House of Dark Delights (22 page)

She continued on, looking out for a nest in one of the nooks and crannies in the stone wall, only to stop short, gaping in stupefaction, when she rounded the bend. The corridor opened up into a cavernous gallery, the walls of which were lined, floor to ceiling and wall to wall, with books.

She stepped into the gallery and held her lantern aloft, turning around to take it all in—thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of volumes lined up on wooden shelves looming a good fifteen feet high against the cave walls. An armchair upholstered in age-crackled leather stood in a corner with a frayed needlepoint footstool tucked up against it, a reading lamp on a little marble table off to the side. The only other furniture was a rolling ladder of the type they had in the Cornell library, so that one could reach the volumes stored on the top shelves. The gallery was devoid of decoration save for a large tapestry on the opposite wall, very old—it looked as if it might date from the Renaissance—which hung all the way to the floor.

Catherine heard an irate little chirrup and looked up to see her avian tormentor sitting on a bank of unlit pendant lamps hanging from a chain strung between two stalactites. Brandishing her walking stick with mock ferocity, she said, “You'll keep your distance if you know what's good for you.”

As if it had understood her, it responded with a battery of screeches and a furious batting of its wings.

“I'm bigger than you,” she told it petulantly as she strolled around the strange library, scanning the titles stamped on the spines of the books. “
You
leave.”

One wall held various sacred texts, Bibles, and works of comparative religion, philosophy, and theology. There were herbals and pharmacopeias, and innumerable history books going back hundreds of years—including quite a few medieval tomes inked on parchment and bound between leather- and silk-covered boards.

Another type of book that was represented in significant numbers, Catherine was intrigued to discover, had to do with matters of an amatory nature. These were arranged not by author, as was the rest of the collection, but by date of publication. The earliest were some very old anthologies in Latin of the verses of Sappho and Catullus, as well as a number of volumes that appeared to be of Oriental and Indian origin. The rest had dates on the title pages that fell within the past two hundred years.

Catherine looked for books written in the languages she was most conversant in, French and English, and thumbed through a few of them: Jean Barrin's
Venus dans la Cloître,
John Cleland's
Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,
Giovanni Giacomo Casanova's
Mémoires de J. Casanova de Seingalt.
She was surprised to recognize one of the books, an academic treatise by Richard Payne Knight titled
A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus,
from her father's library at home. Toward the end of the last shelf was a set of English magazines, about a dozen and a half, called
The Pearl.
The last and most recent volume in this group, Sir Richard Burton's translation of
The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana,
had been published a year ago.

As Catherine returned the
Kama Sutra
to its slot, she was overtaken by a wave of vertigo that left her clutching at the shelf for support. She looked about the gallery, only to see the rows of books swaying slowly, like waves rising and falling in the ocean, the tapestry fluttering and flapping. She rubbed her eyes with a trembling hand, whispering, “Hold on, Catherine, hold on. You've never been the swooning type—don't start now.”

The bird made a cackling sound, almost as if it were taunting her.

“Bugger off,” she said, then laughed in astonishment that such a rude phrase had passed her lips. What would her mother have thought?

The wooziness faded; the bookshelves stilled.

The tapestry, however, still fluttered just a bit, at the bottom. It continued to do so as Catherine slowly approached it, hoping it meant what she thought it did. “Please,” she whispered as she pulled it aside, revealing another, much smaller chamber.

The bird flew past her into the little room, where it lit on a windowlike gap in the cave wall above a narrow iron bed.

“Yes! Oh yes!” Charlotte cried as she stepped into the little bedchamber. The irregular opening really did resemble a window, flanked as it was by a pair of green-painted wooden shutters standing wide open. Through it, she saw, in the purplish twilight, the branches of trees, their leaves trembling in the cool evening breeze. She wouldn't even have to squeeze through the window, she realized when she noticed the door next to it—an actual wooden door, also painted green and fashioned to fit the irregular opening. She turned the doorknob. It was locked, but a key hung by a leather cord from a nail next to it. The shutters were likewise fitted out with a latch hook lock.

Content in the knowledge that she could leave any time she wanted to, Catherine took a moment to look around. The chamber felt remarkably cozy and homelike, with a threadbare Persian rug underfoot and a quilt draping the bed. Against one wall were a pair of shelves attached to two magnificent, tangled formations that she realized were petrified tree roots. The top shelf supported yet more books between a pair of iron candlesticks, the bottom a collection of items—jars, vials, a small scale, a mortar and pestle—that looked as if they belonged in an apothecary.

Lighting the two candles with her lantern, Catherine turned her attention to the books. She slid out the first one, almost dropping it when the little bluebird on the windowsill let out a fiercely strident scream.

“Do go away,” she muttered as she opened the cover of worn brown leather stamped SHAKESPEARE in gold on the spine. The rumpled, discolored title page featured a large etching of the likeness of the Bard below the title:

Mr. WILLIAM

SHAKESPEARS

COMEDIES,

HISTORIES &

TRAGEDIES

Published According to the True Originall Copies

At the bottom of the page were the words:

LONDON

Printed by Isaac Iaggard, and Ed. Blount, 1623.

Catherine's eyes widened. 1623? This was one of the few copies in the world of the coveted first edition of Shakespeare's collected works. She'd seen this very same book at the British Library just last week, except that it had been a third folio, published in 1664; they kept the priceless first folio under lock and key.

Slipping the book back into its space, she lifted the second, which was an exquisitely illuminated
Book of Hours
on silky vellum. Written on the flyleaf in an archaic hand, the ink rusty with age, was the inscription
Pour Darius, l'hermite qui aime des livres. Guillaume, Décembre 1505
.

Catherine worked her way down the row of books, growing ever more impressed, as the little bird continued to hector her. They were all first editions, some quite rare and valuable, the type of book one normally saw only in museums. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
had also been inscribed to “Darius” in October of 1782. A different Darius, perhaps? A many-times great-grandson of the Darius who had been gifted with the
Book of Hours
in the sixteenth century? What other logical explanation could there be?

She slid out a slim volume bound in oxblood leather, checked the date of publication—1524—and thumbed through its pages, finding it to be an illustrated book of verse in Italian. Her mouth dropped open as she realized that the engravings were all of naked men and women copulating. Their bodies—the females' as well as the males'—were meaty and lush, their positions…inventive. The only similar depictions of the sex act she'd ever seen were the statues of satyrs and nymphs in the bathhouse, and even they didn't seem as boldly lewd as these etchings, possibly because the white marble imparted an aura of cool classicism.

Catherine had seen cats and dogs mating, the male mounting the female from behind, and until recently, she'd assumed that was the standard position for human coition. But then she'd been assured by her cousin Abbie, who liked to natter on about such things in a salacious whisper, that people conducted the act face-to-face with the woman lying supine beneath the man. Other positions, Abbie had assured her, were a crime against God and nature.

“Nature doesn't judge,” Catherine had archly replied. And if there were such a thing as God, she'd thought at the time, she couldn't imagine Him judging such things, either, but she'd kept that blasphemous observation to herself.

“Well, the state judges,” Abbie had said. “People can get arrested for doing it the wrong way. And once they're dead, they'll go straight to heck. Even thinking about that sort of thing is a sin.”

If that was true, Catherine thought, then she would roast in heck for eternity, because to her, the pictures in this book were among the most fascinating she'd ever seen. They pointed up all too vividly the gaps in her knowledge of those matters one couldn't learn about in college courses and science books. Ten minutes ago, she'd had no notion of the extent of her ignorance about what men and women did together in bed. Now, that ignorance appalled her. She, a scientist who prided herself on being informed and making logical decisions, had resigned herself to lifelong virginity without the slightest knowledge of what she'd be giving up. It took a book three and a half centuries old to make her curious.

Very curious.

The little bird, as if fed up with being ignored, lifted off from the windowsill and flew around the room, screeching.

“Stop it!” Catherine yelled as it circled her, forcing her to swerve this way and that. The room shifted jerkily, as did the bird. She'd think it was in front of her, then realize it was behind her. She whirled and spun, raising her walking stick to fend it off as it flew perilously close to her head.

“Go away!” She swung the stick, hoping to scare it off, but she hadn't counted on the bird's erratic movements and her own current lack of spatial judgment. The stick struck the bird with a sickening thump.

It dropped like a brick.

“Oh!” Catherine pressed a hand to her mouth as she stood over the little creature, lying utterly still on the Persian rug next to the book she'd been looking at. “Oh, no. Oh, you poor little thing. I didn't mean to…
Damn.
”

She grabbed her lantern and crouched down for a closer look, hoping to see a flutter of movement, to hear a weak little peep,
anything.
But it just lay there, immobile and probably lifeless, its eyes fixed and glazed.

She touched its little chest very softly with her fingertips, but there wasn't the slightest hint of movement. “I'm sorry, little fellow.”

This close to the bird, and with the light from the candles and lantern, she could see that it wasn't a bluebird at all, but a blue rock thrush—a male, judging from the beautiful grayish-blue plumage.

Catherine rose to her feet, wondering what to do with it. Leaving a dead bird on the carpet of someone's home seemed like the height of rudeness. She should put it outside. In fact, sentimental though the notion was, she thought perhaps she should bury it. It had gotten pretty dark, she saw as she glanced out the window, but she did have her lantern, and perhaps she could find something to use as a shovel.

When she looked back down at the bird, it was gone.

Catherine stared at the empty expanse of carpet, as if waiting for it to magically reappear. Had it just been stunned? Perhaps, but she would have noticed, wouldn't she, if it had gotten up and flown off? How could she have missed it? Dead or living, birds didn't just vanish.

Then again, this wasn't the first strange experience she'd had since entering this cave. It was as if she'd become lost in a dream world where the physical rules didn't apply anymore. Not that that was possible. There was a logical explanation, there always was; there had to be. As her physics professor used to say, “There is a reason for everything. Just because you don't know the answer doesn't mean it's not there.”

A soft noise drew her attention to the bookshelf, where she watched the volumes she'd replaced shifting one by one in order to line up more neatly in the row. The candles extinguished themselves with a little puff of smoke, first one, then the other.

There is a reason for everything,
she told herself. She was tired. She was thirsty—hungry, too. She'd spent a stressful afternoon. Little wonder she was seeing things.

Catherine picked up the book from the carpet, and was about to replace it on the shelf when she had second thoughts. She'd barely glanced at it; when again would she have access to these kinds of revelatory images? Why not take a closer look while there was no one around to rip this font of information out of her hands and condemn her as a filthy-minded wanton on account of her very natural curiosity?

There being no chair in the room, Catherine set her lantern on the nightstand and reclined on the bed, propped on an elbow with the book open next to her. She perused it from beginning to end, studying each engraving as if it were an illustration in a biology textbook. One picture showed the couple in a luxuriously canopied bed, the woman astride the man as he inserted his erect penis into her vaginal opening. In another, the woman was again on top, but facing away from her lover, one hand gripping his erection so as to aim it between her legs. In two, the man stood while the woman reclined on a bed; in one, they coupled as animals did, he taking her from behind.

Several of the positions involved a good deal of lifting and twisting, with limbs entwined and heads thrown back in presumed ecstasy—the women included. Although Catherine had never taken Italian, it was close enough to Latin for her to make out parts of the verses, in one of which the woman was rhapsodizing about the “extraordinary pleasure” it gave her to feel the thrusting of her bedmate's penis inside her. In almost every illustration, the reproductive anatomy was depicted in frank and astounding detail—vulvas, labia, bulging scrota, rigid penises with their helmetlike tips…