Whispers of the Flesh

by Louisa Burton

  The first was a pink one that his sister Blanche’s lady’s maid had been laying out on her mistress’s bed, along with a ball gown and assorted other underpinnings, as fifteen-year-old David passed by in the hall. There’d been a corset there, too, as well as a chemise and stockings and a great white lather of flounced petticoats. David had gaped at the indelicate display for perhaps three full seconds before Eileen noticed him and shut the door in his face, saying “You’ll see your fill of such things soon enough, Master Davey, a handsome youngblood like yourself.”

  But he hadn’t seen his fill. In the decade that had passed since then, he hadn’t so much as touched a woman—not in that way. He’d imagined, he’d yearned. More than once, while lying in bed with a rock-hard, weeping cockstand he couldn’t will away, he’d been tempted to seek out a woman, any woman, and slake his raging lust in her—but not once had he surrendered to that temptation.

  Having laid the dress carefully across the table, David turned to find Lili pulling off the last of several stiffly corded petticoats.

  “I . . . thought you were going to leave those on,” he said.

  “The hems will get grimy—as would my shoes and stockings.” Adding the petticoat to the others mounded on a chair, she kicked off her satin slippers and reached under her calf-length chemise to peel off her stockings and garters. Around her left ankle she wore a circlet of hammered gold ornamented with a disc of dark blue stone.

  All she had on now was the corset over the chemise, which had a wide, scooped neckline and elbow-length sleeves. The corset nipped in snugly at the waist, flaring out at the bottom to accommodate Lili’s hips. It flared at the top a bit, too, pushing at the underside of her bosom to plump her breasts into high, firm globes that strained the filmy linen of her chemise. So fine, indeed, was that linen that David could tell from the way it draped her legs that she wore no drawers or pantaloons.

  “David?”

  He met Lili’s gaze, heat suffusing his cheeks when he realized she’d seen him eyeing her.

  “Shall we do it?” she asked in that throaty-soft voice as she approached him.

  David stopped breathing for a moment as she curled her hand around his elbow, her flimsily clad breasts nudging his arm. He fancied he could feel their heat through the layers of wool and linen that separated his flesh from hers.

  “Here,” he said, shrugging out of his coat and offering it to her. “Take this.”

  “I don’t need it.”

  I do. Improper though it was for him to be coatless in the company of a female, her state of undress was by far the more scandalous—and likely to set his blood astir. “Caves tend to be chilly and damp.”

  “Not this one. Besides, I told you, my body runs warm.”

  Draping it over her shoulders, he said, “Take it anyway.”

  The Cella reminded David of a chapel, regardless that the people who had once worshipped here were pagans. The entrance was a wide, arched opening rimmed in rainbow-hued stalactites and other formations, quite majestic, really. It was flanked by a pair of lighted iron cresset torches identical to those that lined the cave corridor they had followed to get here. Clearly, Lili had been fibbing when she’d told him he would have trouble finding this location on his own.

  The Cella was accessible via a natural stone bridge spanning the cave stream, which flowed directly across the entrance. It was a sort of alcove, but a sizable one, with a high, domed ceiling perforated by a shaft to the outside. The shaft evidently served as a chimney for the bronze-lined fire pit beneath it, which did not appear to have been used for some time.

  Directly in front of him, looming a good ten feet high on the back wall between a pair of cressets on iron stanchions, stood a massive, crudely carved sculpture of a human-type being with two roundish lumps denoting breasts and a longer one jutting up from the groin that was meant to represent an erect penis. The face was stylized in the extreme—two almond shapes had been etched for eyes, an oval depression for the mouth. The body was thick and ponderous, with shapeless legs and arms, the latter holding aloft a pair of cups. Badly rusted iron torques encircled the wrists, ankles, and neck, the latter having been forged in the shape of a male organ penetrating that of a female.

  DUSIVÆSUS had been carved in surprisingly precise Roman letters onto the base of the statue. Scratched over that rather crudely was a string of symbols David would have taken for runes had they been somewhere in Scandinavia rather than France.

  “What is the meaning of the inscriptions?” he asked Lili.

  “The one on top has been a subject of speculation for centuries,” she said. “ ‘Dusivæsus’ means ‘Great and Worthy Dusios’ in the ancient Gaulish tongue.”

  “Great and worthy? I realize the Gauls had many gods, but I’d never have guessed they engaged in demon worship.”

  “They didn’t worship this dusios, precisely.” She paused; he had the sense that she was choosing her words with care.

  So painfully beautiful was she, with the torchlight gilding her hair, her face, the upper slopes of her breasts, that he had to look away for fear that she would catch him ogling her again.

  “They did have a god whom they worshipped with especial zeal,” she said, “one they venerated above all others and were sworn to protect, an ancient god born of fire who lived deep in this cave.”

  Returning his gaze to her so as to gauge her reaction, he said, “Listening to you, one would almost think you believe this ‘god’ really existed.”

  She lifted those delicate, luminous shoulders. “The world is very old and very mysterious, David. I do not pretend to be privy to its many secrets—nor do I feel the need to ferret them out so as to know the absolute truth of things. My mind and my heart are open to all possibilities, but I am content in the knowledge that there are some things that I am destined never to know.”

  She was, of course, alluding to David and his painstaking quest for faith.

  “Why, then, is there a statue of a dusios in this place of worship if they didn’t regard dusii as gods?” he asked.

  “I understand they erected it to help their druid—that was a sort of high priest . . .”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “It was meant to help him summon a dusios to their village.”

  “They invited a demonic being into their midst?”

  “You seem astounded,” she said with a bemused little laugh. “Horrified, actually.”

  He was. “To lay oneself open to a diabolical creature, one of the Devil’s minions . . . That way lies earthly misery and an afterlife of torment in . . . the dark place.”

  Lili’s mouth quirked at his use of the euphemism for Hell, which he had been taught from boyhood never to utter in the presence of a lady. “You are speaking of demonic possession, yes?”

  “Possession and influence both. There are said to be demons—not malevolent spirits, but real, flesh-and-blood diabolical beings—who work their evil from without, by tempting their human victims to unholy thoughts and actions.” Just as Lili, with her breathtaking beauty and feral sexuality, tempted him. Were she not so warm to the touch, he might be inclined to label her a demoness, so thoroughly had she bewitched him.

  “Such demons,” he continued, “will exploit a human’s vulnerability to evil—his lack of faith, or a secret taint of sin—in order to exercise their diabolical influence.”

  “An influence that would be impossible, or at least unlikely, if a human were exceptionally pious—or at least exceptionally desirous of piety.”

  That statement cut close to the bone, as it was clearly intended to do.

  “You believe in this?” she asked.

  “No doubt you find that laughable.”

  David had learned not to discuss demons and the like except within the ecclesiastical community. His brothers used to taunt him mercilessly, donning grotesque costumes and leaping upon him in dark places amid hellish cackles and shrieks. Even some of his fellow clerics were openly skeptical about the existence of diabol
ical entities. He would not be expounding on the subject with Lili had she not broached it herself by showing him this pagan effigy—not that he regretted it. It could prove beneficial to his investigation to establish the attitude of Lili and her fellow Grotte Cachée residents in regard to demons and demonic forces.

  “I don’t find it at all laughable,” she said, so soberly that David was disposed to believe her. “Did I not tell you that my mind is open to all possibilities? It is just that so few hum—people still credit the existence of these types of beings. I can’t help but wonder how you came to believe in them.”

  “It was my nursery governess, Mademoiselle Levesque. She was an elderly spinster who had served my father’s family for decades in France.”

  “Your parents are French?”

  Cursing that slip, David said, “Just my father.”

  “A Frenchman named Beckett?” she said. “I gather he anglicized his name.”

  David didn’t correct her assumption. “Father had a family in France, a wife and children, before he came to England and married my mother. They were arrested during the Reign of Terror—not my father, who was away at the time, but his parents, his wife, and his four children. A band of revolutionaries abducted them from their château, carted them to the town square, and guillotined them all.”

  “Oh, how awful.”

  “Mademoiselle Levesque witnessed it all, and described it to me in . . . rather graphic detail—how the freshly severed heads of the victims were lifted by the hair to face the mob, because their brains would remain alive for ten to fifteen seconds. Their eyes could still see the faces twisted in hate, their ears could still hear the taunts and jeers.”

  “She was your nursery governess, you say? How old were you when she told you this?”

  “Five, six . . .”

  “What on earth was she thinking, recounting such things to a child of that age?”

  “The Terror had traumatized her deeply. She was devoted to my family, had helped to rear my father and his siblings. Two of his three brothers, who were priests, were brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal and condemned to the guillotine. The third was beaten to death by a mob. His only sister was among sixteen Carmelite nuns put to death at the Barrière de Vincennes in the final days of the Terror.”

  “I know of them,” Lili said. “Their martyrdom wasn’t in vain. People were outraged, and that outrage helped to bring down Robespierre.”

  “By the time I knew Mademoiselle, she was . . .” Half mad. “She was a melancholic, deeply tormented soul, very much lost in her wretched memories—she talked of little else. My father was the only member of his family to survive the Revolution. He escaped to England, along with Mademoiselle, in the summer of ninety-four. Two years later, he married my mother, who was a good deal younger than he, and started a second family. He told me he’d very nearly become a Carmelite monk instead, but after praying on it, he knew that wasn’t the path that God intended for him.”

  “I am deeply sorry for your family’s losses,” Lili said, “but I don’t quite see what this has to do with demons.”

  “Mademoiselle Levesque used to tell me that the revolutionary mobs had been acting under diabolical influence. How else to explain such rabid brutality?”

  “You are young, David. You have not seen the enragés, with their wild red eyes and their filthy hair, you have not heard them screaming for the blood of the innocents. The Devil’s minions, they crawl into the hearts and minds of the impious and make them commit these actes d’abomination. God has a purpose for you, mon chouchou. You have a vocation, oui? You will hunt the demons down and cast them out, banish them to the fiery pit. This is your destiny, your sacred obligation.”

  David said, “My father told me it was true, what Mademoiselle had said about the demons inciting the Terror. He also taught me that honor, duty, and religious devotion would protect me from Satan’s influence, and that there was no more worthy calling on earth than the . . .” David bit off the rest, cursing his loose tongue.

  “Than the priesthood?” Lili smiled. “You said last night that your parents are content with the path you’ve chosen. I’m glad of that for your sake. A man should choose a vocation based on what he’s passionate about, not afraid of. A life devoted to fear is a sad thing, indeed.”

  David tried to summon a response to that, but none was forthcoming.

  As they were walking away from the Cella, David turned to glance behind them at the stretch of corridor that led deeper into the cave. It was black as Hades that way, the cresset torches extending no farther.

  Testing the waters, as it were, he said, “I would dearly love to explore a bit more. Is this cave system really complex enough to get lost in?”

  “Oh, it’s a warren of twisting and turning passages,” she said. “Even I get confused if I wander too far off the main corridors, and I daresay I know this terrain as well as anyone—except, perhaps, for Darius.”

  “I have yet to meet this mysterious Darius.” David’s investigation would be sorely lacking in scope were he to leave here without having personal contact with each and every inhabitant of Grotte Cachée. “I cannot help but wonder if he really exists.”

  “Darius is a solitary soul,” she said. “He tends to avoid our guests. As for the cave, if you really want to go deeper, I suppose I could guide you, say another half mile or so—providing you don’t tell Archer. There’s something rather interesting that you might enjoy seeing.”

  “Indeed?” said David, thinking of the curious little bedchamber described to him by Serges Bourgoin. “I should be very much in your debt.”

  “You would, at that,” she said, smiling as she wrested a cresset from its bracket. “But I believe there is a way you can repay me.”

  Seven

  ONE WISH, DAVID mused as he stood gazing at what Lili called the Lake of a Thousand Diamonds—which was resplendent, but which was not Bourgoin’s petite salle confortable.

  He had promised to grant her one wish of her choosing—her whimsical notion of how he could “repay the debt” of her having guided him here against the administrateur’s wishes. Not once, that he could recall, had he ever reneged on a promise, and he did not intend to do so now. He prayed that what she asked of him wouldn’t be something he would have to confess to Father Cullen when he got back to Stonyhurst.

  That is, part of him prayed for that. The other part, the part that lived chained up in the shadows, hot and hungry and trembling with need, would gladly say a lifetime of Hail Marys for the chance to cast off those crippling fetters just once.

  “What think you, David?” Lili gestured with her cresset toward the shimmering subterranean pool, a crescent-shaped widening of the cave stream, which flowed mostly belowground.

  The pool was tucked into its own glittering grotto, the walls and ceiling of which were encrusted with a dazzling array of crystal formations—flowers, feathers, coral-like nodules . . . Rippling draperies of peachy, translucent stone swooped and swayed at the entrance to this enchanted niche like curtains frozen on a summer breeze. The water itself was a glassy aquamarine that glowed from within, projecting lazy waves of iridescence onto the interior of the grotto, making the crystals sparkle and wink.

  It was dizzyingly beautiful—literally. All that dazzling splendor . . . it just looked so unreal, so not of this earth. A rush of vertigo overtook him for a moment, then faded away. The light-headedness he had experienced previously had escalated considerably as they’d ventured deeper and deeper into the cave. His perceptions felt skewed, his thoughts strangely slippery. David couldn’t help but recall Domenico Vitturi’s account of the delirium and strange apparitions the deeper precincts of this cave could produce. Was he feeling this way because Vitturi had put the suggestion in his mind, or because there really was some supernatural energy emanating from within these walls of rock, this mountain of cooled lava?

  “Was it worth the trek?” Lili asked.

  “It is one of the most beautiful things I’
ve ever seen,” David said. “Astonishing. Where does the light come from?”

  Pointing, she said, “If you’ll look beneath the surface on that side, you’ll see two outlets. They’re tunnels that curve upward, opening to the outside and letting the sunlight in. If we want to swim here at night, we sometimes put torches out there, so that their light emanates from below.”

  “Extraordinary,” David said.

  “It cannot be properly appreciated when there are other sources of light.” Lili lifted an iron bucket tucked between two of the pinkish stone “curtains” and filled it with water from the pool.

  “Wait,” David said, walking toward her. “What are you doing? You’re not going to—”

  The cresset sizzled as she plunged it into the water, hissing the dirty tang of doused embers and engulfing them in darkness—except for the radiant pool behind her.

  “Why the devil did you do that?” David asked, hating the strident edge to his voice. “That cresset was our only source of light for the return trip.”

  “No, it wasn’t.” Lili shoved the cresset with its iron basket full of sodden pine chunks into a bracket on a floor-to-ceiling natural column. “That’s full of more pitch pine,” she said, pointing to a kindling box on the floor nearby, on top of which sat a tarnished brass casket about the size of a deck of cards. “And there are Lucifer matches in that match safe.”

  Thus reassured, David was in a more receptive state of mind to appreciate the sight of Lili backlit by the Lake of a Thousand Diamonds as she shucked off his coat and hung it on a nearby stalagmite. She untied the shoulder ribbons of her corset, reached behind to loosen the lacing, and stepped out of it. Holding his gaze, she walked toward him, her body silhouetted by the lambent glow through her chemise.

  David grew instantly hard. Please, God, don’t let her see, he thought, since he no longer wore that concealing coat.