Whispers of the Flesh (18 page)

I opened my mouth to invite Starbuck to expound on his theory outside, but Madeleine grabbed my arm, whispering “He’s not worth the scraped knuckles.”

Inigo caught my eye, flicked a dismissive glance in Starbuck’s direction, and waved his bottle toward the door, effectively seconding her advice. “Oh, hey—we’re gonna light a bonfire later tonight out by the bathhouse. You and Emmett should check it out.”

“Ooh, a date,” Starbuck taunted. “You and Emmett have a little thing going on, Hitchens?”

It was a junior-high-level reference to the fact that Emmett and I, who were older and straighter than most of these kids, had been hanging out with each other more than with the rest of them that weekend—except for Emmett’s long talk with Madeleine in the Beckett Garden yesterday, after which he’d told me he was in love with her.

“You and Emmett going steady?” Starbuck asked me. “Did you pin him, or did he pin you?”

As his pals hooted in laughter, Madeleine looked at Starbuck and said, “You can be a real asshole, Bernie.”

“Bernie?”
said Inigo, laughing like hell. “Are you shitting me?”

“Bernard Marion Pease the Third,” she said, “and no, I am not shitting you.”

“Fucking cunt,” snarled Starbuck, a mottled reddish stain crawling up his throat.

“Uncool, man,” Inigo said. “You want to talk that shit, you talk it somewhere else.”

“Are you fucking
serious
?” Starbuck said.

“You don’t talk to a woman that way in my place.”

“What about women’s lib?” Starbuck said.

“What about I liberate your teeth from your mouth?” I asked.

Inigo cocked his head toward the door. “Time to boogie, Bernie.”

Three

I
FELL IN LOVE with your mother in this garden,” Emmett Archer said as he lingered over lunch in the Beckett Garden the next day with Jason and Grace.

Not that Emmett had eaten what you’d call “lunch.” Darius, perched on a crossbeam of the colonnade that shaded the lushly planted terrace, had seen the
administrateur
consume perhaps three spoonfuls of milk toast pressed upon him by his nurse. Nevertheless, he was having what Grace termed “a good day.” Were he not, he would hardly have asked to be brought down here—no easy task, what with the oxygen concentrator and all—to enjoy the spring sunshine in this, his favorite garden.

“You must have fallen hard and fast.” Isabel, sitting across from her father at the linen-draped table with a sketchbook and a mechanical artist’s pen, was working on a drawing of him with the garden and reflecting pool in the background, and beyond that, the bucolic parkland that surrounded the château. “You dated Mom for what, like, two months before you tied the knot. Your most impulsive act ever,” she told him with a grin.

“Was she pregnant?” Jason said. He was dressed as he’d been the day before, in baggy jeans and a baggy flannel shirt over a baggy T-shirt, this one sporting an image of a double helix.

“Oh, no, you did not just ask that,” Grace said, sounding more New York than London.

Glancing up from her drawing to give Jason a
look,
Isabel said, “She wasn’t pregnant.”

Archer smiled. “Of course she was.”

Isabel gaped at her father.

“You were born seven months later,” her father said.

“I was premature. I was conceived on your honeymoon. I weighed four pounds, two ounces.”

“You were eight pounds even.” He gave her a rueful smile. “Your mother insisted on the preemie story. I’m sorry, my dear. It never sat well with me, lying to you.”

Jason, his chair tipped back, hands behind his head, looked back and forth between father and daughter as if he were watching one of those American reality shows.

“Mr. Archer,” Grace said, “are you going to take that pill or just sit there fiddling with it all afternoon?”

“Wait a minute,” Isabel said. “So I was conceived during the love-in?”

“The
house party
?” Archer said pointedly, only to lapse into a coughing fit. “No, Maddy brought a boyfriend, worse luck. It wasn’t until we were back in London again that we started seeing each other.”

Isabel said, “You must have seen an awful lot of each other pretty fast, if she was two months’ pregnant when you got married, um . . .
two months later.
”

“It took me a few days to work up my courage to call her, once I got back to London. I couldn’t believe it when she not only agreed to go out with me, but seemed
enthusiastic
about it. But she was rather . . . mercurial, you know. A free spirit.”

“Mr. Archer, do take that pill,” Grace said. “I know it’s hard, but—”

“Yes, yes, yes,” he said in an irritated tone. Darius heard him take a scratchy breath, as if steeling himself. “Bottoms up.”

“There you go,” Grace said. “And the next one?”

“Ah, look who’s here,” Archer said, smiling toward the door to the dining room. “Come sit with us, my dear.”

Lili stepped into the garden wearing a plum-colored
lubushu
, her gleaming raven hair in a single braid down her back, those almond eyes flashing. Jason looked away from her, took a sip of his wine, and looked back, trying—it seemed to Darius—to keep from leering.

“Why, thank you,” Lili said as Jason rose and pulled out a chair next to his. “You’re . . . Jordan, right?”

“Jason. Jason MacKenna.”

Lili asked Jason where his parents were, and he said they were hiking up Alp Albiorix.

“I’m surprised to find you all still sitting here,” Lili said. “Weren’t you served lunch around noon? What have you been talking about to keep you so engrossed?”

“Isabel just found out she’s a love child,” Jason said.

“What I don’t understand,” Isabel told her father, “is why Mom was such a priss about letting people know. I mean, she was a
hippie,
for cryin’ out loud. They were all about sleeping around.”

“She’s got a point,”Jason said. “Love the one you’re with? All that free love stuff that came out of the sexual revolution . . .”

Lili, sitting next to him, touched his arm and said, “The concept of free love goes back much further than that, I assure you.”

He looked down at her hand on his arm.

She smiled at him as one would smile at a very large but very tame St. Bernard. Jason MacKenna was no
gabru,
not by Ilutu Lili’s standards. If she did choose to take him, as she did many of their male guests, it would be because she had hungers to satisfy, not because she found him particularly attractive.

“Maddy was a hippie, yes,”Archer said,“but from one of the most venerable old families in New York, descended from the original Dutch settlers.”

“From whom she’d been rebelling since she could walk,” Isabel countered.

“But whom she still loved and wanted to please,” her father said. “And sexual revolution or no, there was still a stigma back then about being an unwed mother. She was quite anxious to disguise the fact that she was in the family way when we tied the knot.”

“How times change,” Grace said. “Today, she probably wouldn’t think twice about it.”

“She might not even have bothered marrying you,” Isabel said, “at least not right away. It’s just not an issue anymore.”

“Well . . .” he said. “Not as
much
of an issue, perhaps, but still . . . I mean,
you
wouldn’t have a baby out of wedlock, would you?”

“Actually, I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and I think I would. In the plane on the way here, I was sitting next to this woman a few years older than me who had her baby with her—
so
adorable. I mean, I could feel my ovaries screaming
Do it! What are you waiting for?
Turned out the mother was single with no marital prospects and the biological clock had been ticking down, so she finally realized it was do or die. She went for artificial insemination, but it didn’t work until she had all these other really grueling and expensive fertility procedures, ’cause she’d waited so long. I told myself that wasn’t gonna be me. I’ve decided to try and scare me up some high-quality spermatozoa.”

“Ah, romance,” Jason deadpanned.

Her father said, “Isabel, a woman like you shouldn’t have to resort to such measures to start a family. You’re beautiful, intelligent . . . You’ve had some serious boyfriends. Hasn’t there been at least one you would have considered marrying?”

Isabel looked away. Darius couldn’t help but think back to that Christmas visit when she and Adrien were both teenagers. Their mutual attraction had been obvious—to him, if to no one else, thanks to the way humans tended to dismiss him from their minds when he was just a gray cat curled up in the corner. After all these years, was it possible that she was still carrying a torch for him?

She said, “I’m thirty-five, Dad. I can’t just keep hoping that someday my white knight will ride up, slip a ring on my finger, and get me with child.”

“I’m in the same boat as Isabel,”Grace said. “Single and destined to stay that way, but what I wouldn’t give to have a baby, if it weren’t so bloody difficult to arrange. I’m thirty-nine and living in very contented sin with someone who can’t get me pregnant—so what’s a girl to do?”

“He’s sterile?” Jason asked.

“
She
had a hysterectomy eight years ago, and obviously she wouldn’t have been able to do the deed in any event. Laura and I are dying to have a child, and we’ve thought about artificial insemination from one of those sperm banks, but it just strikes us both as so . . . I don’t know. A complete stranger’s DNA . . .”

“You can stipulate someone who has similar attributes to your girlfriend,” Isabel said.

“Yeah, I know. We actually went and looked at the list of blond-haired, blue-eyed, whip-smart donors, but the chilly anonymity of it . . . We ended up leaving empty-handed, or rather, empty . . . well, you get the idea.”

“Have you considered the turkey baster route?” Jason asked.

“Oh, sure, there’ve been some men of our acquaintance over the past few years who’ve fit the bill, you know? Laura and I have proposed it to seven of them, but no dice. Straight or gay, men feel threatened by the idea of fathering a child on a woman they’re not involved with. They just won’t go for it. Usually it’s ’cause they’re worried that someday they’re gonna have responsibilities shoved down their throat that they didn’t count on. If I were straight, I might just pick a likely bloke and jump him, that’s how desperate I am.”

“What prompted this whole ‘love child’ line of conversation, anyway?” Lili asked.

“Dad was saying he fell in love with my mom right here in the Beckett Garden,” Isabel said.

“Why would a garden in France be named after an Englishman?” asked Jason.

Lili smiled. “If you’re referring to the Archbishop of Canterbury, I’m afraid you’re mistaken, although it’s a common assumption. This garden was actually named after David Beckett Roussel.”

“I recognize that name,” said Jason, who looked as if he were trying to place it.

“Dav—Roussel was one of the foremost British landscape architects of the nineteenth century,” Lili said, “along with Capability Brown and Humphrey Repton. It was he who designed this garden and the other major gardens here. He renovated the courtyard and restructured most of the open land around the château. We still have his notebook of drawings and plans. It belongs to Emmett, passed down from his great-great-great-grandfather, Bartholemew Archer. You should take a look at it, Isabel, seeing as you’re an artist. It’s in the library.”

“Oh, yes, do,” said Archer, his voice sounding very raw now. “It’s really very beautiful. I’ve also got several books that he published and some others that were published about him. You’ll find them in the section of the library that houses the
administrateur
’s books, rather than
le seigneur
’s.”

“Where might that be?” she asked. “That is one huge freakin’ library.”

Darius fluttered down, circled the table to get Isabel’s attention, then flew through the dining room door and waited for her on the back of a chair.

“Whoa,” Jason said. “That rock finch just totally flew into the house. And I just said ‘totally.’ How totally embarrassing.”

He pushed his chair back, but Isabel waved him down as she rose from the table, taking her wineglass with her. “I’ll find it and shoo it out.”

As she entered the dining room, she said softly, “Lead the way.”

Darius guided her through the castle and up the winding stone stairwell in the southeast tower, which opened onto the library’s long, Persian-carpeted, cozily furnished upper gallery. He flew past the book-lined nooks along the outside wall to the large alcove at the very end, settling onto the mantel of the fireplace, its empty hearth shielded from view by a summer screen. To either side of it was an enormous leaded glass window, the left-hand one illuminating a writing desk dating back to the sixteenth century. The only other furniture was a pair of massive old green velvet couches facing each other across a slab of polished black marble scattered with books and magazines, the latter mostly British and American.

“These are my father’s books?” Isabel asked as she entered the alcove, looking around curiously. It wasn’t surprising that she didn’t know this, having avoided Grotte Cachée until her father’s illness. She scanned the books, swiftly homing in on the
R
shelves.

Darius fluttered up off the mantel and onto the writing desk. Stretching his neck, his beak tapped a couple of times on a windowpane and turned to look at Isabel, but she was too absorbed in scrutinizing book spines to notice.

He pecked harder and more persistently.

“What . . . Oh, you want out?” she asked.

Duh.

Setting her wineglass on the desk, she cracked open the window. He nodded his goodbye and flew out over the castle’s front lawn, interrupted by the gravel drive leading to the drawbridge and gatehouse. Cradled by a balmy breeze, he let it propel him around the perimeter of the castle as he considered how to amuse himself now. He could resume his human form and do some reading, he supposed, but he hated to surrender his wings on such a glorious day.

He thought about those little brown wall lizards that lived in the rock garden and were just now coming out of hibernation. On a sunny afternoon like this, there were bound to be three or four lazing around catching some rays. Of course, they’d scurry the moment they saw him, but it wouldn’t be any fun if they didn’t.

As he flew around the western range, he saw a flash of movement in a second-story window. One thing about a 300-degree range of vision—there wasn’t much that escaped your notice. The window was one of six along the west wall of the sprawling chamber that had originally been the
salle haute
—a private upper hall for the exclusive use of the
gardien.
It was one of the largest rooms in the castle, with views of the West Lawn on one side and the courtyard on the other.

In 1987, when Emmett became
administrateur
following the death of his father and Adrien Morel’s parents in the crash of the Morels’ private plane, Adrien gave him permission to turn the little-used
salle
into a gym. It had been improved upon over the years until it rivaled the poshest health clubs in Paris and London. The sauna with its attached, ultra-luxurious steam shower were added a few years ago at Inigo’s request.

Lighting onto the windowsill, Darius saw that the movement had been the opening of a door. He watched as Inigo led Chloe into the big, mirrored room by a chain attached to a steel collar around her neck.

She was dressed in a tightly laced red vinyl waist cincher accessorized with matching opera-length gloves, black fishnets, red stiletto heels, and a red ball gag. In her hands were a roll of black bondage tape and a bottle of lube; Inigo never went anywhere without his lube.