Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories (16 page)

“In numbers, that is,” she said.

“Numbers? No.”

“Then I shall have to begin again. Aunt …”

“Yes, yes,” the woman said, waving her hand. “It must be accurate.”

Brigit turned to the lodge and motioned me to join her. “You are the son of the Grand Falconer.”

“I am.” I kept up her brisk pace. “What are you doing with these … measurements?”

Brigit looked at me as if she had been caught stealing. “They’re for … well, just for … silly women’s drawings … but I like them to be … mathematically accurate.”

“Mathematically?” No one in court knew mathematics. Even the Duke only knew numbers when it came to money. And very basic transactions at that.

She looked around to see if we had been overheard. “You have my secret now,” she said, childlike again, as we reached the lodge wall and she pressed her heels against it, palms and back flat against its stone. She smiled like a coquette. “Will you keep it safe?”

A woman with more academic training than the Duke? That was dangerous. Only strange people from the Arab world or the Far East showed the court things involving mathematics, and they were regarded with suspicion. The young daughter of an Earl who knew five languages and was intent on studying medicine was forced into a nunnery when she corrected the Bishop’s German under her breath.

I was even hungrier than before and I drank in the smell of her skin. “As I will all things you give me.” I turned over her hand and kissed her wrist before departing.

It was the night of a small costume ball for the Duchess. Masks brought out impropriety, and the birds were already reacting. Women concealed their age, everyone was questionable, and the small crowd was augmented by the middling-born who were suddenly emboldened by the opportunity to mingle.

Where was Brigit, this luscious girl-woman with a secret and the puzzle that drove heat into my balls? I found her by the soup caldron and I seized her elbow without thinking of the company surrounding her. She squealed, then stepped into me—but her grandmother, the widow with the layers of mismatched clothing, drew forward. I bowed to the old woman, but Brigit defied her and pulled me over to the window. I countered by escorting her out of the room and down the hall.

I slipped my hand behind her head, expecting her to protest that I was mussing her hair, but she leaned into my kiss. She was clumsy at kissing, and that reassured me, so I ran my hand up her bodice to her breasts until she started panting and pulled away, giving me startled eyes. That was all it took. I lunged for her; I devoured her mouth until her knees bent. I cupped her buttocks and pulled her up against my loins until the swelling of my erection made her whimper. I had never had a virgin. I had never kissed lips that childlike and full. For once I was not in control but falling into the well of it.

“Sweet child,” I said, and she covered my mouth with hers again. We ran hand in hand down the long halls to my apartments and flung ourselves on the bed. She unlaced the top of her dress to show me her breasts, as if she couldn’t believe they were there. When she straddled me, I could tell that this gesture—as much for a horse as a man—was all she knew. I rolled her over and began our first night of gluttony.

But she surprised me. She met me hand to hand. She didn’t lie there like a frightened virgin and yet she didn’t come at me with schooled and empty techniques. She held me with strength, not clinging to me, or even hungry, but with a clear, animal nature.

I watched her face an inch away from mine as she put her hand on her first cock, listened to the surprise in her throat. She moved her fingers up my long, ridged shaft. The tips of her fingers registered the heat of the velvet skin on the head of my dick. I watched her float away, but she returned, seeing me. Seeing the man. Her clear brown eyes made me see her. I traced her jaw with my fingers, touched the corners of her eyes with my thumbs. Her presence made me present, made me see how the widows and I had made love to nothing but the secret of each other.

“My hunter,” she said, tangling her fingers in my hair. I laid her back, watching her face as I had never bothered to with the others.

Every inch of penetration was a surprise to her. I moaned from her hot grip and surrendered to my rhythm until we were covered with sweat, and I saw her first orgasm shoot through her body to brighten her eyes. I shuddered and came.

Her hair floated like seaweed across my pillow, and her chatter was so bright that I wanted to hear it from the mouths of our children, to be peppered with it as an old man, lying in the post-coital fog. I adored her, I realized, as she sat up in bed, my bachelor linens unworthy of her clean flesh.

“Be my wife,” I asked her, unthinking. She consented immediately.

And yet as Brigit bounced on the bed, my balls went as cold and limp as roe-sack. I am a hunter, it drives me—and now the hunting is over? My father’s words came back to me. Brigit was ready to make love again, but all the parts of me shrank from her. I took her hand from my cheek, kissed her palm, and got out of bed.

“Soon, my love,” I faltered. “Thwart the gossips …”

We dressed and returned to the party, where no woman stirred me. Beautiful cleavage and delicate ankles twirled in front of me, but I was listless.

The next morning as we gathered for the hunt, my hawk rode me out to the hunting grounds as if stuffed. Her passivity made me nervous, and when it came time to launch her, she flapped upward and then returned to hop on the grass a pace ahead of me.

My father became unhinged and jammed his walking stick into the ground.

“What have you done to her?”

Three times I launched her and each time she refused to hunt.

I tried one of my team’s birds, and when launched she soared above us and then had to be coaxed down from a tree. It wasn’t the birds, it was me. At the end of the day I returned empty-handed with my stomach in a knot.

“That woman will do the same to you,” Father said. He gripped my elbow as I was pouring mead in our rooms. “That’s why you watch the falcon. That girl will suck the hunter nature out of you.”

I’m not proud of the ensuing week. But a man faces a primal fear when both monogamy and the loss of his livelihood stare him down. I feasted like the starving wretch who can be forgiven bad table manners. I fucked Marie the next morning—and though my chest was covered with flour and my back with sweat, I strode out to the forest and paid for the services of the woodcutter’s daughters, both of them. We had sex so loud and long, it sounded like the lowing cattle in the stall beside us. I rode into town and was serviced at the public baths, rode on to the next village and found the service girl there.

The rookery serfs said that my hawk had to spend all day hooded and that she was so unnerved that she would only sleep on the bottom of her cage with her claws deep in the face of a hare. My second in command took her out while I was gone, and she bagged twice as much game as any other bird in the party.

Clearly, my father was right, and the prospect of marrying Brigit was going to rob both of us of our raptor instincts.

News of our betrothal had preceded my return. As I walked from the rookery to the de Pitannes’ rooms, women showered me with well-wishes and men who had heard of my bird’s rebellion regarded me with troubled eyes.

I had not sent advance word of my intention to visit, so Brigit’s grandmother was shouting her insistence that Brigit hide her drawings. Brigit lit up when she saw me and motioned me over, pushing her grandmother back so I could look at what was laid out on the table.

I nodded respectfully to the old woman. Brigit’s drawing covered the entire surface, with a crock of water and one of quills holding down the far corners. She had the facade of the Duke’s lodge, the back wall, and the length of the garden, each drawn precisely and with the measurements and square footage as well. It was exquisite, with beautiful detail. I had never seen a woman do work like that. Her face flushed as she laid out another drawing from a wide leather tube in which a dozen large parchments were stored. It was an architectural drawing of the Duke de Berry’s westernmost castle.

“I try to get her to paint flowers, m’lord,” her grandmother said and then took to fixing Brigit’s hair, which was loose on her shoulders. “Please don’t talk about her to the others.”

Here was a happy secret instead of a shameful one. Not weakness of character or violation of decency, but a brain that was stronger and sharper than most. My love for her doubled, and I wanted to protect her, not protect our secret.

“Madame de Pitanne,” I said, dropping to my knees. “I’ve come to discuss the specifics of marriage.”

* * *

When I returned to the rookery, my falcon sat nonplussed on her perch. My father was staring into a tankard and barely looked up as I flopped into my chair.

“You’ll marry, then,” he said.

I shook my hands in exasperation at my falcon’s cage and snapped at it with my glove just to get a rise out of the placid bird. “You were right. When I have her, the birds won’t hunt. And I can’t live without hunting. Maybe we should cook you!” I shouted at the bird.

My father slammed his fist down. “You are the sixth generation of falconers. Everything we have is from the birds.”

It seemed unfair to me that I should be denied a wife and an heir, all for the pheasant on the Duke’s table. Was it my lot in life to skulk around other men’s widows so I could put rabbit on a dinner plate?

In the following days, the situation grew worse. No bird would hunt with me, and the ladies of the lodge held no appeal. I was betrothed, and useless. I was happy around Brigit as the lodge made ready for the wedding, but during the day I hung to the back of the hunt team, less useful than a serf. The entire team grew sullen.

On the morning of the seventh day, two days before the wedding, we assembled for the hunt and my father appeared behind us, fully dressed. He seldom joined us for the long walk, but this morning he was sporting his best hunting doublet and his old elbow-high bird glove. He walked as if approaching the Duke. I, my five falconers, and the six dog-masters stood in respectful confusion. Horse hooves rang on the cobblestones. The birds—all but mine—paced nervously on their perches despite their hoods.

The Master of the Hunt and his team who hunted the big game— wild boar, deer, elk, sometimes bear, a far more dangerous task than ours—rode to a line in front of us. The scars on their faces and arms glistened in the morning sun. They outweighed us by fifty pounds apiece. They wore their knives lashed to their chests, with spears and bows on either side of their saddles.

A stable boy trotted up with a riderless horse, an unruly mare already foaming with her own ill will.

“Gentlemen,” my father said ceremoniously. “I have seen this twice in my life and heard of it just once in my father’s. My son has been invited to spend his life with the Master of the Hunt. To give up the bird for the sword. Though it breaks our line of six generations with the falcons, I release him of his duties and encourage him to go to his new life. He has served us exceptionally well …”

My falconry team whispered their objections. There was only an opening on the Master of the Hunt’s team because the previous hunter had been gored and died of an infection. Two of his other hunters were now crippled, old beyond their years. Falconry required fitness and intelligent handling of the birds, but these men were known to dismount and fight an injured pig with their knives, to face down a bear. It was a life of long rides, complex schemes of entrapment, and infrequent kills. Their lives relied on a horse, nearly as dumb as a bird, but capable of killing you in an instant. And look at the horse they’ve chosen: half-mad, witlessly tugging at the reins.

I grabbed my father’s forearm, and he smiled into my surprised face. “Every hunter has a certain nature,” he said. “You spent half of yours with the birds and half in bed. A fine-enough life until you were blessed with someone for whom you would change hunting into protection.” He rubbed my head. “But you see, the birds won’t tolerate receiving the total of your hunter’s nature. They’re too fragile and they’ve abandoned you. So it’s time to move to bigger game. Up the stakes, my son. Give up the rabbit to fight the boar, and marry.”

“But what about you? And our lineage?”

“The birds have abandoned you, but the women have abandoned me—so I’ll resume here. Give me a grandson to train, and we shall see what the birds make of him.”

My body had already made the decision for me. My chest came forward and my falcon danced on her perch. I would descend from second to the Grand Falconer to the newest, least skilled member of the hunt squad.

I bowed to my fine falconry team, saluted the men of the hunt, and moved to the horse on the end.

“They’ve done you no favors with this one, sire,” the stable boy said as I stuck my foot into his hands for a mount. “She’s headstrong. And she bites.”

My mind shifted, on task again.

HALF-CROWN DOXY

Cate Robertson

W
ITH
E
MILIE AND THE GIRLS
packed off to her mother’s in Geneva for Easter, he can—at last—allow himself a little night sport. With no constraints.