Bound in Moonlight

by Louisa Burton

  I must warn you, though, that I'm not sure how well I trust my memory about the things that happened at Grotte Cachée, and not just because it was twenty years ago. It's a screwy place, and I felt vaguely hopped-up just being there, especially in certain areas, like the cave.

  The château is in Auvergne, tucked deep into a valley formed by heavily wooded, extinct volcanoes, one of which houses a labyrinthine cave. The entrance to this “hidden grotto,” or the main entrance, is in a Roman bathhouse built onto the side of that particular mountain, “Roman” meaning it actually dates back to the Roman occupation of Gaul. Whatever it is that affects your mind when you're at Grotte Cachée seems to grow more and more powerful the deeper you go into the cave. But you sometimes feel it in the castle itself, or even in the woods around it, which are vast and ancient.

  Looking back now at the things that happened there, the things I saw, or thought I saw . . . well, it's tempting to conclude that I was just completely off my nut the entire time. It was a stressful episode, or it started out that way, and stress can do that to you. Some of the soldiers I nursed during the war were delusional, but it was just shell shock from the trauma of battle, and they got better once they were out of the fray. But the reason I'm not so quick to chalk up what I experienced at Grotte Cachée to stress is that I was actually warned beforehand that it was a strange place populated by demons, and that I was likely to be exposed to unexplainable phenomena.

  But I'm getting ahead of myself. To understand why I went there, you need to know how and why I became engaged to Hickley in the first place.

  I've told you my father was a banker. He actually owned a bank, and he was a partner in the Vanderbilt railroads. He built a granite castle on Fifth Avenue and a white marble one in Newport that was patterned after the Temple of Apollo, with six forty-foot columns out front. Oh, and we had a big old sprawling country home out on Long Island that was actually sort of homey and pleasant, and where I learned to ride. And Mother kept a little pied-à-terre in Paris for her shopping excursions.

  Are you getting the picture, chéri? There were buckets of money, but it was just a little too shiny and new, my father having been a self-made man. The Astors and the rest of their ilk looked down their noses at the new rich, even the Vanderbilts for the longest time, but my parents were determined to break into their ranks. The time-honored way to do this was to pimp one's daughter marry one's daughter into a venerable old family. Titled Englishmen were thought to provide the splashiest and most surefire entrée into society.

  My childhood friend Consuelo Vanderbilt was torn away from her beloved Winty Ruthurford and married off to Sunny Churchill, a sallow, bug-eyed little weasel with manicured hands who had absolutely nothing going for him except that he was the ninth Duke of Marlborough. I was one of Consuelo's bridesmaids, and my first clue that Sunny might end up being a disappointment was when he skipped the wedding rehearsal to go shopping instead. On the afternoon of the wedding, Consuelo's eyes were red and swollen from sobbing all morning in her room, with a guard stationed outside the door in case she tried to make a break for it. I am absolutely serious. Of course, the marriage was an utter debacle. Sunny treated her like dirt, having only bound himself in matrimony to a dollar princess so that he could afford to restore the true love of his life, that majestic mausoleum known as Blenheim Palace.

  That was what they called us, the American heiresses who got engaged to land-poor British aristocrats looking for an infusion of cash in the form of dowries with which to repair the ancestral manse, play baccarat, or support a mistress or two. The terms of my betrothal were negotiated between my father and Hickley during Hickley's wife-hunting excursion to New York in March of 1902. His father, the seventh Earl of Kilbury, had squandered what remained of the family fortune, leaving him deeply in debt and desperate for the two million dollars in cash and railroad stock he was to receive upon our marriage in June of the following year.

  Why, you are asking yourself, would a smart, selfreliant little bearcat like me agree to such a bloodless and venal arrangement? Perhaps you're recalling my alter ego, Emmeline, so sheltered and class-conscious before her sexual awakening, and thinking I must have been the same sort of girl before breaking out of my shell.

  Actually, Emmeline is probably the most fictionalized element in the book. To make her transformation dramatic, she had to start off extraordinarily naïve. In reality, I was what they called, in America, a “New Woman.” We played tennis and golf, smoked cigarettes, rode bicycles, drove motorcars, and got educated, although you wouldn't believe the histrionics it took to convince my parents to send me to Bryn Mawr. We wore blouses with burly leg of mutton sleeves and skirts that showed the ankle, though we would have died before lifting them for a man. We felt we had the right to careers, and also the right to remain unmarried if we so chose.

  So then, why did I let my parents hand me over, along with two million smackers, to a money-grubbing English baron? First, you must understand that I had no notion of Hickley's true character, or lack thereof, when I met him. We were introduced by a mutual acquaintance named Kit Archer. Kit was an Englishman, but he lived in France, where he served as administrateur to the seigneur of Grotte Cachée, the fourth generation of his family to do so. He was also the author of two books of classical history, as well as a novel about Atlantis that was obscure but really quite good.

  I'd met Kit four years earlier at one of Bertha Chalmers's semimonthly literary salons, which he frequented whenever he was in New York. It was my first time there, and I was shaking in my boots to be in the same room with people like Edith (this was before House of Mirth, but I was in awe of her stories and articles). Kit was so warm and garrulous—he made me feel right at home (as did Edith, of course). He and I became fast friends and remained so until his death right before the war, despite the fact that I was twenty and he was a portly, bald, gout-ridden sixty-year-old who lived on the other side of the Atlantic. And lest you conclude that there was anything untoward in our relationship, Kit had a wife, four children, and a grandson, all of whom he worshipped.

  In any event, I might have skipped Mrs. Chalmers's salon that night, because New York was buried under one of those suffocating March snowstorms, but Kit had sent a note saying he'd just gotten into town and would be bringing a young baron he'd met on the crossing who'd read one of my magazine articles and wanted to meet me. So, I went, partly to see Kit and partly to meet this English nobleman who actually knew who I was! And wanted to meet me!

  Hickley turned out to be handsome and debonair, with that classic British imperturbability that we Americans are too quick to confuse with intelligence, and he seemed perfectly comfortable mingling with my unconventional, Left-Bankish crowd. He told me he'd very much enjoyed my piece two years before in Scribner's about Marion Jones Farquhar competing at Wimbledon. He was extraordinarily attentive to me, which was quite a novelty at the time, and I won't lie to you. It went to my head.

  I was not, and had never been, the belle of the ball. I was usually the girl who heard about the ball the next day from her girlfriends, which I had in abundance. It was boyfriends I lacked—serious boyfriends. I did get asked out occasionally, and I'd even been kissed a few times, but it never went anywhere. The main problem was that I was plain—not ugly, mind you, but not beautiful, not according to the taste of the times. My face was all right—in fact I rather liked it. It had a sharp delicacy to it that may not have been in vogue then, but which I found aesthetically pleasing. But I was too slender, too small-breasted, too athletic. To make matters worse, I'd never gotten the hang of fawning all over men, giggling at their unfunny jokes, and dreaming up reasons to praise them. It didn't help that I was semiaccomplished, having already launched a writing career, even if it was still small potatoes at the time. (My publishing credits consisted of two short stories and a handful of articles and essays, but it was my dream to write a novel, and I couldn't seem to get one off the ground.)

  One of the reasons I embraced the N
ew Woman thing with such fervor was that it was the perfect camouflage for an ungorgeous, sporty little bluenose like me. At twenty-four, having had not a single real beau, I was starting to worry that I'd never get married, not because I didn't want to, but because nobody would have me. New Woman principles notwithstanding, I loathed the prospect of ending my days a pickled-in-brine old spinster like my great-aunt Pembridge.

  It wasn't that I wanted children—as you know, that's never been a priority of mine. If I'm honest, I have to admit, with a fair degree of shame, that my primary motivation for wanting to get married had much more to do with society's expectations than with my own innate desires. Despite my bohemian inclinations and my support for the rights of women, I had been brought up to believe that a woman's destiny was to be a wife, and that single women over thirty were pathetic and unwanted.

  As if that weren't bad enough, there was no respectable way, within the confines of New York society, for an unwed woman to have sex. Just because I was a virgin didn't mean I wanted to remain one forever. I was fascinated by sex, but since females of a certain class never spoke of such things, I knew little more than the basic mechanics of intercourse. I'd discovered the delights of self-gratification during a bath at fourteen, so I did know about orgasms, even if I didn't know for the longest time what they were called or that other people had them, too.

  Hickley conducted a seemingly sincere, if cursory, courtship before popping the question (on April 1—you'd think that would have tipped me off ). He seemed genuinely interested in me, read all my stories and articles. In retrospect, I'm fairly sure he'd chosen me out of the Sears Dollar Princess Catalogue and had one of his minions brief him on me so that our meeting wouldn't appear quite as calculated as it was. (“She wrote a piece in Scribner's two years ago, my lord. . . .”) I wouldn't be surprised if he booked the same ship as Kit because he'd been told we were friends and always saw each other in New York.

  Although he wasn't remotely demonstrative in terms of emotions, he did claim to hold me “in esteem,” which I took to be his stiff-upper-lip way of saying that his feelings for me would most assuredly grow into love, as I assumed mine would for him. I knew about the dowry, but I just thought that was how it was done with aristocratic marriages. I didn't for one moment put my union with Hickley in the same category as Consuelo's to Sunny. What Hickley and I had was, if not quite a love match, surely destined to become one. The money was secondary.

  Okay, so I was a little naïve. By the time Hickley returned to England, promising to visit me once or twice before the wedding, I had a sapphire and diamond ring on my left hand and the memory of a chaste good-bye kiss that represented, in my mind, the lifetime of carnal bliss that I would enjoy as Lady Hickley. I told myself that he surely would have kissed me with more passion if we'd ever been left alone. Perhaps, thought I, he would have attempted even more intimate liberties, which I frankly would have welcomed, fourteen months being a long time to have to wait for the aforementioned bliss. Now that I knew my days as a virgin were numbered, I couldn't wait to find out what I'd been missing. It was all I thought about. I was in heat pretty much twenty-four hours a day.

  Toward the end of July, Consuelo sent me a cable telling me that she'd managed to wrangle me an invitation to King Edward's coronation on August 9, at which she was to serve as one of Queen Alexandra's attendants. At the insistence of my parents, Aunt Pembridge accompanied me to London, where we were guests of the Marlboroughs at Spencer House, which Sunny was letting at the time. I'd thought about cabling Hickley before we set sail to let him know I was coming, but then I decided it would be more fun to surprise him. I inquired after him in London, only to be told that he was spending the rest of the summer touring France with friends, beginning with a sort of extended house party at Château de la Grotte Cachée.

  Once I got over my disappointment, I realized I didn't have to return to New York without seeing him. For a couple of years, I'd been carrying around a little calling card in my purse that Kit Archer had given me when he'd issued a standing invitation to drop by the château if I ever found myself in Auvergne.

  “I warrant you will find it a singular experience,” he'd said. “Just show this to the gatehouse guard.”

  The card, which was in a tiny envelope engraved PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL, was of gilt-rimmed ivory stock so heavy you could hardly bend it. On the front was printed, in French and English, RIGHT OF ENTRÉE IS GRANTED TO THE FOLLOWING. Below that, Kit had inked Miss Emily Townsend and his initials. The back of the card explained how to get to Grotte Cachée from the nearby city of Clermont-Ferrand, an incredibly convoluted route along unmarked roads. I asked Kit how his employer would feel about a perfect stranger coming to his home.

  “Seigneur des Ombres is too busy to cultivate social connections,” he said, “but he enjoys having guests at the château, so he gives me carte blanche to invite whomever I like. I must warn you, Em, it is a place of unbridled libertinage. You will likely witness some very indecorous goings-on, but I shan't think the experience would do you any harm—I daresay it might do you some good.”

  I'd slipped the card into my purse and forgotten about it. Now I was glad I'd held on to it. After the coronation, I convinced Aunt Pembridge that we should make a little side trip to France before returning home. I had no intention, however, of dragging a chaperone with me for a surprise visit with the man about whom I'd been entertaining libidinous fantasies for four months.

  Consulting a map, I saw that Clermont-Ferrand was about a hundred miles from Lyon, where my mother's cousin Biddie owned a château. Biddie's real name, Obedience Blick, couldn't have been more inappropriate, the Blicks being a notoriously wild branch of the family, and Biddie being the quintessential devil-may-care Blick. That was part of the reason I'd always adored her. I knew she spent every summer at that château, so I cabled her, and she invited us to come for a visit.

  When we got there and I told her that my fiancé was at Grotte Cachée, she rolled her eyes and laughed, because of course she knew exactly why I'd come. She offered to lend me her motorcar and driving clothes the next day, and told me not to rush back if I didn't care to—although I promised her I would stay no more than four days, returning by Sunday the seventeenth. She also convinced Aunt Pembridge that she should remain at the château and rest up from all that traveling because I had no need of a chaperone where I was going (she conveniently neglected to mention that Hickley would be there).

  Biddie told me that she had never been to Grotte Cachée, but that her paternal grandmother had apparently spent a week there one summer in the early part of the last century. She had never discussed the visit with anyone, but after she died, Biddie's mother was sorting through her papers and came across several letters wrapped up in a black silk cravat. Their contents had evidently shocked her deeply, given her reaction to them. Biddie saw the letters only briefly before her mother whisked them away, but she did manage to read the first line of one, which she'd never forgotten: Did you ever think you would miss being collared and leashed and forced to submit to a perfect stranger for an entire week?

  Biddie had to explain to me that this had to do with sex, that's how ill-informed I was. The letters were written by the woman who had been her grandmother's closest confidante from the time they'd attended Miss Cox's Academy for Girls in New York—my own alma mater. Biddie said that the two of them used to laugh about the madcap exploits of their youth, and what “highfliers” they'd been (meaning sluts, essentially). Over the fireplace in Biddie's drawing room there was a portrait of her grandmother that had been painted by Ingres(!) around 1830, judging from the gown and hairstyle. She was a dainty little redhead with a mischievous smile and a certain snap to her eyes. Biddie said her friend had been a redhead, too, and that at school, they'd been known as “Miss Cox's Red Foxes.”

  Biddie's mother burned the letters and, for the rest of her life, refused to speak of them. From time to time, however, she would caution Biddie that she must never, while summerin
g in France, accept an invitation to Grotte Cachée.

  “Sadly,” Biddie told me, “no such invitation has ever come my way. How I envy you! You must tell me everything.”

  Now comes the part where I was warned about the demonic denizens and mysterious goings-on at Grotte Cachée. Biddie had a sort of mechanic/handyman working for her, a funny old bird named Eugène who insisted on testing my ability to handle her jaunty little lipstick-red Peugeot before he'd trust me with it. He made me motor around the local roads with him in the passenger seat while he held forth, not about driving, but about Grotte Cachée and why I should give it a wide berth.

  There were forces in the very earth, he said, in the mountains looming over the secluded little valley, in the ancient stone with which the château had been built, that exercised an “influence diabolique” over any human unwise enough to set foot there. He said the force was like that of a magnet, that it exercised a different amount of pull on different people, but that no one was entirely immune. And there were beings (he called them “Follets”) who made their home there and performed “actes obscènes” on visiting humans. They were incubi and succubi, he said, the sexually voracious demons about which the Church had been warning the faithful for centuries.

  Well, it was all I could do to keep that little car on the road. I bit the inside of my lip so hard that it was actually swollen for the rest of the day. He told me the only way to kill most demons was to burn them, which made them virtually immortal, and that the same four demons had lived in that valley for centuries. Three were the kind that violated humans, and in the most depraved ways imaginable. Of those, one was a female succubus who bewitched human men so as to drain their vital essence through sex. Another was, as you may have guessed from my last letter, a satyr. The third was a demon called a dusios who could change from male to female and back again in order to effect a “transfert de sperme” between specially chosen men and women, thus producing human progeny with supernatural abilities—although Eugène was careful to point out that dusii usually kept their male form and ravished women just to ravish them, because they were consumed by lust that returned as soon as they slaked it. The fourth dwelled deep in the cave so as to avoid contact with people, because if he touched a human, he was compelled to turn their deepest desires into reality. This particular demon, Eugène said, could transform himself into a cat or a bird, or even make himself invisible.