Whispers of the Flesh (20 page)

Chloe nodded as if to say
You haven’t heard that?

The three of them came at roughly the same time amid a chorus of groans, Inigo ejaculating onto Chloe’s throat and upper chest. As Elic withdrew his cock, dripping with his extra-thick semen, she twitched her hips as if begging to have it back.

“You’re not sore?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“All right, then,” he said as he stroked his erection back to life.

“Told you, man,” Inigo said as he reached for his tequila. “Inde-fuckin-fatiguable.”

Adrien Morel stood outside Emmett’s library alcove with that day’s
Le Monde
and a cup of coffee, watching Isabel, sitting on a sofa with her back to him, leaning over a book in her lap.

She hadn’t heard him approach, the carpet having muffled his footsteps. He told himself he should turn and walk away before she realized he was there. Her emotions were getting enough of a workout right now, what with her father’s condition; she didn’t need him injecting himself into the mix.

He’d just about decided that he really should leave when a cloud drifted somewhere far overhead, and a bolt of sunlight streamed through the window and touched her hair, and he found himself utterly transfixed.

Isabel’s hair, looped with a covered rubber band into a prettily disheveled pseudochignon, had darkened only slightly from the cool platinum it had been as an adolescent. Adrien recalled having been captivated by it during that Christmas break she’d spent at Grotte Cachée when she was sixteen and he not quite eighteen. He used to catch himself gazing at it during those long hours they’d spent sitting around talking and listening to music, marveling at its pale, silken sheen.

Once she caught him staring and blushed, but he still couldn’t look away, so struck was he by the contrast, at her hairline, of her scalding pink skin against the silver-blond roots of her hair.

Isabel turned a page of her book, whispered, “Holy shit,” then gave her cheek a little slap. “Fucking potty mouth.”

Adrien chuckled.

She turned and looked at him over her shoulder, stared for a second. “How long have you been standing there?”

“Not long. I just came up here to read the paper, then I’ll be heading back to the lodge to finish scanning some scrolls for
L’histoire
.” The
Histoire Secrète de Grotte Cachée
was a project Adrien had launched some time ago, an attempt to take the written accounts of his ancestors and combine them into one comprehensive, multivolume document for the benefit of future
gardiens
and
administrateurs.

Apologize for the intrusion and leave,
he told himself. “What are you reading?” he asked, coming close enough to look over her shoulder.

She closed and held up the book, which was about twelve inches square and bound in age-softened black leather with the initials D.B.R. tooled on the front.

“Ah, the Beckett notebook. It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at that. May I?” He gestured toward the couch.

“Sure,” she said, holding the volume to her chest. “Of course.”

She was wearing big, dangly, primitive silver earrings that should have looked all wrong with her sleeveless white blouse and tan shorts, but instead looked just perfect. Her skin was like cream except for rosy-gold sun stains across the bridge of her nose, the upper ridges of her cheekbones, and her shoulders. Would those spots feel hot to the touch, he wondered, if he were so foolish as to reach out and stroke them?

As he sat—careful to maintain his distance from her—Adrien noticed the stack of books on the table: three biographies of Beckett, one published in the nineteenth century, two in the twentieth; a modern, limited edition set of his four books about landscape design in a slipcase, although they had the first editions as well; and an original edition—there had only been one—of the obscure but intriguing
Dæmonia.

“Making a study of David Beckett, are we?” Adrien asked as he set down his coffee cup and newspaper.

“Why do you call him by his middle name?” Isabel asked. “And that terrace garden is called the Beckett Garden. Shouldn’t it be the Roussel Garden?”

“Beckett is the name he went by when he came here in eighteen twenty-nine,” Adrien said. “He was posing as a, well what we now call a landscape architect in English, and he had a genuine love for that field of work, but he was actually a Jesuit demon hunter who’d been sent by the Church.”

“Ah, I’d wondered what that book about demons was doing mixed in with all these books about gardening.”

“That one,” Adrien said, nodding toward the Beckett notebook still pressed protectively to Isabel’s chest, “has got to be the rarest and most valuable book in your father’s collection.”

Lowering the book to her lap, Isabel opened it almost reverently. “When I was a little girl,” she said, “we had an encyclopedia that had anatomy illustrations with transparent overlays showing, like, the bones over the organs and the muscles over the bones. I used to spend hours looking at those pictures, flipping the overlays back and forth. This book reminds me of that. The paintings are amazing—so detailed, but so vigorous and colorful. And I can’t stop looking at the little maps, you know, the garden plans, and comparing them to how those gardens look now. The whole thing just blows me away.”

Adrien said, “What was it that provoked that heartfelt ‘holy shit’?”

“Let me find it again.” Isabel leafed through the book slowly, so as not to damage the brittle old pages. The front section was composed of notes and fastidiously inked plans showing layouts of Beckett’s proposed gardens and parklands. Following that were twelve watercolor illustrations of different vantage points around the château and grounds as they had existed in 1829. Tipped in over each illustration was a painting on translucent vellum showing how that particular view would look after its suggested overhaul.

Isabel stopped at one of these before-and-after illustrations and handed him the book, saying “The difference is unbelievable. It doesn’t look like the same space at all.” He caught a whiff of her perfume, the same scent she’d worn last August—earthy, complex, not sweet, but deeply feminine all the same.

“Ah, the courtyard.” Adrien lifted the overlay very carefully, cringing at its muted crackle. The painting beneath was an overhead view—from the northwest tower, he would guess—of the castle’s central court as it had looked before its Beckett-inspired overhaul. The fountain, with its sculpture of a couple making love beneath a stream of water from a jug held by a servant girl, was the same, but it was otherwise bare except for a perimeter of box hedges.

He lowered the overlay and smoothed it down, marveling at the transformation. It was one of Beckett’s more symmetrical designs, with a walkway of volcanic paving stones spanning the length of the courtyard from the gatehouse to the great hall’s majestic doorway in the north range. In the middle of the courtyard, this central aisle was interrupted by the fountain, which it circled. Branching off from this circle were smaller paths laid out in a knotlike pattern,
un hommage
to the decorative style of Grotte Cachée’s Gaulish forebears. In the grassy spaces between the knots stood twenty-four cherry trees, depicted in full bloom. Stone benches were situated here and there along the paths and on either side of the fountain.

“The courtyard is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been,”Isabel said. “Seriously, it’s one of my favorite places in the world. And this picture—I mean, it could have been painted this afternoon. It still looks exactly like this after, what—a hundred and eighty years?”

“Especially with the cherry trees being in bloom,” Adrien said.

She said,“I assume Roussel—or Beckett, or whatever you want to call him—came back to supervise the execution of his designs.”

Shaking his head as he handed back the book, Adrien said, “Your ancestor, Bartholemew Archer, saw Beckett’s plans through to completion—all of them, down to the last detail. Beckett himself never came back to Grotte Cachée. About a year after he returned to England, he married the daughter of one of his landscaping clients, Wilhemina Rhodes, and fathered quite a brood of children.”

Smiling, Isabel said, “One of his books is dedicated to ‘My darling Mina.’ Not all of the plans were implemented, though.”

“Yes, they were,” Adrien said. “The landscaping, the courtyard, the hunting lodge, the Beckett Garden, the rock garden . . .”

“But not
this
garden.” She turned to the plan toward the front of the book for the walled garden labeled
Sub Rosa
in Beckett’s distinctive, angular hand. “I’ve never seen this one.”

“That’s because it was never meant to be seen. In former times, if private matters were to be discussed, a rose would be hung overhead so that everyone would know that the meeting was ‘under the rose,’ or confidential.”

“Are you saying this is, like, a
secret
garden?”

Nodding, he said, “It’s hidden deep in the woods to the north, about halfway between here and the lodge.”

“Seriously?” She looked back down at the precisely inked layout in the book, her eyes glittering.

Her excitement was contagious. “Would you like to see it?” he asked.

“
Hell,
yeah,” she said, springing to her feet. “I mean,
heck,
yeah. But I feel guilty keeping you from your work. You could, um, give me directions, and I could just—”

“You’d never find it on your own, and it’s not an imposition. I’ll enjoy it.” Adrien stood and started to hold out his hand, then withdrew it, hoping she hadn’t noticed.

“This is unbelievable,” Isabel said as Adrien led her through the gate in the stone wall enclosing the secret garden, the wall itself so thick with foliage and vines that it was almost indistinguishable from the surrounding forest.

He took her on a tour of the garden: the koi pool with its scattering of lily pads, the fanciful corner turrets, the statues and birdbaths nestled among tangles of fragrant roses . . .

“How come you never showed me this when I was here that Christmas?” she asked. “We skied all through these woods.”

“No way to get here on skis,” he said. “There are no paths leading here.”

“Right . . . So then, how do they get lawn mowers in here to cut the grass?”

“It’s done with scythes,” he said.

“Seriously.” Isabel kicked off her sandals and walked around a bit with an expression of childlike wonder, as if trying to determine whether scythe-cut grass felt different underfoot than mower-cut grass.

Sitting on the stone lip of the pool, she said, “Those are some big freakin’ carp. And the water’s so clear.”

“It’s well filtered.”

Dipping her hand in, she said, “Oh, it feels awesome. I thought it’d be cold, but it’s just right.” She trailed her fingers back and forth through the water, a speculative gleam in her eyes. With an impish grin, she said, “You think these fish would mind a little company?”

“What, you want to swim?”

“It’s not big enough to swim in, but a little dip to cool off?” She stood up and began undoing the buttons of her blouse. “I don’t know about you, but I’m really feeling the heat after that hike through the woods.”

He imagined the two of them in the water together, naked and alone in this remote, sunny little oasis in the midst of an ancient forest. It made him think about the bathhouse last August, and the hunger that had flared between them with such pure, sweet, violent force. It had been the most powerful lovemaking he’d ever experienced, an explosion of passion . . .

Followed by stinging regret.

Her smile faded as he stood there in idiotic, conflicted silence. God, how he wanted her. It might not be wise, but since when had reason not been at odds with desire?

She looked down and started rebuttoning her blouse.

He started toward her. “Isabel . . .”

“Nah, dumb idea.” She turned and headed toward the entrance to the garden, still buttoning. “Anyway, I should really be getting back. It’s almost teatime. Dad will expect me.”

“No, wait. We can . . .”
Merde.
“We, um, we can walk back together. You won’t know the way.”

“I paid attention, and you’ve got work to do. Catch you later,” she said as she strode through the gate.

“Isabel,” he said.

She didn’t turn around.

He didn’t follow her.

Four

T
HANKS FOR KNEECAPPING ol’ Bernie in there,” I told Madeleine as she guided me out into the courtyard. “You should have let me take him outside, though. Might have relaxed me a little to punch his lights out.”

“He would have peed his pants if you’d called him out,” she said. “You do realize he had no clue you were heading in that direction.”

“You think?”

“I know.” She stopped walking and faced me, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand. “Please tell me those cigarettes in your back pocket are American.”

I produced my Marlboros and shook out two.

“There
is
a God,” she said.

I touched a match to her cigarette, which crackled as it ignited. With her absurdly high platform sandals, she was as tall as I was.

She inhaled with an expression of bliss. “It would have been shorter to take you to the gate tower through the corridor inside, but I wanted a smoke, and I don’t like to smoke in other people’s houses.”

“Me, neither.”

She sat on a stone bench in the shade of a cherry tree, crossed her long legs, put her head back, closed her eyes, and savored her little taste of tar and nicotine from the good ol’ U.S. of A. I leaned against the tree trunk to light my own cigarette.

I could see what Emmett meant about the Botticelli thing, especially the hair, which was a hot n’ spicy ginger. She had a classic redhead’s complexion, skim milk with freckles spattered just about everywhere, even on her eyelids. Her eyelashes were long and coppery.

She glowed.

Madeleine’s style of dress was hippie chic without that fresh-from-the-dustbin look that distinguished her friends’ attire. From how she’d dressed that weekend, I guessed she shopped in boutiques rather than thrift shops. Today, for example, she was wearing a long, slinky blue dress with dramatically flared sleeves. It had a bodice that laced up in front, exposing a good three-inch-wide gap of flesh all the way down to her waist. On a woman who was really stacked, it might have looked like she was selling it by the hour, but Madeleine’s breasts were small, with no cleavage to interrupt that smooth white band of skin. Her nipples pushed hard against the slick material of the dress.

Without opening her eyes, she blew out a stream of smoke and said, “Bernie’s a little boy. Just a rich, coddled little boy who has no idea what grown-up men are all about.”

“You two break up?”

She nodded. “Last night.”

I thought about Emmett, hoping he’d materialize soon so he could snap her up before Pieter beat him to it.

She slitted her eyes open and looked at me. “Most people would ask why.”

He took a puff. “None of my business.”

She looked away to tap her ash on the ground, didn’t look back. “I walked in on him fucking Mindy Black last night in our room, on our bed. He wasn’t even that flustered. He said, ‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this whole establishment monogamy thing,’ without even . . . I mean, while he was still inside her. I closed the door, and I could hear them starting right up again, the bedsprings squeaking, you know. And I heard them laughing.” That last sentence kind of crumbled apart wetly.

I pushed away from the tree. “You okay?”

She took a drag on her cigarette and looked at me, pink splotches on her cheeks, her eyes a little too shiny. “So I went to Pete McCormack’s room and fucked him.”

“Oh.”

“He’s from back home. He’s pre-med at Columbia. He’s gonna fucking
do
something with his life. He’s gonna be a
man.
”

“Mm.”

“I mean, not that I want a relationship with him, or anything like that, but you know what I mean.”

“Sure.”
Not really.

She looked away again and took another drag. “He thought he could keep me from getting pregnant by”—she mimed quotation marks with her fingers—“realigning my chakras.”

“Star—uh, Bernie?”

She nodded. “So he wouldn’t have to use a rubber. He doesn’t like rubbers, he doesn’t like diaphragms. Interferes with spontaneity, he says. Spoiled little shit. He wants me to—
wanted
me to go on the pill, but it makes me fat, so that’s not gonna happen, and I hear it hurts like hell to get an IUD. And I
will
not do it without birth control. Never have, never will. Even last night, the pissed-off rebound sex with Pete, he grabbed a Trojan off the nightstand, I didn’t even have to ask. I mean, I know they’re only eighty-five percent effective, but I’m guessing that’s about eighty-five percent
more
effective than that chakra shit.”

“I’m guessing you’re guessing right.” Was I really having this conversation with this woman I’d just met three days ago and barely even spoken to until ten minutes ago?

She looked at me. “Were you really a POW?”

“No, I just made that up to get over with girls.”

“Was it awful?”

I shrugged as I drew on my cigarette. “Beautiful downtown Hanoi. What’s not to like?”

Awful.
What did that mean to a girl like this? A broken nail? A pretentious asshole of a boyfriend? Because of the gag order imposed on the released prisoners, even Emmett didn’t know the half of it—the black box, the leg irons, the dysentery . . . I hadn’t wanted to leave before the other guys, but given that I was delirious and emaciated, with unset fractures from that marathon, disastrous ass-kicking and two dislocated shoulders from the “Vietnamese rope trick”—punishments for a misbegotten escape attempt—I was given zero say in the matter. Three months in the hospital, and I was good as new—or at least, I could fake it pretty well if you didn’t know the full story.

Madeleine looked at me as if she were trying to read my thoughts, and maybe she did, because she said, “Do you have a girlfriend, Hitch?”

In my mind’s eye, I saw Lucinda’s last letter to me, written in her tidy, straight up-and-down handwriting on the pale green writing paper with the ferns around the margins.

Dear Rob,

You’re wrong. We can make this work. You love me, you’ve told me so countless times. And you know how I feel about you. I think I’ve made that pretty clear in my letters, and of course in person before you went to London. If we really do love each other, that’s all that matters, not whether the marriage will be “real” by some screwed-up standard that means nothing to me and should mean nothing to you. I’ve spent so many months writing to you, begging you not to break off the engagement, waiting for you to come to your senses. I can’t keep doing this forever. At a certain point, I just start feeling . . . I don’t know, pathetic and clingy, I guess.

God, what did they do to you in that prison? I know the outcome, but I don’t know how it happened. Obviously it was a nightmare, the whole experience. I know you can’t talk about it, but I wish I knew. Maybe then I’d be able to figure out how to get through to you.

In the meantime, this is it, Rob. I’m going to do what you’ve been asking me to do. I’m going to stop writing. But I’m not going to stop loving you, ever. And I’m not going to stop praying that you’ll see the light and come back to me.

                                                                        
All my love forever,

                                                                        
Lucinda

“No,” I said. “No girlfriend.”

“You didn’t hear his message?” asked Julien Morel as he came out from behind the gigantic desk in his study, a sun-drenched room hung with paintings and medieval tapestries.

“What message?” I asked.

Crossing to his stereo to turn down the Miles Davis album he was playing, Morel said, “Emmett, he called your room and left a message on your . . . How do you say it?
Répondeur
.”

“Answering machine,” Madeleine said. Each luxuriously appointed bedroom in the château was equipped with a wooden-cased device that I’d taken for a reel-to-reel tape player, until I saw the name
PHONE•MATE
on it and noticed that it was, indeed, connected to the telephone.

“Ah,”
Morel smiled at her.
“Parlez-vous français?”

“J’ai étudié le français à l’école.”
She gave him a shyly sweet smile that made me think,
Oh, man, maybe ol’ Bernie was right. Maybe
les femmes
really did love zee French accent.

It wasn’t just the accent. Morel was charming and aristocratic, and a good-looking guy despite, or maybe even because of, his prematurely gray hair.

“In my house,” Morel said, “there is a problem with, er . . .
l’électricité.
This morning, I leave to come here, and is fine, but then Élise—Madame Morel, my wife—she calls to say it stopped working. Is very old, the wires and the fuse box. I know nothing of such things, but Emmett tell me he knows a little, and will try to fix, or get someone else to fix.”

I told him I hadn’t been back to my room since early that morning, so I didn’t get the message. Meanwhile, I was thinking
Great, now what’ll I do all day? Play solitaire and drink myself into a coma?

“Élise, she is nervous to be without the lights when the sun go down,”Morel said. “Our house, is in the woods, and get very dark. And
l’électricité
is needed for the stove and the hot water. If it is just she and I, is not such a problem. We come here. But there is Adrien, our son. He is
un bébé,
eight months old. We do not like him here with . . . the guests.”

“Can’t say as I blame you,” I said.

“What are you typing?” Madeleine asked, looking at the IBM Selectric on his desk, which he’d been pecking away at when they came in.

“Correspondance,”
he said. “This and that.”

“I could give you a hand with it,” she offered. “I type fifty words a minute.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “You have your friends . . .”

“They’ve started to bore me. Seriously, I can type your letters as you dictate them. You’ll be amazed at how fast it’ll go, and then maybe you can help me with my French.”

There came a little grunt that drew their attention to a nearby windowsill on which a gray cat was lounging in the sun, watching them with a languid feline smile.

“Well, who are you?” asked Madeleine, reaching out to pet it.

Morel grabbed her arm as the animal shot to its feet, hissing furiously.

“Jesus!” She would have fallen over as she stumbled back, thanks to those ridiculous shoes, had Morel not maintained his grip on her arm.

“He is very unhappy to be touched,” the Frenchman said.

“God, he scared the hell out of me,” Madeleine said. “Feel how hard my heart’s pounding.” She took his hand and pressed it to the bare flesh between her breasts.

He met her gaze.

“Your hand is so warm,”she said. “You don’t have a fever, do you?” With her free hand, she stroked his forehead, and smiled. “Just one of those hot-blooded Frenchmen, huh?”

Taking that as my cue, I excused myself, leaving Julien Morel to decide for himself whether to take the enticing redhead up on her offer—and wondering if it was such a good idea for Emmett to pounce, after all.