In the Garden of Sin (4 page)

I imagined fingers there, warm, masculine fingers, stroking, exploring, ever so gently. As if it were really happening, the flesh there pulsed with heat.

I dug my nails into my palms so as to stifle arousal with pain. The drumming of my heart seemed to reverberate in my skull.

“What thinkest thou, Domenico?” Elle asked.

“Be prepared to leave for France in two days’ time, Mistress Leeds. And bring the red notebook.” There came a rustle of fabric followed by footsteps that sounded slightly halting.

I stiffened, my eyes flying open as I awaited, through a maelstrom of clashing emotions, his touch upon me.

A door opened and closed.

I turned around. He was gone.

Elle smiled as she handed me back my shift. “Welcome to the novitiate, sister.”

After heaping me with advice and information while helping me to dress, Elle saw me to the door, kissed me three times near each cheek—another Continental convention—and bid me adieu. I started walking home, and was all the way to Fleet Bridge before I realized that I’d left my gloves behind on the little lacquered table.

I retraced my steps to York House, waiting just inside the front door while the footman who’d answered my knock went to fetch the gloves. Glancing around idly, I noticed, through a doorway off the entry hall, a harpsichord standing in the corner of an opulently furnished chamber. It was unlike any such instrument I had ever seen, more imposing by far than the plain little Flemish harpsichord in my withdrawing room at home.

I stepped through the doorway and approached the grandiose
instrument, which was fancily carved and painted all over with peacocks, pheasants, and cupids amid an intricate network of scrolling tendrils and leaves. Even the inside of its raised lid was decorated with a lush pastoral landscape executed in vivid colors.

Curious as to its tone, I was debating whether to play a stanza of the madrigal I’d been working on, when I heard the muted groan of wood and what sounded like grunts of effort from beyond a slightly ajar door leading into another room. I cocked my head to listen, thinking perhaps it was a servant straining at some laborsome chore, until I heard a woman with a French accent—Elle, her breathing strident—say, “Thou art thinking of her.”

“Who?” It was Vitturi’s voice, as winded as Elle’s.

“Hannah.”

There came a moment’s silence, or perhaps he muttered something I couldn’t hear. “Nay,” he said.

I crept closer to the door, which stood open perhaps an inch, peering cautiously into the chamber on the other side. By angling my head, I could make out in succession the edge of a marble mantelpiece, an ornately paneled cupboard, and a row of chairs covered in dark hide lined up against the wall.

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 keep 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.