Bound in Moonlight (29 page)

The earliest of the written accounts, dated 6 May 1461, is a description by a parish priest of events related to him—not, I hasten to add, under the seal of confession—by a young woman who served briefly as a chambermaid at Château de la Grotte Cachée. She gave distraught testimony of having witnessed a libidinous interlude involving
“actes déplorables de sodomie”
between a man and two women, one of the latter having afterward uttered words of enchantment that turned her into a male. Thus transformed, this
“abberration de nature”
proceeded to climb the exterior wall of a tower with naught but his bare hands and feet, whereupon he stole into the bedchamber of a female visitor to the château. The priest sent this report to the Bishop of Clermont (under the
Ancien Régime
), who transferred it to the Archbishop of Bourges, who dismissed the matter, having judged the young woman, sight unseen, to have been bereft of reason. It is worth noting that it had been the longstanding practice of the seigneurs of Grotte Cachée to make frequent and generous donations of land and monies to the Church.

The archbishop's secretary also showed me an age-worn velvet-bound book titled
Una Durata di Piacere,
an erotic memoir by a Venetian nobleman named Domenico Vitturi, which was privately published under a nom de plume for the author's intimate friends in 1609. Several chapters thereof concern visits to Grotte Cachée by Vitturi and favored courtesans for the express purpose of training them to pleasure men in exotic and unorthodox ways. This instruction was carried out with considerable zeal by two men fictitiously named Éric and Isaac, who schooled the courtesans in extraordinarily obscene forms of sexual congress. They were taught to employ various objects, devices, furnishings, and even implements of torture, for the purpose of exciting lust in themselves and their bedpartners. They became adept at such debaucheries as sapphotism, coitus oralis, coitus analis,
le vice anglais,
such punishments as spanking and slapping, ménage à trois, the use of bindings, blindfolds, and gags, and other practices of an even more debased nature. A notable aspect of these depictions of fornication was the prowess of the two trainers, which strikes one as exceeding the natural abilities of the mortal male. By Vitturi's account, Éric could perform the act of copulation a dozen or more times in brisk succession. Isaac, while possessed of a more conventional, though still remarkable, sexual vigor, boasted a generative organ described as
“come il penis dello stallion.”
Furthermore, one of the courtesans claimed that Isaac possessed both a tail and a pair of stumpy, hornlike protrusions on his head, which his thick, curly hair effectively concealed. This book was brought to the attention of high personages at the Vatican, who handed the matter over to the Archbishop of Bourges, who declared that Vitturi's reminiscences were simply too fantastical to warrant investigation.

The third document in Archbishop Bélanger's possession was the letter that prompted this investigation, which was sent this past June from a lady in New York City to an old friend summering at her family's château in Lyon. It was this letter, retrieved by a laundress from the hidden pocket of a skirt belonging to the recipient, which made its way to the archbishop, who being of a more inquisitive humor than his predecessors, resolved to prove or disprove with finality the existence of diabolical forces at Grotte Cachée. You have asked me to relay the contents of this letter, and this I shall do to the best of my recollection. Upon greeting her friend with the curious salutation, “From one little red fox to another,” the correspondent proceeded to reminisce about a “slave auction” they had attended at Château de la Grotte Cachée twelve years earlier. Having been “sold” to dissolute libertines for one week's sexual servitude, they subsequently—if one is to credit this shameless account—engaged in activities of the most appalling degradation. Reference is made to collars, cuffs, and leashes, as well as to casual nudity and public acts of sodomy too perverse for me to detail here. What caught the archbishop's eye was the mention of “that curly-haired devil with the lovely smile and colossal cock.” It is in relation to this man that the lady writes (her actual words may have differed slightly), “I do not, as you accuse, credit the existence of satyrs, but I tell you I did briefly espy, in the course of bathhouse disportments, what looked to be a tail—and I was only very slightly tipsy from the opium. Perhaps his mother, while in a delicate condition, received a fright from a beast with such a tail. Is it not through such maternal impression that some babes are cursed with birthmarks resembling animals, or even more monstrous disfigurements?”

As I say, these three documents represent the only meaningful written accounts of unnatural doings at Grotte Cachée. There was, however, one additional source of information. It seems that in August of 1771, a young carpenter by the name of Serges Bourgoin was hired by Lord Henry Archer, the English
administrateur
to the lady who was then mistress of Grotte Cachée, to replace a door and a pair of window shutters. About a week later, as Bourgoin and another carpenter were doing some work at the home of a local physician, the physician's wife overheard him whispering to the other man of the bizarre and ungodly things he'd experienced at Grotte Cachée. She urged him to report these things to their parish priest. When he refused, she did so herself. Given the nature of her allegations, the fact that they were hearsay, Serges Bourgoin's reputation for overindulgence in wine, and the lady's own reputation as a gossip and intermeddler, the priest penned a brief memorandum about the conversation and pursued it no further.

When I was informed that Bourgoin was still alive, I made arrangements to visit him. At eighty-five, he lives with his daughter in a nearby village, and still enjoys his wine—having been told this, I brought him two bottles of an excellent local vintage. At first, he denied having ever been to Grotte Cachée, but after I explained that I was attempting to confirm or refute the presence of evil spirits there so as to determine the necessity for exorcism, and that I would share his tale only with trusted ecclesiastical personages, he saw fit to confide in me. I confess, it was helpful to my purposes that he was already somewhat inebriated when I arrived that afternoon.

The substance of what Bourgoin related to me is this: He arrived at Grotte Cachée to replace the door and shutters, only to be led up a heavily wooded mountainside to a cave entrance in a rocky outcropping. The opening, although irregular in shape, was fitted out with a door that was old and weathered, its green paint peeling. Next to it was a gap in the dark volcanic rock to which had been attached a pair of window shutters in the same condition. The cave chamber within, he describes as
“une petite salle confortable,”
furnished with a bed, a rug, and bookshelves. There were more bookshelves, many more, he tells me, in a larger chamber adjoining the smaller one. He claims that when he removed a book from its shelf to look at it, it was wrested from his hands and shoved back in place by an unseen force. Unnerved, he installed the door and shutters as dark clouds filled the sky. By the time he was finished, a violent thunderstorm was lashing the valley, forcing him to delay his return home. He spent that night in a room in the servants' quarters, and when he awakened the next morning, he recalled having been visited in the wee hours by a black-haired female, a
“démon feminine,”
who ravished him in exceptionally sinful ways while a very tall man with long, golden hair sat and watched. Sometimes this man would propose things that she should do to him, unimaginably depraved things. Other times, he would pleasure her, but although he was clearly aroused, she never touched him intimately and he did not attempt to have carnal relations with her. Many times over the intervening years, Bourgoin told me, he had tried to convince himself that it had been a dream, but in his heart, he felt it had really happened. When I asked whether he had been drinking that night before he retired, he admitted that he had, but he insisted that he wasn't so drunk as to have invented such an experience out of whole cloth.

During my stay with the archbishop, he issued an invitation to the local gentry to dine with him, as a pretext to throw me together with the present Seigneur des Ombres, Théophile Morel.
Le seigneur,
being of advanced years and ill health, sent in his stead his administrator, Bartholomew Archer, who is the grandson of the previously mentioned Lord Henry Archer. Since Mr. Archer is known to make inquiries regarding those whom he intends to invite to Grotte Cachée, I introduced myself to him as “David Beckett,” Beckett being my middle name—it was, in fact, my mother's maiden name. This, I felt to be an acceptable alternative to an entirely fabricated name. You are well aware, my lord, of how deeply I take to heart the Wisdom of Solomon on the subject of lying—truly, the mouth that belieth killeth the soul. I shall endeavor, during the course of this investigation, to avoid outright untruths, although I concede that lies of omission have been unavoidable, and will continue to be so, from time to time.

In any event, the ruse was successful. Mr. Archer left his Grace's dinner party intrigued with the notion of revamping the grounds of Grotte Cachée in accordance with the picturesque ideals in vogue in Britain, and ten days later he sent a Barouche to fetch me here.

The occupants of the château, aside from Seigneur des Ombres and Mr. Archer (who actually lives in a hunting lodge in the surrounding woods with his wife and infant daughter) are one female and three males, all evidently unrelated. At dinner this evening, I was introduced to the woman and two of the men by first name only—Lili, Elic, and Inigo. The third man, Darius, who was described to me as “something of a hermit,” was not present. During our postprandial conversation, I overheard a brief, whispered exchange in French between Lili and Elic—you have remarked yourself on my acute hearing. Their words, which concerned myself, had clearly not been intended for my ears. When asked whether I understood French, I replied misleadingly that I had never taken a course in the subject, which is true. I declined to mention that my father was from France, as were my nanny and nursery governess, and that I had a thorough command of French before I was speaking full sentences in English.

As for the castle itself, it is of a quadrangular configuration with corner towers, and appears to have been built several centuries ago of dark lava rock. It is tucked deeply into a heavily wooded valley beneath an extinct volcano that houses a cave which I am eager to explore despite Mr. Archer's admonition that I not venture too far within. When I do so, I will of course attempt to locate the curious little bedchamber described by Serges Bourgoin.

Given my disinclination to entrust my correspondence to the hands of strangers, this will very likely be the last communication your Grace receives from me until I return to England to make a full report in person.

Until then, I remain

Your Grace's devoted and humble servant,

David Beckett Roussel

BOUND IN MOONLIGHT
A Bantam Book / December 2007

Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
either are the product of the author's imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved
Copyright © 2007 by Louisa Burton

Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Burton, Louisa.
Bound in moonlight / Louisa Burton.
p. cm. — (Hidden grotto series ; bk. 2)
1. Castles—France—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.U7698B68 2007
813'.6—dc22
2007020379

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eISBN: 978-0-553-90440-6

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