by Лорен Уиллиг
Penelope looked off across the room, over the long row of couples circling in unison as they performed the final figure of the dance. In profile, her expression was carefully blank.
“The alcoves were all occupied, so we went upstairs instead.”
The violinist drew his bow across the strings one final time. Throughout the room, gentlemen bowed and ladies curtsied to signify the end of the dance. With her back to the dance floor, Penelope failed to notice.
“I was with Freddy Staines,” finished Penelope, in a tone deliberately designed to provoke. “In his room.”
The words echoed with unnatural loudness down the suddenly silent room.
Henrietta’s face went ashen.
Like an animal scenting fire, Penelope’s eyes darted from side to side. Beneath Penelope’s still, straight posture, Charlotte could sense the panic coming off her in waves, the frozen panic of a trapped animal that knows it has nowhere left to run.
“You mean Fanny’s room?” Charlotte said very loudly. “Fanny Stillworth?”
There was no such person as Fanny Stillworth, but it was the best she could think of under the circumstances.
As if realizing their gaffe, the musicians struck up again, plunging into a rather frenetic quadrille, but almost no one was dancing. They were all too busy watching the dreadful drama unfolding at the far end of the gallery, where one of their own had just willfully flung herself outside the bounds of polite society. Halfway down the room, Penelope’s mother looked ready to imitate some of the less attractive sorts of Greek gods and devour her own young.
“You heard what I said.” Penelope’s face was a tragic mask, like the bust of Medea in the library, carved into lines of bitter satisfaction. She looked like a queen on the scaffold, staring down the peasantry. “Everyone heard what I said.”
Without another word, she turned on her heel and strode out of the gallery, her flaming head held high.
“Pen — ” Casting an anguished glance over her shoulder at Charlotte, Henrietta hurried out after her.
Charlotte made to follow but she was yanked to a stop by a hand on her arm. Mrs. Ponsonby’s pudgy fingers tightened around her sleeve with surprising force.
“No!” declared Mrs. Ponsonby, in ringing tones that carried clear over the efforts of the sweating musicians and the dancing couples, her fingers digging painfully into Charlotte’s arm. “Do not go after her! We do not know her now.”
Mrs. Ponsonby’s bosom swelled with self-righteous zeal and not a little bit of selfish satisfaction. She had had her eye on Lord Frederick for her own daughter, Lucy, and everyone knew it.
She was not the only mother who had disliked Penelope on those grounds. They all clustered in now, like savages for the kill, ready to grind their spears into whatever vulnerable flesh they could find.
The murderous haze in the air made Charlotte’s stomach turn in a way that had nothing to do with Mrs. Ponsonby’s poor choice of perfume.
“Perhaps you don’t,” said Charlotte, shaking off Mrs. Ponsonby’s clinging grasp, and followed after her friends.
“You can’t touch pitch without being tarred!” Mrs. Ponsonby called shrilly, if inaccurately, after her.
Hastening after friends, Charlotte refused to give her the satisfaction of looking back.
Mrs. Ponsonby was wrong. She might be naïve, but she knew enough of the world to know that it took a great deal of pitch to blacken a duke’s daughter. Not like poor Penelope, who didn’t even have an “Honorable” in front of her name to scrub her reputation clean.
Charlotte’s heart wrenched for her friend. It was so like Penelope to try to protect her and land herself in a stew because of it. So generous and yet so entirely wrong-headed. Because, among other things, she didn’t need protection from Robert. Whatever he might have said to Sir Francis, whatever his reasons for leaving, his intentions towards her were honorable.
She was sure of it.
Chapter Eleven
As the boat drew him across the River Styx, Robert knew he was truly in hell.
It had been four days since he had left Girdings, four days since he had stood on the roof with Charlotte, four days since he had struck his own Mephistophelean bargain in the hallway outside Charlotte’s chambers. It felt more like four years. The descent from the roof of Girdings to the subterranean caverns of West Wycombe had to be measured in more than miles. The distance between the Dovedale domains and those of Medmenham felt as vast as that between paradise and inferno. Once one began the descent, one didn’t go back.
At the time, it had seemed like a logical enough decision. An offer of immediate initiation into Medmenham’s Hellfire Club meant that he could find Wrothan that much faster. The faster he found Wrothan, the faster he could return to Girdings. Quick, clean, over.
Fast, however, didn’t seem to be in it. Whatever the way to hell was, it wasn’t speedy. They had been three days on the road from Girdings to West Wycombe. Once at Wycombe, notices needed to be sent out and preparations made. Robert fervently hoped those preparations included summoning Wrothan from whatever rathole he was currently occupying. It wasn’t until a day later that the whole party had donned their ceremonial vestments and processed, torchbearers to the fore, from the confines of Wycombe Abbey to the vast Gothic folly Medmenham’s cousin had built to mark the entrance to his subterranean caves, home of homegrown Eleusian mysteries and the devil only knew what else.
Upon entering the caves, the others had gone off to prepare, leaving Robert cooling his heels in an upper cavern. He had been instructed to contemplate his sins with the aid of a course of “religious readings.” These turned out, upon inspection, to be nothing more than a folio of expensive French pornography, done up at the edges with gold leaf and illuminated capitals in a mockery of medieval devotional literature.
As Lord Henry had promised, nothing but the best for their orgies.
Like the mock Book of Hours, the ceremonial garb he had been given to put on was also a survival from the club’s earlier incarnation as the Monks of Medmenham. It was a replica of a monk’s habit, cut out of rough brown wool, supplied with a belt of thin and flexible leather with curious metal tips. The belt was, in fact, a whip. Robert preferred not to think too closely about that, although he supposed it might come in handy if he had to fight his way out of the caves.
In addition to being drafty, the robe was extremely itchy. Robert knew that his sojourn in the cell was meant to fill him with prickles of anticipation, but instead he just felt prickly. By the time his guide arrived, to conduct him down to the nether regions for his initiation, Robert was strongly wondering whether it was all worth it. There surely had to be other ways to find Wrothan. Ways that did not involve absurd excursions into subterranean amateur theatricals.
The figure gestured to Robert to put up his hood. When Robert would have spoken, he drew a finger sharply across his lips — or the area where Robert presumed his lips must be — indicating silence.
Feeling as though he had stumbled unwittingly into one of Horace Walpole’s gothic novels, Robert followed his guide down into the catacombs. The path sloped steeply downwards, winding this way and that like a drunkard trying to find his way home. Lanterns cased in red glass hung from the ceiling, casting jagged bursts of flame along the chalk walls and turning the ground beneath their feet an unpleasant reddish brown. Crudely carved horned gods leered at them from the walls as they passed.
The path meandered downwards with no apparent direction. Off to the sides, grilles shielded private alcoves, rounded rooms reminiscent of monks’ cells, carved out of the earth. In the uncertain light, Robert received only a fleeting impression of lurid wall paintings and jumbled bedclothes. In one, he glimpsed paired skulls, perched like memento mori on the bedposts. The skulls’ soundless laughter pursued them as they passed.
Robert made a mental note never to consult Medmenham on matters of interior decoration.
They had, he reckoned, covered roughly a quarter of a mile by the t
ime the path broadened, opening into a vast, vaulted chamber, banded on one side by a shallow stream. In a small boat on the near bank, a boatman waited.
“Ready, Dovedale?” asked Sir Francis Medmenham.
Robert’s brown-robed guide faded off into the web of tunnels. “With all due reverence and humility,” drawled Robert, matching his tone to his host’s. “Wither do we sail?”
Medmenham raised a brow and the boat pole, all at the same time. “Across the River Styx and down into Hades.”
“Rather a Greco-Medieval mix for an Order of the Lotus,” Robert commented as Medmenham poled the boat to the other bank.
“Thrift, thrift, my dear Dovedale,” replied Medmenham, managing the skirts of his robe with the ease of long practice as he climbed out of the boat. “We are an accretion of generations of sin.”
“And all the more sinful for being so?” Clambering about in a habit wasn’t nearly so easy as Medmenham made it look. Robert inadvertently showed a good deal of leg as he swung out of the boat onto the bank. It was a decidedly humbling feeling — which was no doubt the intent.
Medmenham smiled a closed lipped smile. “It’s not quantity of sin but quality to which we aspire. Decadence, after all, is an art. When done properly.”
The brass doors blocking their path did, indeed, bear out that statement. Clearly from an earlier incarnation of the group, they were a work of art in their own right, featuring a bas-relief of Bacchanalian orgies, where tipsy maenads in disordered robes offered their attentions to Bacchus, a herd of satyrs, and one another in a staggering array of wanton combinations. The only concession to the new order was a knocker surmounted on the older panels, its brass jarringly bright in contrast to the mellowed patina of the maenads. It was an elephant’s head. The angle of the elephant’s trunk left no doubt as to its priapic connotations.
Lifting the ring hanging from the elephant’s open mouth, Medmenham let it fall against the brass doors once, twice, three times. On the third swing the doors swung open, propelled by invisible hands — or, far more likely, by some sort of pulley system. Incense billowed out, sifting like mist across the river, only scented as no mist had ever been, redolent of exotic ports and foreign temples.
Through stinging eyes, Robert could just barely make out the bodies in the haze, rank upon rank of them, it seemed, all in identical brown robes with hoods shrouding their features and whips at their waists. With an ironically courtly gesture, Medmenham gestured him forwards into their midst. The silent brethren shuffled back to form a semicircle around him, blocking off his means of egress. How many were there? Robert tried to count, but the smoke was in his eyes, blurring his vision and his senses. Fourteen or fifteen, maybe, it was hard to tell when one looked much like another and the purple-blue smoke belched from braziers slung from the ceiling on thick brass chains.
Medmenham urged him forwards, into the center of the room, directly beneath the room’s sole lantern, so that the light fell directly on his hooded head, placing him in stark relief while leaving the rest of the room in shadow.
Ahead of him, at the far end of the cave, loomed an immense altar. A great stone slab was surmounted by an arch that might have been stolen from an Indian temple — or simply manufactured with that in mind. All around the arch, in minute carvings, lush concubines attired in little more than strands of beads engaged in a variety of acrobatic erotic activities. Not just any concubines; some of the fertility goddesses portrayed in the carving had the bodies of voluptuous women, but their heads were formed of the overlapping petals of the lotus flower.
“Initiate!” declared Medmenham, in thrilling tones, once the meeting had been convened to order with proper pomp and a roll call of assumed names. “Do you come here of your own free will?”
“I do,” intoned Robert.
“Do you come of an impure heart?”
“I do.” Just not the sort of impure heart Medmenham had in mind.
“Have you any sins to confess to the company?”
So that was part of Medmenham’s game — or Wrothan’s. Robert had heard of such a club when he was in India, among the British community at Poona. As an initiation rite, members confessed their sins, usually of a sexual nature. They subsequently found themselves at the mercy of less scrupulous members of the society.
Robert marveled, as always, at the idiocy of his fellow men, willing to sacrifice their dignity on the promise of little more than a bit of slap and tickle.
“I confess,” declared Robert thrillingly, and paused for good effect, “that I am sinfully eager to sample the pleasures of the evening.”
That played well with the crowd. Lord Henry Innes roared his appreciation, pounding his large fist against his thigh. Robert would have known that guffaw anywhere, just as he recognized the braying laugh unique to Lord Freddy Staines. The one edging closer to Medmenham, always seeking to be closer to whatever he deemed the center of power, that had to be Martin Frobisher. That combination of arrogance and obsequiousness was unmistakable, even shrouded in brown wool.
That made four, four out of fourteen whom Robert could identify at a glance. Who were the others? And where in the hell was Wrothan? He might be one of the brown-cloaked figures, but it was impossible to tell. For a moment, Robert thought he caught an elusive whiff of jasmine, as delicate as a ghost in the smoke-haunted chamber, but beneath the heavy reek of incense it was impossible to be sure, and even less possible to trace the source. Robert’s shoulders tightened with impatience. Where was the bloody man? Nothing was going as he had planned.
Medmenham yanked on the end of a tasseled cord, sending up a shrill clanging that reverberated through the small chamber. “We call on the god to bring us the elixir of immortality!”
Claret, no doubt, thought Robert. Or brandy. His head was beginning to ache from the incense, and the ground was gritty and cold against his bare feet. As sin went, this was a fairly ramshackle affair. He wondered if they had mustered a more impressive performance back when they still called themselves the Monks of Medmenham. He doubted it. It would have been inverted crosses then, rather than elephant heads, but it all boiled down to the same thing: a stage set for an otherwise unimaginative bout of drinking and wenching.
It all made him feel very old and very tired.
With a tinkling of beads and a rush of air, a dozen giggling girls scrambled through the arch over the altar, each done up in pseudo-Oriental costumes of strategic straps of chiffon held together with strings of beads that clattered as they moved. Bracelets dangling silver bells circled their ankles and wrists. The exotic costumes sat oddly with flushed pink skin and masses of hair in shades ranging from blond to mid-brown. They were clearly village girls done up to look like temple dancers, preening and giggling as they jangled their bells and pushed out their chests. Their gyrations bore about as much relation to a genuine nautch dance as a jig to the ballet.
One by one, they ranged in an obviously choreographed formation around the base of the altar, posing with their hands clapped above their heads in poor imitation of the figures on the arch above them.
Lord Henry, who had, God help him, appointed himself Robert’s personal sponsor, struck Robert’s shoulder with a familiar hand.
“The handmaidens of the god,” he rumbled, in the worst stage whisper since Garrick’s Hamlet had a spot of bother over whether to be or not to be. “Just you wait. Here it comes!”
There was more?
Apparently, there was. Innes wasn’t the only one bouncing on his heels in anticipation. One of the girls giggled and was hastily hushed. Robert could practically hear the quivering of taut muscles as everyone in the room strained towards the door, waiting for something — or someone. Robert could feel the tension beginning to infect him. His eyes burned from the smoke and his ears rang in the expectant silence.
Someone began a chant and the others took it up, intoning, in unison, “So-ma, so-ma.”
It wasn’t a name Robert recognized. Clever nonsense, perhaps, cooked up to sound
foreign? It was certainly eminently suited to a chant. The low sound echoed through the vaulted room, whirling around and around like a serpent chasing its own tail, over and over again in endless refrain, until the syllables blurred together and one voice was indistinguishable from the next.
Far off — or perhaps it merely sounded like it, through the chanting and the smoke — a pair of cymbals clanged.
Behind him, Robert could hear Lord Henry draw in a rough breath in anticipation. The sound was echoed all around the room. The chanting grew ragged, then faded off entirely, as all eyes focused on the lotus altar. A great blast of smoke blew through the beaded curtain and swirled through the room, a thick, blue-tinged smoke that carried with it a sickly sweet aftertaste that made his tongue feel thick and clung unpleasantly to the back of Robert’s throat.
In its midst stalked a creature out of myth.
Through the smoke, he appeared at least seven feet high. His tunic and baggy trousers were of cloth of gold, sewn with bits of metal that caught and reflected the light, so that he seemed to glitter with living flame. A curved sword hung from one hip, the hilt a full six inches high, set with rough chunks of lapis lazuli, carnelian, jasper, and tourmaline in a display of barbaric splendor. A gaudy gold pectoral hung across the creature’s chest, from which dangled a single chunk of red glass on which was etched, with a great deal more care than on the members’ rings, the insignia of the society.
But that was the least of it. Above the pectoral reared, not a human head, but a grotesque ritual mask, an elephant’s head, fully three feet high, with immense ears that spanned a yard on either side and an arrogantly curved trunk that arched up to reveal a great, gaping cavern of a mouth, painted with thick, red lips. But it was the eyes, the eyes that were the most distressing. The area around the eyes had been decorated as though for a festival day, painted a bluish white and outlined with gold beads, like a Venetian carnival mask. But within the ovals carved out for the eyes, all was black. There was nothing inside.