius, who turned to dart away, only to find Turek directly in his path. “I’ve got him.” He crouched down, arms outstretched and grinning in a predatory way that provoked a searing hiss from Darius.

  “There you are!” A pair of female hands snatched him off the floor before Turek could grab him. Darius shot his claws, ready to spring, as she clutched him to her bosom, whispering, “Easy, Darius. ’Tis I, Elle.”

  He looked up at her, calming when he recognized the blue-eyed honey-blonde who’d captured, or rather, rescued him: Elic in his female persona, dressed for the evening in a lavish gown of pale blue painted silk. Other follets posed no risk to Darius, only humans, whose slightest touch assaulted him with a barrage of desires that he was helpless to ignore—all manner of desires, from a hankering for iced creams to the most bizarre sexual fetish. Darius relaxed into Elle’s embrace, reassured by her familiar scent, barely discernible beneath a saccharine haze of rose oil.

  “The beast is yours?” asked the masked lady, eyeing Darius warily over her fan. “You would do well to remove it before it bites someone.”

  “He really is quite harmless,” said Elle, cradling Darius protectively, “but he cannot abide the touch of strangers.”

  “That is the only kind she can abide,” said Turek, indicating the lady who’d just joined them. His grin revealed a mouthful of teeth a bit too white and even to be real, a suspicion that was confirmed when Darius noticed a narrow ribbon of gold around his gumline. Bowing to Elle with a luxuriant sweep of the hand that held the handkerchief, he said, “Anton Turek, at your service, mademoiselle. And this lovely but rather imperious peasant is Charlotte Somerhurst.”

  Darius’s nose twitched, not at the perfume wafting from Turek’s handkerchief, but from an almost indiscernible whiff of something raw and dark that excited the hunter in him.

  “Really, Turek,” said Charlotte. “You must learn to introduce people by their titles, as we British do, else one never really knows to whom one is being presented. I am the Countess of Somerhurst,” she told Elle, “and this barbarous Hun is, in fact, a baron from one of those murky little countries no one ever visits.”

  “Bohemia,” Turek said. “But I make my home in Vienna, for the most part.”

  “And in London, and Paris, and Venice, and who knows where else,” Charlotte said. “Upon my word, Lord Turek has so many homes, I should think he has forgotten where most of them are.”

  Elle introduced herself with a little curtsey.

  “Just ‘Elle’?” Charlotte asked. “No family name?”

  “Nor title, I confess.”

  Charlotte smiled in a coldly remote way that wasn’t hard to decipher. Having been judged and found lacking in all that was meaningful, namely social standing, Elle could now be crossed off Charlotte’s list of people who mattered.

  “I say, but you are the very image of a local fellow who was inducted into the Hellfires yesterday,” Charlotte told Elle. “An acquaintance of our hostess. Evidently he’d been intrigued by the order for some time, and was eager to participate. I believe his name is Eric.”

  “Elic,” Elle corrected. “He is my twin brother.” />
  “Indeed.” Charlotte glanced slyly in the direction of Turek, whose gaze had frosted over at the mention of Elic. “Well, I suppose there can be no mistaking the resemblance. There’s a handsome family if ever I’ve seen one.”

  A maid came by with a tray laden with wineglasses and two cut-glass carafes filled with wine. “Regular or enhanced?” she asked.

  “Oh, enhanced, definitely,” Charlotte replied.

  “I would advise you to avoid that kind unless you’ve a tolerance for cantharides,” Turek advised Elle. “Spanish fly,” he explained in response to her quizzical look.

  Elle waved away the tray altogether. Turek chose the unadulterated wine, saying he found the notion of consuming ground-up blister beetles both repulsive and dangerous, and that cantharides, in any event, merely excited the flesh as opposed to the passions.

  “I take my excitement in whatever manner I can acquire it,” replied Charlotte as she raised her glass. “To sin in all its varied and wondrous forms.”

  “How came you to join our little romp this evening, Elle?” Turek asked as he raised his wineglass to inhale the bouquet.

  “Like my brother, I am a friend of la Dame des Ombres. She thought I might find it diverting.”

  “Pray, where is Madame?” he asked as he scanned the room. “I’ve yet to make her acquaintance.”

  “She tends to keep to herself.” Elle stroked and nuzzled Darius, coaxing a deep purr of contentment from him. “Her administrateur, Lord Henry Archer, sees to the needs of her guests.”

  “Ah, yes, Archer,” Turek said. “Capital fellow.”

  Lord Henry, second son of the Marquis of Heddonshaw, was an affable young dilettante and the first Englishman ever recruited to oversee the affairs of Grotte Cachée. It was he who’d suggested to the chateau’s gardienne, Camille Morel, Dame des Ombres, that she invite the Hellfire Club to spend a fortnight at the chateau. They’d been meeting at a London pub called the George and Vulture, but it had burned down recently, leaving the Hellfires betwixt and between. Madame, mindful of the carnal needs of the three follets in her care—Darius, Elic, and Inigo—had written a letter of invitation to the club’s founder and chief “friar,” Sir Francis Dashwood. Having read references to Grotte Cachée in the erotic memoirs of Domenico Vitturi, a sixteenth-century Venetian nobleman, and eager to experience the rumored haven of licentiousness for himself, Dashwood had gratefully accepted the offer. He, his colleagues, and their female followers had disported themselves for two weeks at the chateau, and were to depart on the morrow—but not before a final orgiastic celebration tonight.