House of Dark Delights

by Louisa Burton

  “Not me. The Gift prevents their powers from working with me.”

  Archer hadn’t known this. “Are you quite sure?”

  Unexpectedly, Morel smiled. “Did I ever tell you about the time I woke up with Lili on top of me?”

  “Good Lord,” Archer exclaimed through an incredulous chuckle. “You’re joking, surely.”

  “I was seventeen—it was right before you came here. She was naked, of course, and whispering one of her mashmashus, the one that was supposed to keep me from being able to move while she…did what she was born to do. It didn’t take, though. I felt a little weak, but I could still move. I said, ‘Lili, what the hell are you doing?’ She said she wanted to give me something to ‘raise the veil of sorrow from those beautiful eyes,’ because, of course, I’d just lost my parents and your father, who’d been like an uncle to me. For that matter, Lili had been like an aunt. It just felt…I don’t know. Vaguely incestuous.”

  Archer glanced across the courtyard to the northeast tower window, but Elic and Lili were no longer there. Picturing the Babylonian enchantress in his mind, Archer said dryly, “I think I might have managed to overcome those misgivings had I been in your place.”

  Morel smiled to acknowledge the point. “She’s magnificent, to be sure, but when you’ve known someone since infancy…” He shook his head. “In any event, their magic is apparently ineffective with druidic types. Were Elic—or rather, Elle—to attempt to, er, extract my DNA, I would be fully aware, and fully appalled, the entire time. And then, of course, I’d have to deal with the knowledge that Elic was going to be seeking out my wife right after leaving me. Can’t you see how I might find the situation a bit sordid?”

  The purr of an automobile engine drew their attention to the window across the room that looked down onto the front of the chateau. Larsson pulled up to the drawbridge in his steely Lamborghini Roadster, jumped out, and loaded their bags into the boot. Raising the passenger-side gullwing door for Miss Armstrong, he gave her another quick kiss as he helped her into the sleek little car.

  “Mon seigneur,” Archer said as the couple drove away, “if you would just consider what I’ve proposed, keep it in your mind as an option…”

  “Non. It’s unthinkable. Répugnant. Find me a druidess.” Morel turned back to the window, his arms folded, his expression grim. “Make it a priority.”

  Archer knew when he was being dismissed. He crossed to the doorway, paused, and looked back.

  Morel stood at the window, lost in his thoughts as he watched the Lamborghini grow smaller and smaller on the gravel road leading away from their dark and enchanted little valley.

  Read on for a sneak peek at

  BOUND IN MOONLIGHT

  The next scintillating and erotic novel

  by

  Louisa Burton

  Coming from Bantam in Fall ’07

  Bound in Moonlight

  Coming Fall ’07

  One

  London

  June 19, 1817

  HAVE YOU any objection to being raped?” inquired the silver-haired, nattily attired Sir Charles Upcott as he dipped his quill in a cut-glass inkwell.

  Caroline Keating stared at Sir Charles, barrister and baronet, across the marble and ormolu desk that was the focal point of his imposing Regent Street office. Taken aback by the query—indeed, deeply dismayed by it—she said, “Is it not in the nature of…such an act for the lady to object?”

  Sir Charles glanced at her over the top of his spectacles and wrote something on a sheet of foolscap. “Should you be chosen to go on the block, the gentleman who purchases you—your master—may subject you to any number of secret proclivities that he would be loath to reveal to his wife or mistress. He may have wondered, for example, how it would feel to force himself on an unwilling female—something no civilized man would do in the normal course of events, even to a lady of limited virtue. But even civilized men have their dark fancies. As I explained at the outset, Miss Keating, your master may enjoy you in any manner he sees fit during the seven days in which you are his property, short of causing injury so severe as to require the attention of a physician—although there will, of course, be a physician on hand at all times.”

  “But if I am, indeed, forbidden to resist my…the man who…buys me, how could he force himself on me? He would have no cause to do so—indeed, no opportunity—were I to submit willingly every time he…requires it.”

  Without looking up from his notetaking, Sir Charles said, “He may order you to resist. Or he may employ such brutishness in the act, or encourage it on the part of others, that you will naturally resist.”

  “Others?” Caroline asked in a thin voice.

  “He will be at liberty to lend you out, as it were, to another gentleman at the chateau, or to several at once if the fancy strikes him. A slave must be prepared for any contingency.”

  “But did you not say that I would be forbidden to…give myself to any man but my master during the week of my servitude?”

  Looking up with a sigh, Sir Charles said, “Unless it is at the behest of your master. Should he command it, you must do it, unquestioningly and without reluctance. It is really a very elegantly simple arrangement.”

  “But why would he encourage someone else to…?”

  “Usually it is so that he can watch.”

  Watch? Caroline blinked at the barrister. Violent ravishment…by more than one man! Good Lord, what else did she not know about the “secret proclivities” of ostensibly civilized gentlemen?

  Sir Charles removed his spectacles and sat back in his chair with a squeak of leather, studying her with quiet speculation. No doubt he was pondering the wisdom of selecting such a naive creature as she to go under the hammer two weeks hence at some mysterious, isolated chateau in France.

  “Miss Keating,” he said, “I am required by the party I represent in this matter to ask you these questions in order to ensure your aptitude for sexual enslavement. I must warn you, however, that if you offer even one negative response, you will not be chosen—and as I’m sure Lord Rexton explained when he recruited you last night, there is a great deal of money at stake, thousands of pounds.”

  Caroline turned to gaze through a window curtained in whispery, sun-hazed silk billowing lazily on a warm breeze. This time yesterday morning, she’d been standing in a crush of onlookers on the north bank of the Thames watching the opening ceremony of Waterloo Bridge and reflecting that she didn’t even have the halfpence they were charging for a toll.

  Sir Charles allowed her a few moments to contemplate the magnitude of her plight, then put his spectacles back on. “As to the question of rape?”

  “All right,” she said on a sigh, recalling the deal she’d struck yesterday evening with Bram Hugget, the street sweeper who’d been begging for a kiss for weeks.

  “Just one,” she’d said, “but it will cost you a halfpenny.”

  He’d scratched his prickly boulder of a jaw. “Only if I get to feel them diddies, too.”

  She’d clenched her teeth against the urge to weep and scream. A halfpenny to die, quite a bargain, really; but it was a halfpenny she didn’t have. “Over my clothes, not under. You’ve a minute to be done with it.”

  “Miss Keating?”

  She looked toward Sir Charles, regarding her expectantly, his quill poised over the inkwell.

  “Fellatio?” he said.

  She frowned in bewilderment.

  “Oral copulation. Are you willing to perform it?”

  “Oral? Do you mean kissing?”

  Sir Charles withdrew from a drawer a leather folio, which he untied and opened, revealing a stack of pictures. He sorted through them, chose one, and handed it across the desk to Caroline.

  It was a tinted engraving executed in loose, jaunty pen-strokes of a man, fully clothed, and two plump, naked women. The man lay on a bed with his feet on the floor and his breeches wide open, kneading the breasts of a woman who was squatting on his face. The other woman knelt betwee
n his outspread legs, sucking on his erect organ as she fondled both him and herself.

  Caroline stared in unblinking shock.

  “Lord Rexton gave me to believe that you were a lady of some experience in these matters,” said Sir Charles. “When he recruited you yesterday, did you not tell him that you’d been ruined through a liaison with a soldier?”

  Finding her voice, she said, “It was a very brief liaison.”

  “How brief?”

  “One night.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Somewhat over two years.”

  Frowning, he dipped his quill and noted this information.

  Thousands of pounds.

  “My…my experience is limited,” she said, sitting forward, “but I assure you, Sir Charles, I will not balk at—”

  “Yes or no on performing fellatio, Miss Keating?”

  She swallowed hard as she returned the picture to the barrister. “Yes.”

  “Are you willing to have relations in the Greek manner?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I do not know what that is.”

  With an expression of weary forbearance, Sir Charles chose another engraving from the stack and handed it to her.

  A man and a woman, both naked, were coupling on an elaborately draped bed, she with her bottom raised high, he taking her from behind. Caroline had to study the picture for a moment before she realized that he was penetrating her in an aperture other than that intended by nature.

  “Oh,” she said quietly.

  Sir Charles regarded her expectantly over his spectacles.

  “Is it painful?” she asked.

  “That depends largely on whether the gentleman wishes it to be so. Yes or no?”

  She handed the picture back, nodding listlessly.

  “Are you willing to suffer such physical punishments as spanking, birching, and caning?”

  She hesitated, wondering with a surge of dread what punishment had to do with copulation.

  He produced another engraving, this one depicting a terrified-looking young woman lying facedown astride a narrow bench, her petticoats canted up to reveal a bare posterior ribboned with welts. To the side of her stood a dapper, maliciously grinning gentleman stroking his exposed penis with one hand as he raised a length of bamboo with the other.

  Caroline’s stomach clenched as she fought the urge to bolt up out of the chair and flee the room.

  “Well?” prompted Sir Charles.

  She thrust the picture back at him, bombarded by the memory of all those beatings her father had dealt to her and her brothers, hundreds of them over the years, for infractions as trivial as forgetting a line of a psalm. Hanging in the little schoolroom on the third floor of the castlelike rectory in which she’d been reared were a broad leather strap, a birch cane, and a perforated wooden paddle, all well-worn. She couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t mottled with bruises from his sudden, impulsive batterings, mostly on her back, sometimes her chest or legs—but never on the face or arms, where they might have been visible to the Reverend Mr. Keating’s parishioners. He was cruel and pitiless and probably half-mad from the French disease, her brothers whispered, acquired during his reckless youth—but he was far from stupid. Caroline had promised herself, when Aubrey rescued her from the dismal gaol that was her family home, that no man would ever strike her again.

  “Miss Keating? Yes or no?”

  The air left her lungs on a whispered, “Yes.”

  “I beg your—”

  “Yes,” she said, feeling perilously close to tears. “Yes. Yes. Yes to all of it.”

  “Still, I am required to elicit clear and unequivocal consent to each act, lest you protest later that you weren’t adequately warned as to what might be done to you. You are willing to be bound, gagged, blindfolded…?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you willing to perform sexual acts before an audience?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you willing to engage in sexual activity with another female?”

  Dear God. “Yes.”

  “Do you achieve orgasm, Miss Keating?”

  Heat swept in a wave from her throat up to her hairline.

  “I shall take that for an affirmative,” said the barrister as his pen scratched over the foolscap. “Your age?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Height?”

  “Five feet, six inches.”

  “Weight?”

  “I couldn’t say with certainty anymore.”

  “Eight stone at the most,” he muttered as he wrote. “Complexion pallid but unblemished. Hair golden blond.”

  “I was wondering, about my hair…”

  “Mm?”

  “I thought I might henna it, if that would be permissible.”

  “In order to help disguise your appearance? Some of the ladies do change their hair color and employ cosmetics for that purpose. I must say, it would be a shame in your case, but you are within your rights to do so if you wish.”

  “Thank you.”

  Setting his pen aside, Sir Charles slid off his spectacles and scrutinized her thoughtfully.

  “Will I do?” she asked in as even a voice as she could muster.

  “It is a pity you’ve been deflowered, Miss Keating. An intact maidenhead is highly prized in a slave. Virgins tend to command the highest prices, debauchees nearly so—the innocent on the one hand and the unabashedly wanton on the other. You, unfortunately, are neither. But then, great beauty is also a factor of some consequence, which will serve to your advantage. And you are, if not entirely untarnished, nearly so, with a guileless manner of the type that certain gentlemen find irresistible.”

  He closed the folio of lewd pictures and returned it to the drawer, then took out what looked like a visiting card and handed it to her. Engraved on heavy, cream stock were the name and address of a Dr. Humphrey Coates.

  Sir Charles said, “You will report to Dr. Coates tomorrow afternoon at five o’clock for a physical examination. This is to ensure that you are of an adequate constitution to endure the rigors of Slave Week, to pronounce you free of disease, and assuming you pass inspection, to provide you with a means to prevent you from getting with child. Pending a positive report—”

  “That’s possible?” An unwed pregnancy had been one of the things Caroline had lain awake all night fretting about. “To…have relations without conceiving?”

  “There are two devices that serve this purpose, a sheath of sheep-gut for the gentleman and a vinegar-soaked sponge for the lady. As it wouldn’t do to inconvenience your master, you will be given a sponge, which you will be required to wear internally at all times, removing it only to clean and replace. Should you neglect this precaution and find yourself afterward in a delicate condition, it will be on your head entirely. By the terms of your contract, you will be forbidden to communicate with your master or to name him as the father of your child.”

  “Contract?”

  “As I had been explaining,” he continued wearily, “pending a positive report by Dr. Coates, I am willing to approve you to go on the block. In that eventuality, you will return here to execute a binding legal contract setting forth the rules by which you must abide during your week of enslavement. Primary among them is the requirement of utter and absolute obedience to your master, to whose every command you must submit without hesitation or protest of any kind. Should you fail in this even once, you will be sent home with nothing but your traveling expenses.” Sir Charles recited this information in a disinterested drone, as if he’d done so scores of times, which she supposed he had.

  “In addition,” he continued, “you are obligated to secrecy about the location of the chateau to which you will be taken, as well as the identities of the participants, master and slave alike. Should you, at some future point, find yourself in the company of someone whom you recognize from the chateau, you are to conduct yourself as though you’d never met. The contract that the gentlemen sign stipulates the same requirement. The punishment for viol
ating this crucial confidentiality, for the gentlemen as well as for the slaves, is complete social ruin.”

  Caroline said, “How can you…?”

  “Certain exceptionally grievous sins, should they become public knowledge, will make a pariah of even the most revered member of the ton. Such sins will be invented, if necessary.”

  Sir Charles gave her two other cards, one for a dressmaker who would supply her with the required frocks and underpinnings, and the other for a master swordsmith. “He will measure you for a collar, a pair of wrist cuffs, and a pair of ankle cuffs,” the barrister explained. “These he fashions of gilded steel, with rings for the attachment of chains and leashes.”

  Caroline stared at Sir Charles.

  He held her gaze steadily until she looked away, letting out a tremulous breath.

  “You will be contacted regarding transportation arrangements to Calais and from there to the chateau.” Recharging his quill with ink, he said, “Where do you live, Miss Keating?”

  “St. Giles,” she said, noting how his eyebrows quirked at the mention of the notorious slum. “I share a bed in a lodging house on Denmark Street and Charing Cross Road. But…”

  “Yes?”

  “When I left yesterday evening, I told my landlady I wouldn’t be returning, and I…I don’t know if she’ll let me back in, because it’s tuppence a night, and I haven’t been able to pay it in some time.”

  With a little grunt of acknowledgment, Sir Charles wrote anote on a sheet of writing paper, folded it up around four gold sovereigns, and sealed it with wax. “Give this to Mr. Peckham at the St. James’s Royal Hotel on St. James’s Street. The payment covers your bed and board for two weeks. See that you eat your fill, and then some—your thinness detracts from your beauty. Eat beef and mutton washed down with plenty of good, rich burgundy. It will put some much-needed color in your cheeks.”

  She murmured her thanks as she took the note, heavy with the weight of the coins. It was more money than she’d had in her hands—more than she’d seen—in a very long time. With any luck, she would see a great deal more at the conclusion of her one-week “enslavement.”

  One week of appalling degradation. If she could stomach it, she would be free forever from the ever-worsening squalor and hunger and hopelessness in which she’d been mired these two years past. She could buy a little cottage in some village in the Cotswolds, where no one had ever heard of Caroline Keating and her tattered reputation. Perhaps she could even open the school for girls that had been her dream since childhood.