Bound in Moonlight (2 page)

Two

E
MMELINE STARED IN
bewilderment through the side window of the brougham parked next to her little green Benz in the château's carriage house. In the throes of some delirium fever—for what other explanation could there be for his violent tremors and mad rantings?—the young man cried out, “Yes! Oh, yes! Lick the tip. Squeeze the balls. Now suck it hard . . . harder . . . Here it comes. It's coming!”

He roared like a lion, convulsing in spasms that filled Emmeline with unspeakable dread. She must do something,and quickly, lest this poor young man succumb to whatever ghastly ailment held him in its grip.

“By Jove, Lavinia, but you are an artiste with your mouth,”he said as a woman's head rose into view.

Dear God, no,
thought Emmeline. She couldn't have actually put her mouth on his . . . his . . .

Emmeline recoiled in disgust as the depravity of what she had just witnessed sank in. Her vision went gray, and she collapsed in a swoon of horror and disbelief.

January 26, 1922

Steamboat Springs, Colorado

Mon chéri
Rèmy,

No, no, a thousand times no, etc. etc. etc.

I'm forty-four. You're thirty-two. Why do we even have to discuss this? Rèmy, you know how I feel about you. You're the most perfect man I've ever known, the best lover, the warmest companion. And, oh, the contrast of those big, muscular peasant shoulders with the eyeglasses and the brain . . . it still makes me weak in the knees.

If there were any real reason for us to tie the knot, I might consider it, but I honestly just don't see the point. Everything's copacetic, is it not? What are we lacking that marriage can provide? We sleep together, we travel together, we share the same friends and the same interests. Yet we have our own homes, so we're not on top of each other constantly, and we have an understanding about sleeping with other people that would be unworkable if we were bound together in holy matrimony. Really, it's the perfect arrangement. I can't imagine why you want to go and ruin it.

Speaking of sleeping with other people, I must tell you about the dream I had last night about Nils, the Viking. Well, first I should tell you what inspired the dream.

Every morning after he brings in the mail, Nils sits in the dining room and drinks a cup of hot cocoa before setting out again. Yesterday, Kitty, who's got quite the crush on him, asked if she could join him. He was delighted, of course. She's quite the doll. Afterward, she told me he'd asked her if the pretty brunette with the broken bones was her sister. She said he was astounded when she told him I was her aunt, and twenty-three years older than she.

Well, the compliment must have really taken root in my subconscious, because I awoke in the middle of the night from the most exciting wet dream (yes, women have them, too). In the dream, it was I, not Kitty, having cocoa with Nils in the dining room. He was so shy and nervous, and clearly sweet on me. And he was a virgin who had never so much as touched a woman.

I said, “You can touch
me,
if you like,” and I lifted my skirt just an inch or so to show him what I meant.

He pulled his chair close and very tentatively slid his hand up my leg—not the one in the cast, the good one. I was wearing my peach silk camiknickers, and of course those are so loose that he had no trouble at all reaching the bull's-eye. He touched me very carefully, teasing apart the hair over the slit with his big gentle fingers and exploring the little folds and furrows between them until I was panting and clutching at the arms of my wheelchair.

He said, “It's getting slippery.”

All I could do was nod.

A fingertip grazed my clit, and I sucked in a breath. He thought he'd hurt me, and started pulling his hand away, but I told him it felt good. He told me it felt good for him, too, and I could see that he had a hard-on like a broom handle.

He pushed a finger inside me, and I instantly came. It galvanized him. He started frantically undoing his trousers, but I pushed him away, saying we couldn't go any further, that he was too young for me. (I know, I know.) He tried to talk me into it. My refusals grew more and more halfhearted. At this point, my casts had disappeared, and my clothes, too (dreams are very convenient that way). He threw me to the floor, pinned my arms down, and fucked me like a pile driver.

I woke up climaxing, even though I was lying on my back, with nothing to push against. Usually when I come in my sleep, I'm lying on my stomach and thrusting against the bed. I brought myself off by hand a couple more times just to get it out of my system, and then I drifted back off to sleep.

At breakfast, Kitty asked me why I was smiling that way, so I told her about the dream.

“Do you think he's really a virgin?” she asked.

“You're in a better position to find that out than I.”

So this morning she joined him again for cocoa, steered the conversation around to women, and asked him outright if he'd ever gotten any. You know Kitty, she's not much for subtlety.

Well, guess what? He hasn't! Twenty years old, a Norse god with the face of an angel, and he's a virgin. Isn't that the sweetest thing you've ever heard? She asked him if he'd ever touched a woman . . . down there. He hadn't. She asked him if he'd like to. He was hesitant, something about some girl at church he's been pining over but can't work up the nerve to ask out. Eventually, though, he took her up on it, and she said it was very similar to my dream, Nils gently fondling, the two of them getting hotter by the second. But just as she was about to go off, he tore himself away with an obvious effort, said he liked her too much to treat her like an alley cat, and left. That was eight hours ago, and she's still grumpy.

Yes, darling, I know you're chafing at the bit, wondering when I'm going to get around to “spilling it all” about the château, as you so emphatically demanded in your letter. Your rabid curiosity slays me, as does your outrage that I'd never told you about Hickley or any of the rest of it until now. I'm not the type to live in the past—you know that. Once I wrote “The End” on the last page of
Emmeline's Emancipation,
I was done with that chapter of my life and ready to start fresh.

That said, I can certainly appreciate your point about my “cockteasing” you with that little dining room ménage à trois and the satyr comment. I understand your wanting to hear the whole story, and your point about my having nothing but time on my hands for the next three weeks is well taken. It will require more than one letter to relate it all, but I'll give it the old college try.

I must warn you, though, that I'm not sure how well I trust my memory about the things that happened at Grotte Cachée, and not just because it was twenty years ago. It's a screwy place, and I felt vaguely hopped-up just being there, especially in certain areas, like the cave.

The château is in Auvergne, tucked deep into a valley formed by heavily wooded, extinct volcanoes, one of which houses a labyrinthine cave. The entrance to this “hidden grotto,” or the main entrance, is in a Roman bathhouse built onto the side of that particular mountain, “Roman” meaning it actually dates back to the Roman occupation of Gaul. Whatever it is that affects your mind when you're at Grotte Cachée seems to grow more and more powerful the deeper you go into the cave. But you sometimes feel it in the castle itself, or even in the woods around it, which are vast and ancient.

Looking back now at the things that happened there, the things I saw, or thought I saw . . . well, it's tempting to conclude that I was just completely off my nut the entire time. It was a stressful episode, or it started out that way, and stress can do that to you. Some of the soldiers I nursed during the war were delusional, but it was just shell shock from the trauma of battle, and they got better once they were out of the fray. But the reason I'm not so quick to chalk up what I experienced at Grotte Cachée to stress is that I was actually warned beforehand that it was a strange place populated by demons, and that I was likely to be exposed to unexplainable phenomena.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. To understand why I went there, you need to know how and why I became engaged to Hickley in the first place.

I've told you my father was a banker. He actually owned a bank, and he was a partner in the Vanderbilt railroads. He built a granite castle on Fifth Avenue and a white marble one in Newport that was patterned after the Temple of Apollo, with six forty-foot columns out front. Oh, and we had a big old sprawling country home out on Long Island that was actually sort of homey and pleasant, and where I learned to ride. And Mother kept a little pied-à-terre in Paris for her shopping excursions.

Are you getting the picture,
chéri
? There were buckets of money, but it was just a little too shiny and new, my father having been a self-made man. The Astors and the rest of their ilk looked down their noses at the new rich, even the Vanderbilts for the longest time, but my parents were determined to break into their ranks. The time-honored way to do this was to pimp one's daughter marry one's daughter into a venerable old family. Titled Englishmen were thought to provide the splashiest and most surefire entrée into society.

My childhood friend Consuelo Vanderbilt was torn away from her beloved Winty Ruthurford and married off to Sunny Churchill, a sallow, bug-eyed little weasel with manicured hands who had absolutely nothing going for him except that he was the ninth Duke of Marlborough. I was one of Consuelo's bridesmaids, and my first clue that Sunny might end up being a disappointment was when he skipped the wedding rehearsal to go shopping instead. On the afternoon of the wedding, Consuelo's eyes were red and swollen from sobbing all morning in her room, with a guard stationed outside the door in case she tried to make a break for it. I am absolutely serious. Of course, the marriage was an utter debacle. Sunny treated her like dirt, having only bound himself in matrimony to a dollar princess so that he could afford to restore the true love of his life, that majestic mausoleum known as Blenheim Palace.

That was what they called us, the American heiresses who got engaged to land-poor British aristocrats looking for an infusion of cash in the form of dowries with which to repair the ancestral manse, play baccarat, or support a mistress or two. The terms of my betrothal were negotiated between my father and Hickley during Hickley's wife-hunting excursion to New York in March of 1902.
His
father, the seventh Earl of Kilbury, had squandered what remained of the family fortune, leaving him deeply in debt and desperate for the two million dollars in cash and railroad stock he was to receive upon our marriage in June of the following year.

Why, you are asking yourself, would a smart, selfreliant little bearcat like me agree to such a bloodless and venal arrangement? Perhaps you're recalling my alter ego, Emmeline, so sheltered and class-conscious before her sexual awakening, and thinking I must have been the same sort of girl before breaking out of my shell.

Actually, Emmeline is probably the most fictionalized element in the book. To make her transformation dramatic, she had to start off extraordinarily naïve. In reality, I was what they called, in America, a “New Woman.” We played tennis and golf, smoked cigarettes, rode bicycles, drove motorcars, and got educated, although you wouldn't believe the histrionics it took to convince my parents to send me to Bryn Mawr. We wore blouses with burly leg of mutton sleeves and skirts that showed the ankle, though we would have died before lifting them for a man. We felt we had the right to careers, and also the right to remain unmarried if we so chose.

So then, why did I let my parents hand me over, along with two million smackers, to a money-grubbing English baron? First, you must understand that I had no notion of Hickley's true character, or lack thereof, when I met him. We were introduced by a mutual acquaintance named Kit Archer. Kit was an Englishman, but he lived in France, where he served as
administrateur
to the
seigneur
of Grotte Cachée, the fourth generation of his family to do so. He was also the author of two books of classical history, as well as a novel about Atlantis that was obscure but really quite good.

I'd met Kit four years earlier at one of Bertha Chalmers's semimonthly literary salons, which he frequented whenever he was in New York. It was my first time there, and I was shaking in my boots to be in the same room with people like Edith (this was before
House of Mirth,
but I was in awe of her stories and articles). Kit was so warm and garrulous—he made me feel right at home (as did Edith, of course). He and I became fast friends and remained so until his death right before the war, despite the fact that I was twenty and he was a portly, bald, gout-ridden sixty-year-old who lived on the other side of the Atlantic. And lest you conclude that there was anything untoward in our relationship, Kit had a wife, four children, and a grandson, all of whom he worshipped.

In any event, I might have skipped Mrs. Chalmers's salon that night, because New York was buried under one of those suffocating March snowstorms, but Kit had sent a note saying he'd just gotten into town and would be bringing a young baron he'd met on the crossing who'd read one of my magazine articles and wanted to meet me. So, I went, partly to see Kit and partly to meet this English nobleman who actually knew who I was! And wanted to meet me!