Bound in Moonlight

by Louisa Burton

  I asked him how he knew all this, and he told me that his brother Alain had worked as a guard in the château's gatehouse for many years. Like all Grotte Cachée employees, Alain had been sworn to secrecy about what he saw and heard there, in return for which he received a ridiculously huge salary and retirement pension. Alain had always been irreligious, but when he was dying, Eugène brought him back to the true faith. Flush with his newfound piety, Alain told his brother everything before passing on. Eugène went all the way to the archbishop in his quest to have the demons exorcised from Grotte Cachée, but he was dismissed as a loony old fanatic.

  I thanked him for his advice, but told him it was very important that I make the trip. I did say I'd keep an eye out for demons. He told me they were more beautiful than ordinary mortals, the better to captivate and seduce their human prey. And he begged me to remember, when I turned in at night, to lock not just my bedchamber door, but every window in the room, even if I was at the very top of one of the towers. He said the demons' insatiable lust maddened them and gave them extraordinary strength, and that the dusios in particular would climb the castle walls to get to sleeping humans.

  What with rutted dirt roads, a top speed of fortyfive kilometers per hour, and hordes of geese and sheep to contend with, it took me over five hours the next day to drive to Grotte Cachée. All the while, I prayed that the rain clouds gathering overhead would hold off until I got there. Although you're FAR TOO YOUNG TO REMEMBER, those early autos were sans windshield or top.

  Luckily, I arrived just as I felt the first few pinpricks of rain. The château was so deep in the lushly vegetated valley, and so dark (having been constructed, I later found out, of volcanic stone), that I doubt someone flying an airplane overhead would even notice it. It was a rectangular castle with a courtyard in the center, a round tower on each corner, and a shorter, squarish one in the middle of each range, that in the front range being the gate tower. As I pulled up in front of it, a gigantic guard came out and crossed a drawbridge over a deep, wide ditch that had probably been a moat at one time.

  “Bonjour, mademoiselle,” he said as he approached the car. “Êtes-vous perdu?”

  I handed him the little card and told him no, I wasn't lost, that Mr. Archer had invited me. He informed me that Mr. Archer was in India at present, and that their current houseguests would be departing the next day, but that I was welcome to remain as their guest until Mr. Archer's return. He said the housekeeper, Madame Gauvin, would have a room prepared for me, and that he would call for a driver to take the car to the carriage house. I didn't want to leave it waiting in the rain, though, so I told him I would take it there myself, but that I would appreciate it if someone could fetch my luggage.

  The carriage house, which was tucked away in the woods next to the stable, was the largest one I've ever seen, a long, narrow stone building (of lava, like the castle) with about a dozen bays. The bays were open, rather than being walled off separately, so that as I pulled the car into an empty one, I could see the other automobiles and carriages parked to either side.

  I had shucked off my driving goggles and was pinning on an uncharacteristically chic black picture hat with silken bows and ostrich feathers that I'd bought especially for my reunion with Hickley, when a subtle movement from within a carriage about five or six bays to the right caught my eye. It was a gleaming landau with a glass window on either side of the passenger section. Through the window facing me, I saw a young man in shirtsleeves with slightly mussed brown hair sitting with his head thrown back, eyes closed. I might have thought he was asleep, except that his chest was moving as if he were trying to catch his breath. He looked pained, and I thought, I've got to help him, but then he lifted his head and said something, looking down. I couldn't hear what he was saying, but I realized he wasn't alone. Perhaps, I thought, there was a woman lying with her head in his lap—those landaus were pretty roomy inside. (Do stop laughing, Rèmy, or I won't go on.)

  The young man threw his head back, grimacing. His back arched, and he shuddered for several long seconds before he slumped back down. By this time, I'd figured out that there was, indeed, a woman in there with him, and that she must have just brought him off by hand. (I said don't laugh!)

  He looked down again, heavy-lidded and smiling contentedly, and said something else. A blond head appeared.

  It was another young man.

  I stuck a hatpin into my finger.

  The blond man leaned forward for a kiss, then turned to sit back on the seat, which was when he saw me. He said something to his companion, who looked in my direction with wide-eyed panic.

  I mouthed, “I'm sorry,” as I stumbled from the car and fled from the carriage house, my car coat flapping behind me. I was about fifty yards down the gravel path when I heard a voice from behind me call out, “Mademoiselle!”

  The brown-haired young man was jogging toward me, hurriedly shrugging on his coat.

  “I'm so sorry,” I said, backing up with my hands raised. “Je suis désolée.”

  Hearing my accent, he said in breathless English, “You are américaine?”

  I nodded. “I'm Emily Townsend. I'm a friend of Mr. Archer's. He invited me here, but he's not here, but I know someone else who's here, and that's why I—”

  “Please, Mademoiselle,” he said, putting a thankful end to my idiotic babbling. He struck me as so young and vulnerable, standing there hatless in the rain with his hair plastered to his forehead. “I beg you, what you saw . . .” He looked toward the carriage house, where the blond man stood just inside the first bay, watching us as he lit a cigarette.

  I said, “It's really none of my—”

  “If my father were to find out . . .” he began. “He mustn't. Please, I beg you not to say anything to him—to anyone.”

  “Who is your father?” I asked.

  “He is Émile Morel, Seigneur des Ombres. I am Claude Morel. If he knew . . .” He shook his head desolately, raindrops coursing down his face like tears.

  I said, “I won't tell him. I promise.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “I believe you. You have a sapphire radiance about you.”

  “I've never even met your father,” I said. “I'm here at the invitation of Mr. Archer.”

  Looking alarmed, Claude said, “He mustn't find out either.”

  “Kit wouldn't judge you.” There were two men who attended Mrs. Chalmers's salons, a Harper's Weekly editor and a playwright, who were known to be lovers. And there was a female poet who smoked a pipe and dressed in men's clothes. No one, including Kit, seemed to think anything of it, although I was probably the only one who hadn't realized that homosexuals expressed their love physically. It had simply never occurred to me that two people of the same sex might be moved to kiss, much less make love.

  “He might not judge me, but he would have to tell my father, because if I don't provide an heir . . .” Claude pushed the wet hair out of his eyes. “It is unthinkable.”

  I asked him how old he was.

  “Eighteen.”

  “You're young,” I said. “Perhaps, by the time you're ready to marry and have children, you'll have outgrown this, this attraction to other—”

  “No,” he said bleakly. “I won't have.”

  I assured him that I would keep his secret, whereupon he returned to the carriage house and I continued on to the château. It was raining harder by the time I entered the courtyard, but I could make out six or seven naked people of both sexes cavorting in the pool of a large central fountain. One, a young woman, was dancing around with arms outstretched, her face turned to the sky. A tall man knelt behind a woman who was bent over the pool's stone rim, his hands around her waist. His dark blond hair was so long that I would have taken him for a swish had I not seen his hips pumping and realized, with a fair degree of shock, that they were fornicating—and in a manner I'd thought to be the exclusive domain of animals. More curious still was that, as he coupled with the one woman, he was kissing another, one with black hair who kne
lt in the water next to him, lightly stroking his back.

  A man with dark, curly hair stood on the base of the fountain's central column (which supported a sculpture of a couple going at it, by the way), one hand gripping a bottle, the other the head of the woman who stood before him. The rain made it difficult to see exactly what was going on, but it was clear that her face was at the level of his private parts, the implications of which I didn't want to ponder. Another man stood behind her, hips churning. A dark tail-like object seemed to be sticking out of his rear end. It was hard to make it out, given the rain and my utter stupefaction. So these were the “indecorous goings-on” that Kit had warned me about, I thought, marveling at his typically British knack for understatement.

  I took this all in with a curious sense of detachment, almost as if it were one of those dreams where you know you're dreaming, so you become more or less an observer of the surreal. I'd been in a slightly off-kilter state of mind ever since I parked the car. I remember thinking, Maybe Eugène was right about the magnetic force in this valley.

  The dark-haired man on the column saw me as he took a swig from the bottle, and gave me a delightfully boyish smile, the first of many that he would direct my way, for this was Inigo. “Ah, une beauté! Joignez-vous donc à nous!”

  With a frantic shake of my head, I turned and scurried into the castle through the nearest doorway, the invitation to join them echoing in my mind.

  I found myself in a great hall that looked like something out of a painting. It was cavernous and opulent, with Renaissance tapestries hanging above carved oak wainscoting. Such halls usually have a rather forbidding quality, Sunny's cartoonishly regal Blenheim Palace being a case in point, but this one felt warm and appealing. Perhaps it was the comfortably modern furnishings, but it was quite an inviting room—or it would have been were it not for the gagged and blindfolded woman (naked, of course) dangling from the ceiling by means of chains attached to the fleece-lined leather straps around her wrists and ankles. She was hanging faceup at about the height of the little table next to her, with legs widespread to display her oilsheened gash. On the table sat a fat, unlit candle, a black marble statuette, a carrot, a squash . . . You get the idea. Around her neck was a sign that read FUCK ME or FRIG ME.

  “My God!” Pulling down the gag and blindfold, I said, “I'll get you down from there.”

  “The hell you will,” she said in a refined British accent. “Do you realize how long it took them to get me like this?”

  “You want this?”

  She stared at me incredulously. “What is that bloody thing on your head?”

  I patted the hat to find the enormous brim sodden and drooping, with the wet, ratty ostrich feathers hanging limply over the edge.

  “Are you going to frig me or not?” the woman asked.

  Taking a step back, I said, “Um, perhaps some other time. I'm looking for my fiancé.”

  “And that would be . . . ?”

  “Randolph Lytton, Baron of Hickley.”

  Brightening, she said, “You're Randy's Yanky Banky? Bloody excellent to meet you. I'm Frances Caddingdon, but you must call me Fanny.”

  I recognized the name—in fact, I thought I might even have met her in passing a couple of years before at the Royal Opera House. She was Lady Caddingdon, a marchioness.

  Fanny told me I'd find Hickley in the dining room, gave me directions, and asked me to replace the gag and blindfold.

  You already know the little tableau I encountered in the dining room. When he became aware of my presence, my betrothed paused in his humping, extracted his face from the brunette's snatch, and said, “Miss Townsend?” (No, we had not yet progressed to first names.) “I say, is that you?”

  I replied that it was, since I could think of absolutely nothing else to say.

  Frowning in bewilderment, he said, “What the devil have you got on your head?”

  And with that, chéri, I must bring this marathon missive to a close, because my hand is cramping up (impending old age, you know) and Kitty has just come to wheel me into the dining room for dinner. She says to tell you she's blowing you a kiss, and that I must write the following or she'll withhold my postprandial moonshine: “Keep on Em about the marriage thing. She'll cave sooner or later, because she really is crazy about you.”

  She's right on one count.

  Je t'aime à la folie,

  Em

  Three

  YOU'LL THANK US for this, my dear,” said Lady L——, tying Emmeline's hands behind her as her maid, the robust Fanny, gripped her snugly about the waist.

  “Unhand me this instant, you shameless hussies!” Emmeline demanded as the women pushed her down onto a silk-upholstered footstool, yanking her legs indecently wide so as to lash her feet to its two front legs.

  “Prudery such as yours only brings misery and fits of hysteria,” explained her ladyship as she gagged Emmeline with the waist sash of her own daisy-sprigged frock. “You are overdue for an education in the ways of the flesh.”

  She whipped aside the curtain over what Emmeline had taken to be a window in the dark little room. It was, indeed, a sheet of glass, however the view it afforded was not to the outdoors, but into a room the existence of which Emmeline had been entirely unaware until that moment.

  “We call this the Ruttery,” Lady L—— announced.

  It was a windowless but bright chamber, thanks to the light from electric sconces reflecting off white walls hung with tapestries depicting acts of unspeakable licentiousness. Some of the furnishings appeared to be of unfamiliar and cunning design, but Emmeline's gaze was drawn to the naked beauty hanging faceup from the ceiling by means of golden chains attached to her outstretched arms and legs. She was not just gagged, as was Emmeline, but blindfolded as well, and at the perfect height to be ravished by a standing man, which was, in fact, precisely the activity that was transpiring at that very moment.

  The gentleman in question was naked but for one peculiarity; sprouting from his nether orifice was what appeared to be a tail of black horsehair. Behind him stood a woman in a black corset, black opera gloves, and tall boots, whipping him on his rear with a riding crop and shrieking, “Harder, you puny gelding!Ram it in! Pound the wench!”

  Nor were these three the only debauchers making use of the Ruttery that evening. What Emmeline had taken for a life-size bas relief sculpture of a man on the back wall was, upon closer inspection, an actual man affixed to the wall by means of a coating of plaster. The only exposed parts of him were his nose, his mouth, and his groin, which appeared to have been shaved and painted white. A woman in a severe black dress stood before him, trailing a raven's feather over his turgid manhood and the bulbous sac beneath it as he emitted a low, quavering moan.

  In a corner stood something like a tall, leather-cushioned sawhorse, on which a young woman lay facedown with her limbs strapped to the splayed legs of the curious bench and her skirts thrown up. Behind her, facing Emmeline's direction, stood a dapper man in a black mask made of something hard and shiny, like lacquer, but Emmeline recognized him from his well-oiled reddish hair as Lord Hardwyck, her betrothed. He was having carnal relations with the tethered woman dogways, giving her a smart spank on her pink-stained bottom with each snapping thrust. All the while, he was staring across the room at Emmeline, a lewdly sinister glint in his eye.

  “He can't actually see you,” said Lady L——. “What he's looking at is himself giving it to Philomena Quimsby. It is a mirror on one side, and a window on the . . . Oh bloody hell, not again,” she groaned as Emmeline, overcome, as you can well imagine, by the indecency she was being forced to witness, slumped into a faint.

  Yanking Emmeline's head up by her tidy bun, her ladyship gave her captive two revivifying slaps across the face. “Stay awake and learn something, you little twit. Come, Fanny,” she said as she swept from the room.

  Oh, dear Reader, the things our innocent Emmeline learned that evening. The strangest sensations arose within her as she watched her fellow
houseguests disporting themselves in the Ruttery,sensations she'd never experienced until that moment. Her heartbeat quickened, along with her breath, and the rosy tips of her bosom grew oddly stiff. Most curious, and disconcerting,was the tingling heat pooling at the juncture of her thighs, which felt damp for reasons she couldn't begin to imagine. Her sex was consumed by a strangely delicious itch, prompting her to press that part of herself repeatedly against the footstool in an effort to assuage it, yet it only got worse, maddeningly so.

  “Darling Emmeline. What the devil . . .”

  She turned to see her only real friend in this place, the handsome,gentle Tobias, entering the dim little anteroom.

  “Are you all right?” he asked as he untied her gag.

  “I don't know!” she cried. “They . . . they tied me up and left me here, and now I feel so . . . so . . . Oh, Tobias.” Shaking with the urge to sob and scream, she wondered if this was what they meant by hysteria. “What is happening to me?”

  He glanced into the Ruttery, nodded to himself, and knelt before her, saying, “I think I know. And I think perhaps I can help you.”

  “You . . . you do?” she asked, not even caring, as he slipped a hand beneath her skirt, that he had not yet offered to untie her.