House of Dark Delights

by Louisa Burton

  “Be my guest, old man, be my guest. I’m rather proud of that library, I confess. Built it up from a few paltry shelves to what it is now, which is one of the finest collections of ancient and classical history in Europe, if I say so myself.”

  Rising to her feet with the help of her walking stick, Catherine said, “I’m off to investigate the cave.”

  “Capital idea,” Archer said. “Er, I must humbly request that you don’t disturb any artifacts and leave everything as you find—”

  “Yes, my father has already explained the rules to me.”

  “And that you stay on the lamplit path,” Archer persisted, “and venture no farther than the Cella—that would be the chamber with the statue in it.”

  “What happens if I go farther?” she asked with a sardonic little smile. “Do I turn into a pumpkin?”

  Archer looked up, the smile stiffened into place. “You will find yourself in inhospitable terrain.”

  Two

  CATHERINE!”

  Catherine paused some fifty yards into the cave, next to one of the wall-mounted oil lanterns, waiting for Thomas to catch up with her.

  “Mind if I tag along?” he asked a little breathlessly as he took off his spectacles and hooked them over the neckline of his damp white bathing suit.

  “You’ll get chilly, dressed like that,” she said, thinking how silly men looked in their swimming clothes when they weren’t in the water, as if they were just walking about in their underwear. “Caves tend to be—”

  “I don’t mind.”

  She knew why he wanted to be alone with her. As gently as she could, she said, “I’m not going to change my mind, Tom.”

  He held her gaze for a bleak moment, looked away, started to say something, sighed. “All I’m asking is for you to think about it. You answered so quickly, without even—”

  “I thought about it before you asked. I’ve been thinking about it since I was a child, about the impact on my career, my life, if I were to marry.”

  “For God’s sake, Catherine, it’s not as if I’m some Neanderthal who’s going to tie you to the cookstove and beat you when you get out of line. It’s me, Thomas,” he said, his eyes dark and intense. “I’m the one who took you to that suffragist meeting, remember?”

  “Actually, I took you.”

  “The point is, you can’t seriously think I’m the kind of man who’d try to remake you into some mindless little baby mill. You’ve known me for how many years now? Three? Four?”

  “Men change once they’re married,” she said. “They get covetous, domineering.”

  “Is your father like that?” he demanded. “He and your mother had an ideal marriage, a marriage based on equality, respect…Your mother was free to follow any pursuit she desired.”

  “You never even knew my mother, Thomas. Elijah romanticizes their marriage because he loved her so much.” Which was why the poor man couldn’t stop grieving for her, why he’d cocooned himself in the womb of academia after her death, and why he wouldn’t even think about courting other women, even though he was the type of man who was never meant to be alone.

  “Are you saying she was unhappy in her marriage?” he asked.

  “I’m saying she made the best of her lot. She loved my father. She loved me, she loved being a mother. But I think—I know—she would have had a much richer, more fulfilling life if she’d followed her dream and become a physician.”

  “A physician?”

  “She’d been accepted into the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania when she married Elijah and became pregnant with me. I think she’d intended to return to her medical studies eventually, but as the years passed, she found herself playing helpmate to my father in his career, accompanying him on histravels…” Catherine shrugged. “She used to tell me that a woman has a choice in this life, marriage and motherhood or a career. I want a career, Thomas. I want to go back to Cornell someday and teach. I can’t do that if I’m shackled in wedlock to…to anyone. It’s not you. This…this isn’t about you.”

  He looked away with a dubious little grunt. He was right to be skeptical, of course, for it was partly about him, perhaps even mostly about him. Yes, the institution of marriage, with its ingrained subjection of women, made Catherine uneasy, but if any man could make it work, it would be Thomas. More troubling, though she was loath to mention it because it was about him and not about abstract principles, was his attachment to such an inane pursuit as mythology. To spend one’s life classifying satyrs and demons and faeries struck her as an appalling waste of brainpower. Likewise, Elijah’s devotion to the subject, much as she loved him, both baffled and shamed her. Thomas’s distressed her even more, because she could see him making her happy if only she could respect his life’s work.

  “It feels as if it’s about me,” he said.

  “I care for you,” she told him truthfully. “You’re one of the finest men I know.”

  “Then why won’t you give me a chance? Give us a chance. I love you, Catherine. I want to marry you. Does that count for nothing?”

  She looked away, groping for words, as she did every time he made that declaration, which she’d never returned.

  Gentling his voice, he said, “You’re afraid. Don’t be. Let me prove I can give you a loving marriage and your freedom.”

  “And if it turns out to be a disaster—for both of us?”

  “Neither of us can predict the future,” he said, “but we can try our best to make it work and leave the rest in God’s hands.”

  She said, “The very fact you put it that way, knowing how I feel about religion…”

  “We’ll leave it to fate, then. Is that better?”

  “No, it’s not better,” she said heatedly. “I’m a scientist, Thomas. I don’t just launch into foolhardy endeavors willy-nilly and leave the outcome to fate—whatever that is.”

  “Foolhardy endeavors?” He reached out to grip her arms, startling her; they never touched. “I’m asking you to marry me, Catherine. You dismiss my proposal out of hand because the outcome is uncertain and you can’t bear that. You can’t bear not being in complete control every step of the way, you never could. But that’s how life is. Life is full of uncertainty and risk, but there are some chances we take out of passion and love and faith just because we’re human.”

  She backed away, wrenching herself from his grip. “Not me. I’m not made that way. I’m sorry.”

  “But—”

  “Leave me alone, Thomas,” she pleaded, surprised to find her throat closing up, as if she were on the verge of tears. “Please, just—” She swallowed to steady her voice. “I just want to be alone right now. Can I just be alone for a little while?”

  Thomas regarded her in dreadful silence for a long moment. As he turned to leave, he said, “I’ll be keeping that ring in my pocket for a year, in case you change your mind.”

  Catherine stood studying the statue in the lamplit Cella for a long time, as if, in understanding it, she would better understand Thomas and Elijah. On the front of the slab of stone that formed the base of the statue had been painstakingly incised the word DVSIVÆSVS. Scrawled over it in much larger letters, as if gouged by a knife, was the runic inscription the two men were so eager to translate:

  Her arms still felt the imprint of Thomas’s hands. They never touched, she and Tom. His courtship of her, if one could call it that, had been so reserved and decorous—for he was both a gentleman and a creature of the mind—that it had taken her over a year to realize that he was paying her his addresses.

  Not once had he tried to kiss her. If he had, Catherine couldn’t imagine how she would have responded. On the one hand, she’d striven to discourage him ever since she’d sorted out his intentions. On the other, she couldn’t help but be a little curious. At twenty-two, she alone among her girlhood friends had never been kissed.

  The statue was huge and crude, with its tree-trunk limbs and lascivious bulges—especially that between the legs. Dusivæsus’s masculine organ w
as a monument unto itself, so erect that it had been carved with no space whatsoever between it and the statue’s belly.

  Did real men get that hard? she wondered. Did they rise that high? She might never find out, given her disinclination to marry. Not that she had any moral objection to the concept of free love, but she didn’t quite see the point. For men, the appeal was obvious, inasmuch as they derived pleasure through ejaculation. But for women, who by all accounts merely tolerated the act in the interest of procreation or wifely duty, such relations were not only baffling, but fraught with peril. It was she, not he, whose reputation could end up in tatters, she alone who ran the risk of an unwed pregnancy. Why the women who got involved in such relationships didn’t think the matter through to its logical conclusion was beyond Catherine’s scope of comprehension.

  Catherine left the Cella and stood in the outer passageway, looking back toward the way she had come, then in the other direction, leading farther into the cave. It was very dark that way, a tunnel of blackness.

  You will find yourself in inhospitable terrain. Little did Mr. Archer know that Catherine had traversed such terrain before. She’d been exploring caves since she was an adolescent, squeezing herself through crawlways too tight for her male colleagues, climbing shafts they dared not, navigating ledges too narrow for their feet. And caving wasn’t the extent of it. She’d stood on the banks of Kilauea’s lakes of boiling lava, trekked across the Bering Glacier, scaled Mont Blanc armed only with an ice pick, a rope, and her trusty compass.

  She could handle Grotte Cachée.

  Retrieving her notebook and pencil from her gear pouch, she flipped to the first blank page, checked her pocket watch, and wrote:

  23 Aug. 1884, 3:25 pm

  Grotte Cachée, Auvergne, France—

  Lava cave (efflux) in extinct volcano: Extent unknown.

  After consulting her compass, Catherine began a rough map of the cave, lifted a lantern from its hook outside the Cella, and set about tracking the waterway through its disappearances into sinks and its reappearances downstream. It turned out to be a maze cave comprised of a vast network of corridors, tunnels, chasms, and rooms, everything from nooklike alcoves to sprawling galleries festooned with jewel-toned stalactites and stalagmites, rippled shawls of dripstone, and thistly frostwork.

  Catherine was finishing up a sketch of the most breathtaking crystal pool she’d ever seen when she realized she hadn’t noticed the stream in a while. She went back the way she’d come, using her map as a guide, only to find herself at an unfamiliar crossroads where the corridors went off in three different directions. Could she have taken a wrong turn? She did feel a little light-headed, probably from thirst. She took out her watch, which gave the time as 10:04. She hadn’t been down here that long. Lovely; now her watch was broken.

  She consulted her compass, but its needle jittered crazily. Only once had she experienced this type of magnetic declination, when as a child she and her cousins had gone exploring in an abandoned iron mine near her grandparents’ home in eastern Pennsylvania. The needle had fluctuated then, due to the presence of all that iron, but not nearly as wildly as now. The explanation, of course, was that she was standing in the heart of a volcano, albeit one that had gasped its last breath long ago. The lava, as it cooled, must have produced a flow of swirling electrical energy. Most likely this magnetic vortex was also responsible for her malfunctioning watch.

  Catherine picked a corridor and took it, hoping that it would lead her back to where she’d started from, or to some other exit from this labyrinthine cave, but it only led to more corridors. At length, she began to realize that the floor beneath her was pitched upward, like a ramp. She paused, noting that the relative humidity was lower than it had been before, which made sense, given that she appeared to be heading to an upper level of the cave system.

  Tucking her walking staff under her arm, she withdrew her compass, but the needle still spun and whirled. Just looking at it made her feel so dizzy that she wavered on her feet, the walking stick slipping out from beneath her arm. But instead of falling onto the stone floor, it stood straight up.

  Catherine stared at it, thinking, This can’t be happening. I can’t be seeing this. The staff stood poised on its tip, quivering ever so slightly, as if animated by an electrical current. Absurd, of course; wood couldn’t conduct electricity. She reached out and tentatively touched her fingertips to the stick, which popped into her hand with a sound like a gasp. It felt the same as always, just an age-burnished length of hickory, completely inert, utterly normal.

  Nothing in this place is normal. Catherine glanced down at her watch, which now read 8:57. “Oh, blast.” Now something was wrong with her watch. She experienced one of those little mental anomalies where one feels as if what’s happening had happened before. But no; as dependent as she was on her watch, she would remember if it wasn’t working properly.

  A few hundred yards up the meandering, inclined corridor—or it could have been a few hundred feet; Catherine’s queerness of mind was affecting her sense of space—she felt a fresh draft and brightened. Please, please, please be a way out of here. But it turned out to be a shaft in the roof, impossible to negotiate without the proper equipment. It was comforting, though, to see a patch of light, even if it was edging into dusk already, and to hear the tweets and trills of birds in the forest overhead.

  No sooner had she entertained that thought about birds than one flew straight at her from the corridor up ahead, narrowly missing her as it sped past. Catherine laughed breathlessly even as she braced a hand on the wall to keep her balance. That bird was a good sign. Given the unlikelihood that one would enter a cave through a vertical shaft, and given from whence it had flown, chances were good that she’d find a navigable opening up ahead.

  Catherine ventured onward, only to be attacked—for that was what it felt like—by the same little bird, a bluebird, she thought, given its coloring. Were there bluebirds in France? She should know that, after all those happy childhood hours she’d spent poring over Audubon’s Birds of America and other bird guides, but her mind felt as if it were wrapped in cotton wool.

  The bird fluttered past her from behind, turned, and flew at her with such fierce determination that she was forced to duck. She straightened, fighting a wave of vertigo, only to have to sidestep it as it streaked by her yet again, disappearing around a bend in the corridor up ahead. It was almost as if it were harrying her, like a hawk being harried by a smaller bird. She wondered if it had a nestful of chicks somewhere up ahead, to which it viewed her as a threat. It certainly seemed to be trying to keep her away from something.

  She continued on, looking out for a nest in one of the nooks and crannies in the stone wall, only to stop short, gaping in stupefaction, when she rounded the bend. The corridor opened up into a cavernous gallery, the walls of which were lined, floor to ceiling and wall to wall, with books.

  She stepped into the gallery and held her lantern aloft, turning around to take it all in—thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of volumes lined up on wooden shelves looming a good fifteen feet high against the cave walls. An armchair upholstered in age-crackled leather stood in a corner with a frayed needlepoint footstool tucked up against it, a reading lamp on a little marble table off to the side. The only other furniture was a rolling ladder of the type they had in the Cornell library, so that one could reach the volumes stored on the top shelves. The gallery was devoid of decoration save for a large tapestry on the opposite wall, very old—it looked as if it might date from the Renaissance—which hung all the way to the floor.

  Catherine heard an irate little chirrup and looked up to see her avian tormentor sitting on a bank of unlit pendant lamps hanging from a chain strung between two stalactites. Brandishing her walking stick with mock ferocity, she said, “You’ll keep your distance if you know what’s good for you.”

  As if it had understood her, it responded with a battery of screeches and a furious batting of its wings.

  “I’
m bigger than you,” she told it petulantly as she strolled around the strange library, scanning the titles stamped on the spines of the books. “You leave.”

  One wall held various sacred texts, Bibles, and works of comparative religion, philosophy, and theology. There were herbals and pharmacopeias, and innumerable history books going back hundreds of years—including quite a few medieval tomes inked on parchment and bound between leather-and silk-covered boards.

  Another type of book that was represented in significant numbers, Catherine was intrigued to discover, had to do with matters of an amatory nature. These were arranged not by author, as was the rest of the collection, but by date of publication. The earliest were some very old anthologies in Latin of the verses of Sappho and Catullus, as well as a number of volumes that appeared to be of Oriental and Indian origin. The rest had dates on the title pages that fell within the past two hundred years.

  Catherine looked for books written in the languages she was most conversant in, French and English, and thumbed through a few of them: Jean Barrin’s Venus dans la Cloître, John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Giovanni Giacomo Casanova’s Mémoires de J. Casanova de Seingalt. She was surprised to recognize one of the books, an academic treatise by Richard Payne Knight titled A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, from her father’s library at home. Toward the end of the last shelf was a set of English magazines, about a dozen and a half, called The Pearl. The last and most recent volume in this group, Sir Richard Burton’s translation of The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana, had been published a year ago.

  As Catherine returned the Kama Sutra to its slot, she was overtaken by a wave of vertigo that left her clutching at the shelf for support. She looked about the gallery, only to see the rows of books swaying slowly, like waves rising and falling in the ocean, the tapestry fluttering and flapping. She rubbed her eyes with a trembling hand, whispering, “Hold on, Catherine, hold on. You’ve never been the swooning type—don’t start now.”