In the Garden of Sin

by Louisa Burton

  “Goodchild,” I said.

  Lucy gave me a dubious little scowl. “Are you certain?”

  “Quite.” I should know my own uncle’s name.

  “Guy Goodchild, then,” Lucy said. “He’s been locked up in the tower for months, all the while proclaiming his innocence, although the duke says he has unassailable proof against him. It’s probably true, because it’s come to light that he’s secretly …” She lowered her voice, as if to prepare us for something shocking. “… a papist.”

  Bianca and Sibylla, both openly Catholic—they were Italians, after all—exchanged a look of amused forbearance. I kept my expression carefully neutral.

  “A Catholic would naturally harbor sympathies with Spain, would he not?” Lucy said. “And it doesn’t help that it was the Duke of Buckingham himself who accused him. Everyone knows that Goodchild and the duke were close. After King James died, when His Grace was most in need of a friend, ’twas Master Goodchild he turned to. They fenced together, hunted together… Why on earth would the duke accuse his closest companion of being a traitor to the crown if it weren’t so?”

  That was the very question that I had come here to answer.

  Lucy said, “Parliament was dissolved before they could hold an inquest to try Master Goodchild for high treason. They’ll try him when they reconvene, whenever that may be. ’Tis all but certain he’ll be found guilty, and then he’ll be executed as all traitors are, by drawing and quartering.”

  Sibylla shuddered. “Barbari Inglesi,” she said. English barbarians.

  Just as I had feared, Bianca asked Lucy what she meant by drawing and quartering.

  With cheerfully gruesome relish, Lucy described how the condemned man was to be drawn to the place of execution on a hurdle, then hanged by the neck, choking and writhing, until he was almost, but not quite, dead. After being taken down from the gibbet, his belly would be sliced open and his entrails pulled out, to be roasted before his eyes, often along with his privy members. The torment would finally end when he was beheaded, with the remainder of his body being cut into quarters.

  “They take the four quarters and the head, shove them onto stakes, and put them on display as a warning to others,” Lucy said. “They’re left to rot there till the flesh drops from the bones.”

  Bianca sat with a hand pressed to her mouth, ashen and wide-eyed. Sibylla yawned.

  I stared out the window, eyes stinging.

  Guy Goodchild, my mother’s kind, funny, generous younger brother, had been like a father to me all my life. At forty years of age, he had never been married. He had no wife and no children to come to his aid. He only had me. I could not, would not let him end his days in such agony, especially for something he didn’t do. Uncle Guy was fiercely loyal to his king, and to his friends, as well. He’d always spoken of the Duke of Buckingham with the greatest respect and affection. Once or twice, he’d even slipped and referred to him in my hearing as “George.” Their friendship had meant everything to him.

  What could this “unassailable proof” possibly be? Buckingham hadn’t revealed it publicly, nor, apparently, did he mean to do so until the inquest, which would likely be brief and decisive, with the ghastly sentence carried out within days. The inquest would take place when Parliament reconvened, and since there was no way of telling when that would be, it was imperative that I establish my uncle’s innocence as soon as possible. My plan was to do whatever it took to coax Buckingham into revealing his “proof” so that I could challenge it. If that required me to employ my womanly wiles, I would do so. All that mattered, all I cared about anymore, was saving my beloved uncle. I would gladly forfeit my modesty, my reputation, even my virginity if it came to it, in order to rescue him from such a hellish and undeserved death.

  HERE IT IS!” exclaimed Bianca, pointing ahead of us as the carriage emerged from the shadowy woods, its wheels grumbling along a serpentine gravel path now instead of packed dirt. “I see it! Il castello!”

  All four of us jumped up to lean out of the carriage, two on each side, shading our eyes as we peered at the distant castle nestled in the embrace of Grotte Cachée Valley. It was rectangular, with a tower rising from each of the four corners. The sinking sun, hovering just above the craggy, densely forested mountains looming over us, gilded the castle with a saffron luminescence. Having been told that it was constructed of dark volcanic stone, I had expected a bleak and forbidding edifice; on the contrary, from this particular vantage point, it might have been forged from pure gold.

  “È bello,” Bianca murmured.

  “Sì,” I replied. “Molto bello.”

  Even the jaded Sibylla appeared transfixed as she gazed at the building that was to be our home for the next few weeks.

  “I can’t wait to meet Elic and Inigo,” Lucy said as we retreated into the carriage and set about tidying ourselves for our arrival at the château.

  I said, “Will they be our only… the, er, only instructors teaching us how to…”

  “Fuck?” Lucy said, erupting in laughter when I blushed.

  “Sì,” Bianca said. “Constanze, she tell me is just these two.”

  “Don Domenico doesn’t… participate?” I asked.

  Bianca shook her head. “He lie with us at night, but he don’t teach.”

  He would lie with the rest of them, but not with me. I hadn’t yet been summoned to his bed; nor, if he was as good as his word, would I be. Yet I couldn’t help but recall Elle telling him that I could “compensate thee quite adequately for thy largesse, if she be inventive.” I could only assume there were “inventive” ways to kiss and embrace and so forth, yet Vitturi had yet to solicit this sort of thing from me.

  “He may not mean to teach us,” Lucy said with a grin, “but every second spent in his arms is a revelation.”

  The other two emitted lustful little sighs that spoke volumes.

  “Yet he never really seems to look at me,” Sibylla said. “At my body, perhaps, but not at my eyes. He never lets me kiss him, nor does he let me sleep in his bed. When the lovemaking is done, I must depart.”

  Lucy and Bianca said he was the same with them, an accomplished and thoughtful lover, but one who never let his guard down all the way. When they spoke too familiarly to him, he seemed to shrink back into himself.

  “I pity him,” Bianca said, “because he keep his heart to himself. I think he will never love one woman. But he love women, all women, more than any man I ever meet. And he know them. He know what they like, what make them … ecstatico.”

  “He’s that best of all lovers,” Lucy said, “a gentleman, but also a bit of a savage. He’s not afraid to let the beast out of its cage, you know?”

  I nodded, although I didn’t know, not really.

  “’Tis best he won’t be the one to deflower Hannah,” Sibylla said. “He would surely spoil her for other men.”

  “Aye, there’s that,” Lucy said. “The first time he bedded me, after agreeing to take me on as a novice, he did me in the French manner, and upon my honor, he didn’t stop till I came seven times.”

  “The French manner?” I said.

  “He pleasured me with his mouth,” Lucy said.

  “You don’t mean…?” My gaze strayed to her lap.

  They all three burst out laughing as heat flooded my face.

  “Oh, Hannah, your poor little lambkin,” Sibylla said, clearly trying to stifle her laughter. “Surely you’ve heard of Greek lovemaking.”

  “Taking it in the bum?” Lucy added helpfully.

  I gaped at them.

  “Don’t fret, sweeting,” Lucy soothed as she leaned over to take my ice-cold hand. “At Grotte Cachée, you’ll have the chance to master these things, and more. ’Tis why we’ve come here, so that we can practice all manner of novel bedsport with Elic and Inigo, so as to be prepared for any request of our benefactors.”

  So this, then, was what Vitturi had been referring to when he’d spoken of me debuting as a courtesan with my maidenhood intact but well s
chooled in divers erotic pleasures.

  And I’d assumed he’d been talking about kissing.

  Imbecile! I thought, slumping back into my seat in a daze of horror. Pathetical little dunderpate! What have you gotten yourself into?

  “Constanze say we will learn to take great pleasure in these thing,” Bianca said, adding, with a suggestive smile. “She say Elic and Inigo are ispirazione. She say after Grotte Cachée, we never be the same.”

  “Bonjour, mademoiselles!” came a booming voice as the carriage rumbled over a drawbridge, shuddering to a halt before a gatehouse manned by red-coated Swiss Guards. “Good afternoon, ladies! Buon pomeriggio, signore!” The speaker, a bearded giant, swung open the carriage door and gave a deep bow. “I am Serge Pépin, mon seigneur’s administrateur and your servant, ladies. Bienvenue au château. Signor Vitturi tells me your lingua franca is English, oui?”

  Before any of us could respond, he bellowed, “Excellent! We love English here!” Offering me his gigantic hand, he said, “Welcome to Grotte Cachée, mistress. May your stay with us be an adventure.”

  Assembled in the castle’s central courtyard to greet us were some two dozen men and women retained by Signor Vitturi for the purpose of transforming us into courtesans worthy of the most discriminating benefactors. There were Venetian dressmakers, seamstresses, milliners, and shoemakers; French and Venetian ladies’ maids; strapping footmen; dancing, singing, and painting masters; instructors in rhetoric, deportment, harpsichord, and lute; French, Italian, and Latin tutors; even expert card players and sportsmen.

  Vitturi and Elle were not in attendance, although the Marquess of Tarwick and Sir Humphrey Quade, Buckingham’s master of the hunt, lingered about the central fountain drinking tobacco from long clay pipes as they observed this singular reception. I couldn’t keep from stealing glances at the fountain, which was majestic in scale, with a fat column rising from the middle of a round stone pool. Atop this column was a sculpture of a couple united in coitus as a maidservant poured water onto them from a jug.

  The last two people to whom the garrulous Monsieur Pépin introduced us were our “professeurs d’amour,” as the administrateur so tastefully put it: the by-now-legendary Elic and Inigo. I discreetly took their measure as we exchanged bows and curtsies, reflecting that Bianca’s description of their physical allure had been no exaggeration.

  Inigo, who struck me as a Greek or Italian type, had hair that grew in a mop of tight black curls, big dark eyes, and a disarmingly boyish grin. He was attired, for some reason, in the height of ostentatious English-style fashion, his doublet of ivory silk and full, midnight blue breeches both thick with embroidery. No opportunity for embellishment had been neglected; his whisk and garters were edged in lace, a lovelock trailed over one shoulder, his earring dripped tassles, and his shoes, which were embroidered to match his doublet, sported immense silken rosettes.

  Elic was, as Bianca had said, very tall and handsome, with long, honey-blond hair and pale blue eyes. He resembled his sister Elle to an extraordinary degree; one would never confuse them for anything but siblings. His garb, which was far more austere than that of his friend, reminded me of Domenico Vitturi’s in that it was entirely black but for a good deal of linen showing through the open front and armholes of the doublet; he wasn’t even wearing a collar.

  I could barely meet the eyes of either man. If my tutelage proceeded as planned, they would soon be doing unpardonably sinful things to me and with me, things I had never even imagined before that afternoon. I couldn’t claim that I hadn’t been warned. Elle had been most explicit. You will be taught certain practices that may shock you at first, and you will be expected to perform these acts with men who are virtual strangers to you.

  Elic greeted me warmly, but his brow soon furrowed. “Hannah, are you—” He caught himself, making a sheepish face at having addressed me so familiarly. “Pray pardon me. Are you quite well, Mistress Leeds? You seem terribly pale.”

  “I thank you for your concern, monsieur,” I replied, “but I am quite well. I tend toward paleness.”

  He gave me the oddest look of skepticism—half scowl, half smile—as if he were well aware that I wasn’t normally pale, though of course he had no way of knowing that.

  Monsieur Pépin assigned us each a footman to run our errands, as well as a ladies’ maid, whose immediate duty was to show us to our bedchambers, unpack our baggage, acquaint us with the castle, and help us to wash and dress for supper.

  “A feast of Auvergnet delicacies will be served in the great hall at eight of the clock,” Pépin announced, “after which we shall enjoy libations and sweetmeats in the adjacent withdrawing room.”

  As we were filing into the castle, the administrateur took me aside and said, “I understand, Mistress Leeds, that you were asked to bring with you a book of madrigals of your own composition.”

  “Oui, monsieur.”

  “Signor Vitturi asks that you bring it to supper so that he may choose one for you to sing when the company retires to the withdrawing room.”

  I had been anticipating something like this—just one more assault on my already frayed nerves. “They are meant to be sung by more than one voice.”

  The administrateur responded to that with a smile and a Gallic shrug.

  I sighed. “Very well, monsieur. Please tell Signor Vitturi that I shall be happy to oblige him.”

  “Afterward, you and the other novices are invited to accompany Elic and Inigo to the bathhouse for the first of your lessons in, er, les arts de la chambre à coucher.”

  “Oh.” Oh, God, so soon?

  “If you would be so kind to extend this invitation to the other ladies…?”

  “Of course,” I replied, thinking this was no invitation, which one might have the option of declining, but rather a summons.

  “Excellent! Until supper, then, mademoiselle,” he said with a bow.

  “À bientôt, monsieur.”

  H, ISN’T IT LOVELY,” Lucy cooed that evening as we novices and our two professeurs d’amour followed a pair of footmen with torches around a bend in the gravel footpath leading from the castle to the base of the tallest mountain overlooking the valley—an extinct volcano, we’d been told. Built onto its side was a colonnaded structure of white marble that glowed from within with a wavering luminescence.

  Sibylla, her hand curled around Elic’s right arm—I held his left in a rigid grip—said, “It looks like something the Romans might have built.”

  “It is, actually,” replied Inigo, who had his arms around the waists of the other two novices. He’d told us he relished the opportunity to practice his favorite language, English, which he spoke, curiously enough, with a British rather than French accent. “There was a Roman villa here for about three hundred years following the Gallic Wars, a sort of pleasure retreat for an important family. They built this bathhouse to take advantage of a cave stream they felt had mystical qualities.”

  “Did it?” Lucy asked. “Does it?”

  “Why don’t we all have a dip,” he suggested, “and ye can decide for yourselves.”

  Of course, I thought. “A dip” meant disrobing, and this was, after all, to be our first lesson in “the arts of the bedchamber.”

  The footmen stood to either side of the bathhouse’s arched doorway as we filed inside, to murmurs of awe from the novices, for the golden radiance was the product of scores of candles, a hundred or more, their flames trembling all around us. Some sat on low wrought-iron tables, but most had melted in place on little natural shelves and depressions on the rear wall, which of course was part of the mountain to which the bathhouse was appended.

  Colorful pillows were scattered all about, and there were trays of brandywine and sack near the square marble pool, from which a haze of steam rose into the cool night air. A large section of ceiling over the pool was open to the night sky, the roof’s remaining perimeter being buttressed by four columns, one near each corner of the pool.

  Adjoining each column was a li
fe-size marble statue of a nude couple, which I took at first for a god and goddess— Venus and Adonis, perhaps, given the amorous poses. But upon closer inspection, I saw that the poses weren’t so much amorous as lascivious, being representations of explicit sexual union, and not just of normal intercourse. Two depicted what I now knew to be lovemaking in the French manner as described to me by the other novices that afternoon, the male being the recipient in one instance and the female in the other.

  And the couple—it was the same man and woman in each sculpture—was clearly not meant to portray Venus and Adonis, nor any of the pantheon of Roman deities. The female was voluptuous but otherwise unremarkable; however, the male had stubby horns and slightly pointed ears showing through his head of short, coiled curls, and a slender tail with a little tuft of hair on the end. He also possessed a colossal male appendage that was depicted in the erect state, something I’d never before seen in a work of art—or anywhere else, of course. The organ in question reared up in the air, which I assumed at the time to be, along with its size, a comically absurd exaggeration meant to convey outsized erotic appetites. After all, this was no god but a satyr.

  Looking away from the statues so as to collect myself, I noticed an irregular, doorlike opening in the wall of mossy rock, and ventured closer to peer into it.

  “’Tis our cave,” Elic said when he saw what had drawn my attention, “the hidden grotto for which our little valley was named.”

  He advised me not to venture too far into this grotte cachée, should I choose to explore it during my stay, no farther than the cressets illuminating the first quarter mile or so. “Not only does it get deucedly dark in there,” he said, “and labyrinthine as well, but some people experience a certain derangement of the senses within its walls, what we call le magnétisme hallucinatoire. I’m told it can oft be felt here in the bathhouse as well. Occasionally a visitor will feel it in the castle itself, because it was constructed of volcanic stone from this mountain, but most only feel it here and in the cave.”