Bound in Moonlight (3 page)

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 New 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 summering 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.

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.