In the Garden of Sin by Louisa Burton Read Free Book Online Page A

volcano, we’d been told. Built onto its side was a colonnaded structure of white marble that glowed from within with a wavering luminescence.
    Sibylla, her hand curled around Elic’s right arm—I held his left in a rigid grip—said, “It looks like something the Romans might have built.”
    “It is, actually,” replied Inigo, who had his arms around the waists of the other two novices. He’d told us he relished the opportunity to practice his favorite language, English, which he spoke, curiously enough, with a British rather than Frenchaccent. “There was a Roman villa here for about three hundred years following the Gallic Wars, a sort of pleasure retreat for an important family. They built this bathhouse to take advantage of a cave stream they felt had mystical qualities.”
    “Did it?” Lucy asked.
“Does
it?”
    “Why don’t we all have a dip,” he suggested, “and ye can decide for yourselves.”
    Of course
, I thought. “A dip” meant disrobing, and this was, after all, to be our first lesson in “the arts of the bedchamber.”
    The footmen stood to either side of the bathhouse’s arched doorway as we filed inside, to murmurs of awe from the novices, for the golden radiance was the product of scores of candles, a hundred or more, their flames trembling all around us. Some sat on low wrought-iron tables, but most had melted in place on little natural shelves and depressions on the rear wall, which of course was part of the mountain to which the bathhouse was appended.
    Colorful pillows were scattered all about, and there were trays of brandywine and sack near the square marble pool, from which a haze of steam rose into the cool night air. A large section of ceiling over the pool was open to the night sky, the roof’s remaining perimeter being buttressed by four columns, one near each corner of the pool.
    Adjoining each column was a life-size marble statue of a nude couple, which I took at first for a god and goddess— Venus and Adonis, perhaps, given the amorous poses. But upon closer inspection, I saw that the poses weren’t so much amorous as lascivious, being representations of explicit sexual union, and not just of normal intercourse. Two depicted what I now knew to be lovemaking in the French manner as described to me by the other novices that afternoon, the male being the recipient in one instance and the female in the other.
    And the couple—it was the same man and woman in eachsculpture—was clearly not meant to portray Venus and Adonis, nor any of the pantheon of Roman deities. The female was voluptuous but otherwise unremarkable; however, the male had stubby horns and slightly pointed ears showing through his head of short, coiled curls, and a slender tail with a little tuft of hair on the end. He also possessed a colossal male appendage that was depicted in the erect state, something I’d never before seen in a work of art—or anywhere else, of course. The organ in question reared up in the air, which I assumed at the time to be, along with its size, a comically absurd exaggeration meant to convey outsized erotic appetites. After all, this was no god but a satyr.
    Looking away from the statues so as to collect myself, I noticed an irregular, doorlike opening in the wall of mossy rock, and ventured closer to peer into it.
    “’Tis our cave,” Elic said when he saw what had drawn my attention, “the hidden grotto for which our little valley was named.”
    He advised me not to venture too far into this
grotte cachée
, should I choose to explore it during my stay, no farther than the cressets illuminating the first quarter mile or so. “Not only does it get deucedly dark in there,” he said, “and labyrinthine as well, but some people experience a certain derangement of the senses within its walls, what we call
le magnétisme hallucinatoire
. I’m told it can oft be felt here in the bathhouse as well. Occasionally a visitor will feel it in the castle itself, because it was