He held me, shaking and panting, as the tremors diminished and our hearts and lungs resumed their normal rhythm.
“I didn't use anything,” he said, a little breathlessly. “Protection.”
“I'm on the pill,” I murmured into the crook of his neck.
He nodded. “I, um, I'm healthy. You know.”
“Me, too.”
“Still . . .” He shook his head slightly.
I lifted my head to look at him.
Without meeting my gaze, he brushed the damp tendrils of hair off my forehead and cheeks, pulled the straps of my swimsuit back up. Reaching between us, he withdrew from me and buttoned up his khakis.
“You think this was a mistake,” I said.
He looked as if he were trying to compose a response.
I levered myself off him and got out of the pool, struggling against the urge to burst into tears again.What had I thought, that after nineteen years, he'd suddenly developed feelings for me?
Hastily donning my terry-cloth robe, I said, “Just please don't tell me this was a pity fuck, even if it was. I couldn't take that right now.”
“God, Isabel.” Wading to the edge of the pool nearest to me, he said,“How could you think that?”
“Why would I not?” I turned and left.
Four
I READ EMMELINE'S EMANCIPATION last night,” I told my father the next morning over tea and scones at a little table on the balcony of his apartment, which overlooked the castle's central courtyard.
“Oh, yes? What did you think?”
“It's dated.”
He lifted his cup and blew on his tea. “It was written over a hundred years ago. It nevertheless has its amusing moments, I think.”
“Even if unintentionally. The movie doesn't seem to be following the book very closely. In the book, when Emmeline walks in on Archie and those two women in the library, she flips her shit.”
“Isabel, can't you say, ‘She becomes upset’?”
“Fine, she becomes upset. So fucking upset that she faints dead away, one of like eleventy-seven times that happens. She's this totally naïve, terrified virgin when Tobias takes her under his, uh, gigantic wing, and it's not till the very end that she becomes Mistress Emmeline, She-Wolf of the Château.”
“Your point?”
“When I saw that library scene being filmed yesterday, it took her about two minutes to go from, ‘Archie, you cad!’ to this red-hot girl-on-girl scene. What's that about?”
He sat back in his chair, shrugging. “Larry adapted the screenplay from the book. I gave him free rein to take whatever approach he chose, so long as the Follets got their chosen roles.”
“Speak of the devil.” I nodded toward the courtyard below, which I was facing. Dad looked over his shoulder to see Larry Parent, his crew, and a gaggle of robe-clad actors—Elic, Inigo, and Lili among them—trooping across the courtyard to the central fountain.
Turning back around, he said, “I believe that's the next to last scene on the schedule. They film them out of sequence, you know. This afternoon they'll do the cave scene, and then they'll wrap.”
“There's no cave scene in the book.”
“I suggested it a couple of days ago. There's an exquisite crystal pool about a half mile in from the entrance, and I told Larry I thought it would make a splendid setting for a scene between Emmeline and Tobias. Orange juice?” he asked, lifting a little cut-glass pitcher.
I nodded, pushing my glass over.
Out with it, I told myself. It was a white lie, not a real lie, and if it helped him to live longer and more contentedly, where was the harm? “According to my pulmonologist, my longevity will be in inverse proportion to the level of stress and strain in my life.”
“Um, Dad, I've been thinking about what we discussed yesterday, me taking over as administrateur after, um . . .”
Leaning forward, he said, “Yes?”
“I, um . . .” Unable to meet his eyes, I lowered my gaze to my glass of juice. “I'll do it.”
“Oh, Isabel.” He reached over and squeezed my hand, which stunned me. I couldn't remember his ever having initiated a gesture of that sort. “You can't imagine what this means to me. This has been weighing on me so heavily. It pained me so much to think of anyone other than an Archer serving as administrateur after all these years. And I had no idea how I would go about finding a replacement if you decided not to do it.”
“I know, Dad. You can relax now. It'll all be taken care of.”
“There's so much to tell you, so much to fill you in on. I daresay you'll be as incredulous as I was when I first learned the history of this place and how the Follets came to be here—and why Adrien Morel and his ancestors have been safeguarding them for the past two-thousand-plus years.”
I cocked my head. “Two-thou—?”
“Action!”
I looked down into the courtyard to find a scene of orgiastic revelry taking place in the fountain as the cameras rolled. The redhead from the library scene was bent over the lip of the pool taking it doggy style from Elic as he kissed Lili, kneeling next to him with some other guy screwing her from behind. Inigo, standing on the base of the statue, was sucking on a tequila bottle while “Fanny” sucked on him. She, meanwhile, looked to be taking it in the ass from the guy playing Archie.
I said, “It's supposed to be raining in that scene.”
“The weather hasn't cooperated,” Dad replied as he pushed himself up from the table,“so Larry's decided he can live without the rain. He just wants to wrap. Come with me. I want to show you something.”
“Don't you think you should knock first?” I asked as Dad, breathing harshly from the walk, used one of the myriad keys on a large key ring to unlock the door to Adrien's gate-tower study.
“He'll be in Lyon till this evening,” he said breathlessly, “meeting with an architect about some renovations. And lest you think I'm trespassing, I have free access to his study—I alone.” Swinging the door open, he said, “No civilian other than the administrateur must ever enter this room.”
“Civilian?”
“The ungifted.”
“Um . . .”
Ushering me inside, he said, “The only reason I'm letting you in here is because you're my heir apparent.”
Oh, man. “Dad, I really don't know if I should . . . Wow,” I murmured, looking around.
It was a large room with windows on all four sides. Through those on the south wall, I saw the road leading to the gatehouse, atop which this room was situated. Those on the north wall overlooked the courtyard. The walls were of raw stone, imparting a medieval aura, although little could be seen of them given the scores of paintings, drawings, photographs, and tapestries hung right up against one another.
One of the drawings was that pencil sketch I'd done of Adrien that Christmas. It was under glass in a gorgeous gold leaf frame with triple matting. Go figure.
There were numerous bookcases and cabinets, a timeworn leather sofa, and two long worktables at right angles to each other in the northeast corner. One table held a desktop computer, a laptop, a printer, a photocopy machine, an oversized scanner, and a more esoteric machine that I recognized from the office of one of my clients as a perfect binder, the function of which was to produce professional-quality paperback books. Tucked diagonally into the corner between the two tables stood a standalone automatic commercial paper cutter. The other table was neatly laid out with a number of ancient-looking manuscripts and parchment scrolls, a stack of books—the top one was Mass and Electric Charge in the Vortex Theory of Matter—and a pile of spiral notebooks. On the cover of the top one was written, in black marker:
ÉTÉ 14 A.D.
L'ARRIVÉE D'INIGO
BTIMENT DU BAIN PUBLIC
LA MORT DE L'AUGUSTUS
“Summer, A.D. 14,” I murmured. “Inigo's arrival, building of the bathhouse, the death of Augustus.” I walked closer to check out the notebooks under that one. The second was labeled: 1500S–1600S, DOMENICO VITT
URI/COURTISANES; The third: 18TH C., HELLFIRE CLUB; and the fourth, most eye-catching of all: VISITATIONS PAR DES VAMPIRES.
There was a massive walnut desk strewn with books and papers at the east end of the room. On the opposite wall stood a glass case housing an age-burnished walking stick made out of a gnarled oak branch and a heavy gold neck torque that looked like it should have been in a museum.
Leaning on the desk, my father said, “Those belonged to Brantigern the Protec—”His words were swallowed by a sharp coughing fit. When it was over, his eyes looked unfocused.
“Dad, are you all right?”
He nodded. “A little dizzy. It will pass.”
I helped him over to the couch, where he sat heavily, slumping against the backrest. “Here.” Handing me the key ring, he pointed with a slightly palsied hand to a glass-fronted bookcase and said, “Open that and take out the first volume.”
The books inside were trade-size paperbacks titled VOLUME I, VOLUME II, VOLUME III, and so forth.
My father said, “The books on the second shelf are my English translations, if you'd prefer not to have to read them in French.”
I withdrew the first volume in English and relocked the bookcase.
“Adrien's ancestors were chieftains and spiritual leaders in this valley since before the time of Christ,” he said. “When the Romans took over Gaul, a young druid named Brantigern stayed behind along with a small group of his tribespeople in order to protect Darius.”
“That hermit guy?”
“He's lived here for well over two millennia,” my father said.“He's a djinni.”
“Um, like, I Dream of Jeannie?”
Giving me that look, he said, “No. Not like I Dream of Jeannie. He's from an ancient and venerable race, as are Elic, Lili, and Inigo, who arrived here later. Elic is a Nordic elf who is also, because of a genetic mutation, what we call a dusios, which means he's sequentially hermaphroditic.”
“A hermaphrodite? 'Cause I saw him in the altogether just now, and his parts all appear to be pretty masculine—and in good working order, I might add.”
“The operative word is ‘sequentially,’ meaning he has the ability, like certain animals, to shift genders for reproductive purposes. Lili was the Goddess of the New Moon in ancient Babylonia, but through most of her life, she's been considered a witch or a succubus. And Inigo is a satyr.”
“Okay, don't satyrs have like furry haunches and hooves and horns? And tails?”
“He had the tail surgically removed, his horns are very small, and if you look at the earliest Greek depictions of satyrs, you'll see that they have normal humanoid legs.”
“Oh, well, that explains it.”
“Most people consider Follets to be sexual demons, incubi and succubi—or they used to when they believed in such beings—because their carnal needs are all-consuming. Well, not Darius so much, unless he happens to touch a human and absorb their carnal needs—he has his own cross to bear. That's why, when he's around people, he's usually in the form of a gray cat. Sometimes a blue rock thrush, but usually a cat.”
“Uh-huh. So he's like a shape-shifter, too?”
“To the ancient, pre-Islamic Semites, the djinn were shape-shifters. As I say, he avoids humans, but the others thrive on sexual encounters, literally, the more intense the better. Doing without would be like doing without food and water, and no sooner do they appease their hunger than it returns, keeping them in a fever pitch of lust until they can find another human with whom to mate.”
Had my reserved and decorous father just said, “fever pitch of lust”? Did he really believe all this hoo-hah about gender-bending elves and satyrs, for crying out loud? Were we actually having this conversation?
“If they're so horny all the time, why can't they just . . .” I made a stroking motion near my crotch in the Universal Masturbation Symbol.
“Inigo can find release that way, but not Lili or Elic. In fact, Elic's physiology makes him particularly vulnerable. He would almost certainly die if he were deprived of human women for an extended period. They have to be human—he can't mate with Follets. Inigo and Lili would probably go insane if chastity were enforced upon them for very long. This is why, as administrateur, it will be your duty to provide carnal nourishment to the Follets on a regular, ongoing basis. For the most part, this means securing as houseguests humans with whom they can engage in powerful sexual encounters.”
“Serving as their pimp, in other words.”
My father's eyes frosted over the way they did when he was quietly seething, which wasn't often; he was a pretty laid-back guy in general. “Your use of that word is an insult to me and to the Follets, whose guardianship is no less than a sacred calling. To properly care for them, you must think of them as gods and goddesses who derive sustenance from sexual energy, which happens to be a natural and beautiful life force, except perhaps to mouth-breathing Philistines.”
“I'm sorry, Dad. I didn't mean to insult you.” Gods and goddesses. . .He was losing his mind. It was the disease, it had to be. The lack of oxygen to his brain . . .
In a gentler tone, he said, “I know it takes some getting used to, this notion of living gods, because no one believes anymore. I think of the Follets as being akin to princes and princesses of a deposed royal family. They have no official royal status, they govern no one, but they nevertheless have royal blood flowing in their veins.”
“Dad, um . . .” I shook my head helplessly. “Have you discussed all of this with Adrien?”
He smiled. “Who do you think taught me about this? When Adrien's parents died, along with my father, and I took over as administrateur, I knew very little about the Follets or the Morel lineage. But Adrien did. He had learned it from his father and from the written accounts of the gardiens who had gone before him—which he is now endeavoring to turn into a single, all-inclusive document, the Histoire Secrète de Grotte Cachée.”
“This?” I said, indicating the book in my hand.
“That is the first of what will be many volumes before he's done. In addition to learning the history and lore of this place, Adrien also had special tutors to prepare him for his priestly calling. They helped him to recognize and develop The Gift.”
“What gift?”
“It's actually a bundle of gifts, extrasensory abilities inherited from his druidic ancestors, which help him to protect and care for the Follets.”
“Extrasensory? Like psychic?”
“He can't read minds, if that's what you mean, but he can sense things about people through their auras, which are quite vibrant to him. He receives extraordinary insights through his dreams, and there are also certain spells he can employ—phrases in the old Gaulish tongue—to effect, for want of a better word, magic. In olden days, he would have been called a seer and recognized for the priest that he is, which is why he refers to himself and people like him as druids and druidesses.”
“Like Mom?” I said with a little roll of my eyes.
“Your mother is a druidess.”
I could not for the life of me figure out how to respond to that.
“She was born with The Gift,” he said. “Some people are, usually because both of their parents are gifted, because it's a recessive gene. If only one parent is gifted, the likelihood of having gifted offspring is quite dim. In any event, with your mother, the problem was that she never had any proper training, as did Adrien. Her gifts are unfocused and ill-developed, but she senses their presence on some level. Most gifted people don't, because our culture is too arrogant and skeptical to acknowledge the existence of abilities beyond the patently obvious. They're generally in such denial that even an exceptionally gifted druid who's been trained to read auras, like Adrien, won't recognize them as his own kind. In any event, that's why your mother's gotten caught up in all that Tarot-reading, crystal ball–gazing mumbo jumbo.”
“Oh, yeah, that's mumbo jumbo, but this business about satyrs and elves and djinnis—”
“Djinn,” he said.
/> “What?”
“The plural of djinni . . .” He let out a few more strident coughs, then sat back wearily. “Read the book, Isabel. It will tell you everything you need to know.”
Five
AND SO DO I, Brantigern Anextlomarus, record the lore of our people, not for Roman eyes, nor for the eyes of any man, but for the gods and goddesses alone. Always have our rites and secrets been safeguarded from those who would burn our gods and mock our truths. Always shall it be so.
Thus concluded my afternoon reading, Volume I of Adrien's Histoire Secrète de Grotte Cachée, in which the druid Brantigern recounts the beliefs and history of his Celtic tribe from their settlement in the valley through the Gallic wars and the initial decades of Roman occupation.
I closed the book and set it on my lap, holding it firmly to make sure it didn't slide into the bathhouse pool, in which my legs were dangling. It was intriguing stuff, that book, but a little distressing, too, especially the parts about the tribes people serving as guardians to “gods” with whom I'd met and interacted. First, there'd been Darius, their “god of fire” from some unknown foreign land who had lived deep in their “enchanted cave” for centuries. Then came Elic, “a benign dusios from the North,” and finally Inigo, who'd been recruited by the Vernae's Roman conquerors to pose for the bathhouse statues. There'd been no mention of Lili. She must have come later.
The history itself might have simply been the product of research, but that business about Darius, Elic, and Inigo . . . It wasn't that they worshipped gods; they had dozens of them. It was that these particular gods were still living at Grotte Cachée. I'd met them, for heaven's sake. Was I honestly supposed to believe that they weren't people, but divine, sex-obsessed beings thousands of years old?
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