Hanging on the wall over the chairs was a massive beveled mirror in a gilt frame, reflecting the upper body of Domenico Vitturi, in his black doublet but without his overgown. He was standing with a pair of upraised legs in embroidered stockings and red-heeled pink slippers propped on his shoulders, from which I surmised that Elle must have been lying before him on a table. All I could see of her aside from her legs was a great white lather of rucked-up petticoats.
Vitturi was leaning over her, his face obscured by hair that swayed with his movements, which were abrupt, as if he were trying to push some immovable object using his entire body. But of course I realized what he was really doing—what they were doing. I was innocent, but I was not dimwitted.
I stopped breathing.
“If not Hannah, then whom?” Elle asked.
“Merda,” he rasped. “No one.”
“No one?” Elle said through a chuckle. “Thou lieth with me, Domenico, but methinks thy mind lieth otherwhere.”
“Cease thy prating, woman, lest my cockstand grow as limp as thy wit.”
Elle laughed.
Vitturi paused and straightened up, pushing his hair, which looked to be damp with sweat, behind his ears. “Vixen,” he said with a little shake of his head—but he was smiling in an amused and indulgent way that took me completely by surprise, given how relatively aloof he had been with me.
The side of his face that was visible in the reflection was the uninjured left side, sheened with sweat. Without the wounds to distract me, I was awed by how striking he was, with those huge, dark eyes and distinctively Italian aquiline nose. What a shame, I thought, for such beauty to have been compromised. It occurred to me that a man’s wounds ofttimes came to define him, even to himself. I wondered what sort of man Domenico Vitturi saw when he looked in the mirror.
Elle let out a kittenish little mew of pleasure as he resumed his thrusting. I backed silently away from the door and returned to the entry hall. When the footman reappeared with my gloves, I was standing exactly where he had left me.
AVE YE SEEN HOW Master Knowles looks at me?” Lucy Swanton asked her fellow novice courtesans as our carriage jounced along a rutted track through the woods enveloping Grotte Cachée Valley.
Jonas Knowles, Esquire, courtier and companion to the Duke of Buckingham, was the youngest of the seven noblemen accompanying Domenico Vitturi on this trip to Grotte Cachée. The other three novices, with whom I had shared the canopied cart during the ten-day journey from the Channel, could not stop whispering about Master Knowles, who was the fair-haired, charming second son of a baron. Lucy seemed particularly enraptured.
Saucily plump, with ruddy cheeks and gleaming silver-blond hair, Lucy was the most vivacious and chatty of the four of us, what my mother would have called a trittle-trattle. She was married to a Cambridgeshire gentleman farmer who was no gentleman, and from whom she’d fled after he’d throttled her almost to death for having paid a call on the rector’s wife without his leave. She’d taken refuge in the home of a female cousin in London, a mistress of one of the king’s ministers. When the cousin told her about Domenico Vitturi, she’d leapt at the opportunity to move far away from England and remake herself into a woman of independent means.
Sitting next to her on the leather seat facing mine was Bianca Gabrieli, a delicate beauty with a fair complexion and light brown hair. Bianca was the widow of a Venetian glass merchant who had been rich as Croesus when she’d wed him but who had gambled it all away in short order. The previous winter, he was knifed to death over a debt he couldn’t repay, leaving her in desperate straits.
Sharing my seat was the darkly exotic Sibylla Fierro from Florence, whose worldliness, elegance, and rigorous convent education were the envy of the rest of us. The impoverished orphaned daughter of a patrician, Sibylla had chosen courtisanerie over the nunnery.
“Master Knowles looks at all of us that way,” Sibylla told Lucy. Her English, the only language we all had in common, was remarkably polished. “’Tis Elle he truly lusts after, and who can blame him?”
“Has he bed her yet?” asked Bianca, whose Italian accent was much stronger than Sibylla’s.
“Nay, nor will he,” I said. “She doesn’t fancy him. She told me so.”
“Then she be mad,” Lucy said. “I’d lift my skirts for him in a heartbeat if Don Domenico would allow it.”
Don Domenico’s companions were free to avail themselves of the intimate company of the novices, myself excluded, provided they first obtain his consent. The only man who had been denied this privilege was Jonas Knowles. According to Elle, the Duke of Buckingham considered it unseemly for his principal retainer, who had a wife and child back home, “to be seen skulking from bed to bed like some goatish runagate.”
On the seventh morning of our travels, when Lucy had talked of being summoned to Don Domenico’s bed the previous evening, I’d felt an absurd little twinge of envy despite my resolve to remain a virgin. The memory of him taking Elle in the dining parlor of York House, his driving thrusts, his grunts of effort, his sweat—Thou art thinking of her—had only grown more vivid with time. I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to lie with such a man, to transform him with my powers of seduction from an urbane and self-possessed gentleman into a rutting beast, to feel his sex moving in and out of me, rubbing me from inside, my heart hammering faster, faster…
I had even dreamed about it at the inn we stayed in the night before, only to awaken with a start, hips squeezing as I lay facedown in my little bed, the flesh between my legs hot and swollen. The urge to press down hard, to grind my aching sex against the prickly straw mattress, was almost overwhelming.
The dream had likely been inspired by the squeaking bed ropes and rhythmic thumping coming from the bedchamber next to mine, which housed the gray-haired but brawny Marquess of Tarwick. A female voice, muffled but recognizable as Bianca’s, cried “Sì! Sì! Dio santo!”
“Like it good and hard, do you?” Tarwick rasped as the squeaking speeded up.
“Aye, my lord, come una lancia. Stab it in. Sì… Sì…”
I lay there with my eyes wide and my ear trained, grudgingly fascinated by their raucous coupling.
“By the rood, you’re good at this,” the marquess said, “bloody good. Can I fetch in you?”
“Sì, I want you to. I want to feel the… how you say? Spitting? Spurting, that is the word.”
The moans from the next room took on an urgent quality. Wedging a hand beneath me, I found my night rail soaked through at the juncture of my thighs, a phenomenon I had experienced occasionally, but never to such a degree. I stroked my sex through the saturated linen, inciting a sharp tremor of pleasure that seemed to emanate from a little knot of flesh at the apex of the cleft. It was the first time I had ever experienced such a sensation, having never touched myself there except when bathing. Drunk with arousal, I reflexively pressed my mons against my hand. There came a second tremor and an urge to thrust that was so powerful, I shook with the effort of resisting it. I felt as if I were on the threshold of a crisis of pleasure that might burst my heart were I to surrender to it.
“Oh Dio! Oh… oh…” Bianca let out a series of sharp cries that alarmed me for a moment until they devolved into breathless chuckles and I realized she was reacting to pleasure, not pain.
“Oh, God,” the marquess groaned as the squeaks and thumps grew louder, faster. “I’m coming. Ohhh…” The squeaks slowed as he let out a long, low groan.
I knew I should pull my hand out from under me, put the pillow over my head, and try to get back to sleep. I was no voluptuary enslaved by base physical urges but a scholar, a thinker, a creature of the mind.
But not only did I leave the hand there, I pressed my finger into the slit through the drenched linen, brushing the little knot, which was hard as a pearl now. That light, fleeting touch triggered a contraction in my sex that sucked the very breath from my lungs. There followed a flurry of spasms so intense that I had to bite my lip—hard—to k
eep from crying out as I convulsed with a pleasure I had never known before.
As I lay there afterward, catching my breath and marveling at what had just transpired, I reflected that I might have a great deal more to learn about carnal matters than I had previously thought. That realization only magnified my unease as our procession of carts, carriages, and horsemen drew ever nearer to Château de la Grotte Cachée.
Lucy was complaining about Don Domenico’s “interfering in our love lives like some meddlesome old auntie.”
“Love lives?” Sibylla said. “These are all wedded men, Lucy, most with mistresses as well. ’Tisn’t love they want from us.”
“Is he a wedded man?” I asked. “Don Domenico?” The possibility had not occurred to me.
“Constanze say he have no wife and no mistress,” Bianca told them. Constanze was her older sister, who had had been among Vitturi’s first group of neophyte courtesans seven years ago and was now one of the most sought-after courtesans in Venice. “She say once he have many lovers, and a very beautiful mistress, but now he only bed his cortigianas. She say when he is young, the mothers of all the young ladies want him for marry the daughters, for he have much wealth, and fine family, and he write the poesie di amore. But then a bad thing happen …”
Besides already being a poet of some renown in his early twenties, Bianca told us, Vitturi had been an officer in Venice’s vaunted Navy. Nine years ago, during a battle in the Adriatic against “the Uscocchi,” whom I took to be pirates of some sort, he received such grievous injuries that he was no longer able to serve in the Navy.
Upon seeing him newly wounded, his mistress was so horror-struck that she vomited and cast him aside. He sought out Galiana Solsa, the wealthiest and most elegant courtesan in Venice, who had favored him in the past, but she hurled stinging insults at him and ordered him out of her palazzo. When he lingered, thinking he might sway her with words, for he’d always been a silver-tongued charmer, Galiana had him dragged into the street and savagely beaten by three brawny footmen.
“She is a demonio, that one,” Bianca said. “Una striga.”
“Striga?” That was a word my Italian tutor had never taught me.
“A thing of great evil, a devil of the night. Galiana Solsa hunt the peoples in the dark, like the owl hunt the mice, and she drink their blood. She stay young very many years. Her… how you say, preda, those she feed upon, they vanish in the night. Still, the men, they cannot turn from her, so great is her beauty. She have a strange power over them.”
“Bianca, you superstitious little plebian,” Sibylla said. “You don’t really believe that.”
“Do you defy the Church?” Bianca demanded. “The Folleti, the incubus and the succubus, they visit the peoples at night, when they sleep, and violate them. Some of these incubi, the ones called dusii, they can change from man to woman, and back again. Is how they steal the seed from the mens and—”
Sibylla snickered.
“The fathers of the Church tell us these thing,” Bianca said heatedly. “’Tis not for us to question.”
Like Sibylla, I was far too scholarly to credit such tales, but I kept my mouth shut so as not to vex Bianca.
Addressing Lucy and me, but not the smirking Sibylla, Bianca said in a low, mysterious tone, “Constanze, she tell me there is much strange things at Grotte Cachée. There is a cave which make you feel drunk inside, and things happen there that cannot happen. And by this cave, there is a pool of water that is bewitched. What others in this water feel, you will feel. Oh, and she tell me one day she hear the old lord of Grotte Cachée, Seigneur des Ombres, speak an incantesimo. I do not know the Inglese word for this.”
“An incantation?” I said. “A magic spell?”
“Sì, sì, magico. And she say she think is incubi at Grotte Cachée, but she say they don’t hurt the peoples. There is a hermit who live in a cave who can take the shape of animals, or even make himself invisibile. And she say Inigo and Elic, the men who will teach us the arts of love, be no ordinary men. Inigo, the dark one with the beautiful smile, he have il cacchio di uno stallion. She say is like a pillar of stone. And Elic, this one is very tall and handsome, with golden hair, like Apollo, and he can take the womens again and again—ten, twenty times, with no rest between orgasmi.”
“È ridicolo,” Sibylla muttered as she gazed out at the passing trees.
Lucy cut off Bianca’s rebuttal with a gasp. “He’s coming!” she said, craning her neck to look behind them through the tied-back curtains draping their carriage. “He’s riding toward us up the path.”
“Don Domenico?” I asked.
“Nay. Well, aye,” she whispered as she pinched her cheeks and patted her hair. “He’s coming, too, and some of the others, but I meant Master Knowles.”
“What ho, ladies,” Jonas Knowles said as he walked his horse past the carriage, sweeping off his wide-brimmed, luxuriously plumed beaver hat with a low bow.
Lucy made sheep eyes at him as she returned his smile. “Master Knowles.”
Next came Elle, riding astride in a billowing blue satin skirt that was split in front, revealing matching breeches and hose— a shameless style of dress unique to Venetian courtesans, which the Frenchwoman had adopted as a riding costume. She wore a mannish hat very much like that of the English courtiers, only perhaps with a few more plumes. The effect was actually quite fetching.
When Elle told us that we were but a few miles from Château de la Grotte Cachée, all four of us raised a cheer. Ten days in that jolting, rattling carriage had left us woozy and aching. Like the other noblemen, Buckingham usually rode, surrounded by his yeomen and retainers, although he did have a very elegant carriage in which he retired from time to time, often with Knowles for company. As Buckingham’s gentleman of the bedchamber, it was Knowles’s responsibility to keep the duke well dressed, well fed, and supplied with devoted and genial companionship.
Domenico Vitturi, who rode by next, not only greeted us warmly, but touched his heart as he bowed, a courtly gesture of which I had grown quite fond. His traveling costume consisted of a black doublet, breeches, and hose, with a buff leathern jerkin and tall boots folded over at the tops. In contrast to the Englishmen, he wore a flat, brimless, Venetian-style felt cap. To my mind, his attire—the cap in particular—bespoke a restraint and self-assurance that was more attractive by far than the peacock ostentation of his companions.
“We few shall be riding ahead to the château to ensure that all is in readiness,” he said, meeting every pair of eyes in the carriage save for mine. He often appeared to be subtly dodging my gaze, just as I dodged his. I wasn’t quite sure why this was. He didn’t seem to harbor any mislike toward me, and I certainly felt no animosity toward him. In fact, the more I saw of him—of his gallantry toward the novices, his easy camaraderie with his fellows, and the evenhandedness and quiet authority he displayed with his staff—the more I admired him.
Bringing up the rear of the little group on horseback were two stalwart yeomen of the Duke of Buckingham, followed by the duke himself, who was widely regarded as the handsomest man in England. Dressed in the dashing cavalier style favored by King Charles, he had wavy chestnut hair, a pointed beard, and deep blue eyes that were uncommonly striking. Yet for all his beauty, and his reputation for charm and wit—he was the courtier’s courtier, after all—he rarely smiled, or engaged in good-natured banter with the other gentlemen. Indeed, there was an aura of melancholy about the man that evoked my pity despite his aloofness and his baffling accusation against my uncle.
“Your Grace,” Lucy said to him with a little duck of her head.
The duke did not so much as glance in our direction as he rode past the carriage. Like Knowles, he was a married man with a child. This was the only reason I could fathom for his attitude of studied indifference toward the wanton beauties with whom he was traveling—that and perhaps his glum spirits. Buckingham’s purpose in visiting Grotte Cachée was primarily to hunt wild boars in the woods and moorlands surround
ing the castle, which were said to be teeming with them. French boars, Elle had told me, were known to be far superior to their English counterparts.
The duke was surrounded at all times by burly attendants charged with preventing anyone from getting close to him without his leave. Several times I had tried to speak to him, only to be rebuffed in no uncertain terms. Yeomen even stood guard over him while he slept. I prayed that he would be more approachable once we were at Grotte Cachée. If not, I would have to concoct some ruse to breach the fortification he had established around himself.
When he was just out of earshot, Lucy lowered her voice and leaned forward. “He thinks he’s Lord God himself, being the favorite of two kings, first James and now Charles, but he very nearly got yanked down off that high horse of his after that wretched business with Spain.” After half a year spent living with a mistress to a member of the king’s inner circle, Lucy knew all there was to know about English court intrigue.
“What business with Spain?” Bianca asked.
“The duke headed up an absolutely disastrous naval expedition in October,” Lucy said. “He tried to capture Cádiz and botched that up, so he mounted an assault on a fleet of Spanish galleons full of silver from the New World—only they took a different route than they were supposed to, and slipped the noose. It was a humiliating defeat for us. All fingers pointed to His Grace as a bungler, and there was a movement to impeach him as chief minister, but King Charles thinks he walks on water, so last month he disbanded Parliament.”
“Disbanded…?” Bianca said with a little shake of her head. “My English…”
“Told them to pack up and go home, and that he’d call them together again when he felt like it—when he needs money again, most likely. Meanwhile, the duke has been saying he didn’t bungle anything, that the mission only failed because Spain was warned about it in advance by a traitor, an English emissary to the Spanish court named Guy Goodbody.”
In the Garden of Sin Page 3