Whispers of the Flesh Read Free Page B

buff during Slave Week, when Sir E_____ took me dogways before the entire company of masters and slaves. As I lie upon the glacial sheets of my marriage bed, with that dusty old goat snorting and twitching atop me, I relive every detail—me stark naked with my face pressed to that scratchy wool rug and my arse in the air, hands clasped dutifully behind my neck, Sir E_____ blindfolded and trying to guess who I was by the feel of my chink. He said he would make me come so as to identify me by my voice, do you remember? I can still feel his fingers on my cherry pit, diddling away while he fucked me silly. I came with such fervor, I thought my heart would burst, and then he uncunted and I felt volleys of hot spurts all over my back and arse. Heaven! T_____ thinks himself quite the swordsman for making me spend every time. Little does he know it’s actually Sir E____ doing the deed for him.”
    What most intrigued the archbishop was Mrs. L____’s description on the next page of “that curly-haired devil with the lovely smile and towering tallywag.” It is in relation to this man that the lady writes, “I do not, as you accuse, dear M____, credit the existence of Satyrs, but I tell you I did espy, in the course of bathhouse disportments, what looked to be a tail—and I was only very slightly tipsy from the opium. Perhaps his mother, whilst in a delicate condition, received a fright from a beast with such a tail. Is it not through such maternal impression that some babes are cursed with birthmarks resembling animals, or even more monstrous disfigurements?”
    The three preceding documents represent the only extensive written accounts of unnatural doings or unclean spirits at Grotte Cachée. There is, however, one additional source of information.
    It seems that in August of 1771, a young carpenter by the name of Serges Bourgoin was hired by Lord Henry Archer, the English
administrateur
to the lady who was then mistress of Grotte Cachée, to replace a door and a pair of window shutters. About a week later, as Bourgoin and another carpenter were making repairs at the home of a local physician, the physician’s wife overheard him whispering to the other man of the bizarre and ungodly things he’d experienced at Grotte Cachée. She urged him to report these things to their parish priest. When he refused, she did so herself. Given the nature of her allegations, the fact that they were hearsay, Serges Bourgoin’s reputation for overindulgence in wine, and the lady’s own reputation as a gossip and intermeddler, the priest penned a brief memorandum of the conversation and pursued it no further.
    When I was informed that Bourgoin was still alive, I made arrangements to visit him. At eighty-five, he lives with his daughter in a nearby village, and he still enjoys his drink. Having been told this, I brought him two bottles of one of the finest local wines, from a vineyard in Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule, not far from here.
    At first, he denied having ever been to Grotte Cachée, but after I explained that I was attempting to confirm or refute the presence of demonic forces there so as to determine whether the castle or its occupants might be in need of exorcism, and that I would share his tale only with trusted ecclesiastical personages, he saw fit to confide in me. I confess, it was helpful to my purposes that he was already somewhat inebriated when I arrived that afternoon.
    I took detailed notes while Bourgoin spoke. The substance of what he related to me is this: He had arrived at Grotte Cachée to replace the door and shutters, only to be led by two Swiss Guards up a forested mountainside to a gap in a rocky outcropping. He would never have known it was there, since it was hidden behind a pair of walnut trees so huge and old, they looked to him like “the legs of giant soldiers.” From what he overheard of the guards’ conversation, he surmised that this was one of several entrances to an extensive cave system.
    The opening,