Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories (15 page)

THE ROOKERY

Jess Wells

T
HE BIRDS IN THE ROOKERY
know when royal sex is being had. They puff out their chests, molt violently, and dig their talons into the perch posts. The dust and mites fill the air to choking. Even when hooded, if there’s sex going on, the hawks are agitated. The falcons burst into screeching—not a sound you want to hear indoors ringing off stone walls.

Unless you’re my father, Grand Falconer. The head of the hunt team and an honored man in the Duke’s employ, he revels in the screeching and mayhem as clues to a puzzle he is determined to crack. He sits at the right hand of the Duke, on par with his Secretary of State and his chief diplomat. My father’s leather is imported from Spain, and he owns four pairs of boots. But since my mother’s death decades ago, he paces like the birds, drinking mead, standing hours into the night with his hands folded over the head of a walking stick that is pressed into the side of his balls. He surveys his birds and imagines wet cunt and sweat. The servants sweep up the feathers in the morning.

You can’t blame him or the rest of us on the hunt team for trying to make sense of the sexual mayhem. The birds are our plow horses, our arrows. We are hunters for the Duke’s lodge, and our job is to tend the hawks and falcons—no easy task—and it’s much like being devoted to the fine dance of pampering and mastery that is sex with women. The birds are temperamental, fragile, ferocious, required. If we feed them too much, they will not hunt—so their hunger must be orchestrated. We have brothers across the hall who tend the hunting dogs, close companions to the bird. You send the dog out to find the game; the dog goes on point, you unleash the bird, it hovers in a triangle above the dog—and on your command, the dog flushes, the game rises, the hawk dives down to snatch the prey. There’s no mercy. Your part is to intercept the bird before it devours too much of what it has caught and leaves none for the table. You feed it bits of rabbit to distract it. And the hunter, for his part, returns with blood on his glove, a sated bird, proud dog, vanquished game. You look powerful, but it’s the hunger of the bird, the nose of the dog.

When the Duke is here, the birds even hunt differently. They soar higher and dive as if performing. They overshoot the target and then loop back as if teasing. When they land on their prey, you have to run harder than any other day because the birds are relentless to satisfy themselves.

My father and I were the only ones who knew of the connection between the birds and the women. The falconry team believed it was just general chaos when the Duke and his entourage arrived four times a year for the hunt. They thought the birds must be smelling the perfume, or the improvement in dinner fare, or the sound of decorations unboxed. My father taught me privately that the royal Falcon, prized by the Duke, was attuned to the pleasure of the Duchess, and that each of the ladies-in-waiting had a corresponding bird that signaled her readiness to be bedded. It paid to know this, he instructed, since the Duke and Duchess always traveled with more women than men and some of us in a higher station could find ourselves the cause of a bird’s distress. Best to know which lady was available, as soon as possible.

In building his system, my father sent servants into the hallways to listen at doors, paid the chambermaids for information, and finally grew bold enough to offer the guests a ceremonial display of the birds, where the ladies were asked to “inspect the hunt team” by walking past each of the hooded birds in display on the grounds. The Duke, thinking it grand, allowed the ceremony anytime a new woman joined his entourage. I kept careful notes, and my father directed our activities with them.

In the last few years we’ve cut a fine pair, a team: my father is broad shouldered and dark, trim and fit for a man of his years, and he is fond of elegance and silver. I have my mother’s coloring, a wheat-stalk of a man, my father’s height, with blond hair that I keep long—bound with leather straps down my back. We have hawkeyes in common, though, set the same, dark and piercing. When we stand together our eyes sweep the scene in unison. My father would approach the newly arrived grand dame of the entourage while I slid up beside a lesser lady-in-waiting. We kept our birds on opposite ends of the rookery to prevent them from setting off the entire flock.

When the Duke wasn’t in residence, my father would travel to other towns to balls and feast days. He would return with the smell of women on his doublet and gloves, and his own bird—a goshawk with a splendid wingspan who had broken through cages on three occasions when my father was fucking. She had been losing her mind all evening and would require my father to softly talk her into settling down for the night.

But in the last year, all that changed. Others thought my father’s walking stick was an affectation, but I knew that it hid a bad knee sprain that wouldn’t heal. My father rarely hunts with us now, just inspects the operation and trains me in court etiquette, buying me stitched shoes and sending me alone to court events. He’s growing thick through the middle from inactivity—and two months ago at dinner with the Duke, I caught my father digging in his back teeth in pain. Now when I return to our rooms, he’s either fully dressed and pacing, or doubled over a soup bowl with a shawl like a broken old man.

Last week he changed our sexual teamwork as well, sending me out to call on a fine woman, then swooping into my private meeting, over-dressed, bowing with great drama, and sending me away. I sat all night glowering at the histrionics of his bird, and when he appeared before daylight, I was so drunk I could barely lift my head above my tankard. I am already twenty-eight years old, far older than my father was when he became Grand Falconer. I’ve been second in command a long time. This clearly wasn’t teamwork.

“So I’ve become your bird dog, have I?” I snarled at him. “Sending me out to flush the quarry?”

He threw his gloves on the table and took over my tankard. “The Duke is having the legs of your chair cut down so you don’t tower over him.” He set the tankard down. “You can afford to be generous.”

But I didn’t feel generous. In the last few months, my father had come home from a tryst with a limp. He had called off a rendezvous because of indigestion. When he was being rebuffed (for the first time in his life, perhaps), he blustered and swore and finally went out for the tavern whores in town. His conquests were desperate and pathetic.

* * *

That was the spring when I saw Brigit de Pitanne at banquet. Courtiers said that her family was Italian, that she had just come of age and joined the Duke’s entourage in its last swing through Paris. She had jet-black hair, dark eyes, olive skin. She was buttery and young, heavy enough to be healthy without signs of excess. She dressed simply, a respectable girl, but one who was so young, flushed, flawless, that she had no idea of her own allure. She ate her dinner as a girl would—to eat—not as a woman would—to entice. I cautiously watched her grandmother in too many layers of threadbare clothes, her aunt, nervous and demanding. Young Brigit was as oblivious as a bauble at her family’s wrist.

I don’t make a habit of younger women. “Never the fawn,” my father would say. I’m fond of the homely lady-in-waiting who is happy for attention, the matron who has resigned herself to a sexless middle age, the widow whose sense of propriety prolongs the seduction.

And in each case, the secrecy of the tryst was feted like our precious child, receiving as much attention as we gave each other.

But I’m a hunter, and my father’s son, and therefore more interested in the chase than the quarry. I’ve been accused by my fellow hunters of being too fond of the power involved in these affairs, but perhaps those critics should become farmers. For a hunter, it’s the tension before the release. It is the nature of the male animal who is built like arrow and bow in one. Sex is not the steady, unimpeded flow of an old creek. It is the dam and the sluice gates. And with my lovers—well treated, each of them—it was the moment they shut the sluice that I remember best. When the Widow d’Anju slid away from me along the garden wall, I heard her gown scrape against the brick and the smell of moss stayed in my nostrils every time we made love. What I remember about the Matron Simone is the rosemary in the kitchen when she first sent me away. The innocence of young women is its own refusal: the way they let cake cling to their over-full lips, the way they run like children without knowing that their breasts are bouncing the minds of every man nearby.

I approached Brigit in the garden as she was tending to her two unruly cousins. Like a little girl, she didn’t back up or stiffen. I walked right up and bent to kiss her hand. She met my eyes with astonishment, then regarded her hand as if there had been honey on it—remembered herself, gathered the children up, curtsied, and hurried back to her apartments. She didn’t ask my name.

The chase was on.

What happened next I blame on my hawk, a bird so closely attuned to me that the serfs tending the birds during banquets could tell if I was drunk by the way she behaved. The day I first approached Brigit, I came back into the rookery expecting my bird to be pacing and screeching. The winter I plowed the Widow d’Anju, she molted so severely that her breast was nearly bare. My serf administered to the bird obsessively and regarded me as if I were cheating on my wife. That day I slapped my gloves on the table and turned to the hawk to share the fire in me. The birds around her were screeching over the exploits of others (where was my father, I wondered?) and one had already broken its perch. But my peregrine was oddly quiet. I felt betrayed, snubbed even.

That’s when I made my erroneous conclusion: her quietude proved that this woman was to be my wife. The bird’s serenity foretold a peaceful marriage, didn’t it? The hunt was over, the bird at rest. Brigit wasn’t a widow with complications, or a woman much older than me with grown children. She wasn’t of such high station that a match was out of the question. In asking about her, I had learned that her grandfather had been court astrologer and physician, her uncle a court scribe. Similar to my family, hers was valued for its knowledge and skill. So for the first time, I thought about marriage. In Brigit perhaps I had found someone of my own.

I didn’t expect to be overcome with a wave of relief, to suddenly have my hunter’s hunger turn to possessiveness. My bird, my Brigit, both precious and fragile. I ran my hands down my hawk’s cage. My father came up behind me and regarded the bird with curiosity as well.

“Requesting permission to marry, sir,” I said, and my father jerked his head back in surprise, then turned back to my hawk.

“Here’s proof it’s the wrong choice.” He took his seat at the table.

“No, proof it’s the perfect decision,” I blurted. I seized on the logic of it. We weren’t sure why the birds went mad when we bedded women, but maybe it was jealousy. If so, my bird’s peace meant that this woman belonged in the family.

My father, however, would hear none of it. “Whoever she is, she’s not right for you, son.” He paced in front of the cage, checked the bird’s droppings, questioned the serfs on her water ration. I described Brigit’s family, her beauty and youth.

“You’re going to give it all up, for one woman?” He paced the room, and his limp seemed more pronounced. “Well, I suppose you wouldn’t have to be true.”

“Of course I’d be true to my wife.”

My father redoubled his protests. I saw that it wasn’t my attachment to Brigit, but his own failing libido that frightened him. If the women wouldn’t have him and I married, what would his life look like? I wouldn’t seduce at his side, I wouldn’t turn over my ladies to him, he couldn’t even vicariously enjoy my exploits. He would be the old man under the shawl slurping broth.

There was something about my father’s unease that pleased me. I hadn’t minded in the past when he had been privy to my activities by reading my hawk. But now it seemed intrusive, a little sadistic to cackle over the bird’s distress. The privacy of this new life appealed to me.

But my father’s concern also gave me the itch. I went into the kitchens where the bakery girls were setting up yeast for the morning bread and found Marie, who would have me on occasion if the mood struck her, or if she hoped to marry up by conceiving my child. She would only take my cock standing up in the wood-drying alcove behind the ovens where the flames made the walls gold. I suspected that there was usually an audience, some servant boy who pledged love and got off on the display. Marie gripped me deep inside her, and as I sweated in the baking heat her muslin skirts billowed little clouds of flour. Her cleavage tasted like butter—and whenever the Duke was in residence, of nutmeg.

As I passed the rookery on my way to bed, my hawk screeched and rattled her cage.

In the morning I began my pursuit of Brigit. I did it with a slaked thirst that I thought was important for clarity. I saw her in the far gardens and I was flooded with desires I hadn’t expected. I coveted her firm breasts pressed into my back every night, to wake up with my shaft hard and her wet thigh slung over my hip. I wanted to drive into her half-asleep in the middle of the night without saying a word, for her to pour hot water into my bath and reach through the suds to my balls. Not the hunt, but the feast afterward. I wanted the sexual gluttony of marriage.

The Duke’s garden is a long strip leading at the end to a gate to the forest. But it is poorly laid out with a flower bed barrier down the middle. Brigit paced with wide steps, holding the sides of her gown above the grass. I realized I was on the wrong side, so I broke through the rose bushes, tearing my hands in the process. Brigit’s aunt was sitting on a bench lost in contemplation.

“You’ve made me lose count, sire,” she said. There was no innocent surprise on her face, no childish awe, and the transformation took me aback.

“Count of what?”

“The garden. Know you the length of this garden?”

“Long enough for a fine stroll.”