House of Dark Delights (7 page)

A surge of wooziness overtook her as she gazed around at the near-black stone walls, identical to all the rest of the walls in this place. She closed her eyes, but that only made everything whirl drunkenly, so she opened them and drew in a deep breath.
Get yourself in hand, Charlotte.

No more wandering these halls feeling sorry for herself, Charlotte decided. She must find her chamber on the second floor of the northwest tower, but she couldn't begin to guess which direction she was facing at this point. There was a corner tower directly ahead of her, at the end of the hall; unfortunately, they all looked alike. If this wasn't the right one, she thought as she entered it and climbed the winding stairwell, she would simply try the next one, and the next.

It was, in fact, the wrong tower, as she discovered when she opened the door on the second-floor landing to a sitting room decked out
à la Chinois
with sumptuous, Oriental-inspired furnishings and objets d'art—the latest rage in London and Paris. In the center of the room stood an exotic lacquer-and-gilt table on which pretty little Millicent Holmes lay naked and panting, her legs draped over the shoulders of a curly-haired fellow who knelt on the floor, licking her notch as he thrust something in and out of it.

The young man, clad in nothing but his long, ruffled shirt, looked up and smiled at Charlotte while continuing to frig Millie with what appeared to be an ivory statuette. “What a delightful surprise! Come to join our little private party, have you?” He spoke like an English aristocrat, but Charlotte knew he hadn't come there with the Hellfires.

“I…no, actually, I'm just looking for my own chamber,” Charlotte said as she backed up onto the landing.

“Oh, do stay, Charlotte,” Millie breathlessly implored. “He's got more than enough pikestaff for both of us, believe me.”

“Perhaps later.” Charlotte shut the door and headed back downstairs, thinking as she did so that perhaps she'd been too hasty in rejecting the invitation. That “enhanced” wine she'd drunk earlier had begun to take effect, provoking a tingling warmth between her legs that would only grow hotter and more insistent as the evening wore on. Of course, she could simply retire to her room and bring herself off by hand, but experience had taught her that she could come a dozen times under the influence of cantharides and still be aching for more.

Charlotte thought about that handsome young buck upstairs, with his wild black ringlets and boyish smile. That shirt hid most of his body, but she could see that he had well-muscled legs and…

She paused on the stairs, frowning at the memory of something peeking out from the hem of his shirt in back, something curiously…tail-like. Not a tail, of course—it couldn't have been—but then, what…?

She shook her head, wondering if her wine had been spiked with more than just an aphrodisiac. Or perhaps there was something in the water here, or in the air, that made people's minds play tricks on them.

At the bottom of the stairwell, Charlotte paused and looked around, baffled to find herself in a narrow, unfamiliar hallway lit by a single torch. The walls and floor were of the same near-black stone as the rest of the castle, but more rough-hewn. In the floor of beaten earth was a stone-lined well, on the lip of which sat a bucket tied to a rope. Preoccupied with her thoughts, she'd evidently bypassed the first-floor landing and ended up in the cellar.

She was about to turn around and head back upstairs when she noticed, at the end of the passage, a slightly open door comprised of a thick, iron-banded slab of oak with a small, barred window carved out of it; it was the type of door one might encounter in a prison or lunatic asylum. Charlotte approached it curiously and stood on tiptoe to squint through the little window, but it was too dark on the other side to see much. Using both hands, she hauled the door open and stepped inside.

Yellow torchlight spilled through the doorway, illuminating a groin-vaulted stone undercroft with a floor of beaten earth, its six arched bays supported by a pair of massive, drumlike columns. Embedded in the columns at various heights—and in the ceiling and floor, as well—were a number of iron rings, some of them dangling chains, manacles, and foot irons. The bay in which she stood housed a long, sturdy table with a frame around the edge, fitted out with three rollers to which ropes were attached—a torture rack, Charlotte realized with a little shiver of fascination.

She circled the device, trailing her fingers over it as she recalled an etching she'd seen once of a naked young woman being stretched on the rack by a group of masked inquisitors. One of them was squeezing her nipples with pincers while another manipulated some unidentifiable device in the hairless slit between her legs. The woman had her head thrown back and her mouth open, but it was unclear whether she was crying out in pain or ecstasy—or both.

Charlotte's arousal intensified as she imagined what it must feel like to be tied up and pulled taut while nameless men did as they wished to her naked and exposed body. She would be completely at their mercy. They could use her in unspeakable ways, make her feel whatever sensation they wanted her to feel, and she would be helpless to resist. That notion should have repelled someone like Charlotte, who was accustomed to power and relished the wielding of it, yet for some reason she found it darkly exciting.

In an adjacent bay stood an old bed covered with a wool blanket, a fat coil of hemp cord looped around one of the bottom posts and a covered chamber pot tucked underneath, next to a little cluster of empty oil lamps. A collection of sinister devices sat on wooden shelves next to the bed. Charlotte recognized the thumbscrews and the spiked “cat's paw” designed to tear the flesh from bones. There was a Spanish boot, a tongue tearer, iron collars and belts, and a number of helmetlike devices meant to do unspeakable things to the wearer's head.

Most of the other implements were unfamiliar to Charlotte, although in most cases she could guess which body part they were intended to crush, pierce, or restrain. An unlabeled brown glass vial sat on the bottom shelf, the contents of which she could only begin to imagine. Poison? Flesh-eating acid? The images that came to mind sickened her.

Charlotte strolled through the rest of the cellar, whose furnishings included a hanging cage, a pillory with head and wrist holes, and an iron chair with built-in shackles. Tucked away in a far, dark corner amid a pile of straw was a low wooden stool equipped with leather restraints, a device not unfamiliar to her. There was a whipping stool in most village squares, right next to the stocks. She'd never actually seen one used, but the notion of a miscreant being bound to such a stool for a humiliating public flogging had intrigued her since adolescence. In her fantasies, the offender was always some aloof, powerful nobleman, someone like that bastard who'd sired her, then shunted her off to London the very afternoon of her mother's funeral; and she, Countess of Somerhurst, would, of course, have the honor of wielding the whip.

But now, contemplating the deceptively simple bench with its straps and buckles, Charlotte couldn't help but visualize herself being shoved to her knees by some burly peasant whose job it was to mete out justice to the black-hearted and bloodstained. She could almost feel the bite of leather around her arms and waist as he lashed them to the stool, the cool air on her naked hindquarters as he flung her skirts up so that they hung down over her head. He would yank her thighs apart to strap them to the back legs of the stool, leaving her kneeling over it with her arse lifted indecently high, like a bitch in heat.

There would come a pause. She would feel his breath on her most intimate, cruelly exposed flesh…and then would come his bemused, almost pitying chuckle. He would see how her sex lips had flushed and parted, revealing her erect little clit and dripping quim, and he would know the shameful truth—that the high and mighty Lady Somerhurst found degradation so arousing that she was on the verge of release even before the first lick of the whip.

Charlotte crossed to the whipping stool in its shadowy corner, nipples prickling against her tight-laced stays, her sex wet and inflamed. The walls in that bay were festooned with an astonishing assortment of floggers, paddles, horse crops, canes, birches—and most ominous of all, a wooden handle sprouting three lengths of heavy steel links. Chain whips were true implements of torture, devilishly efficient at tearing the flesh from the back.

What must it feel like, she wondered, to be overpowered, bound, disciplined…
used
? To be a slave to the will of another, a
thing
with no will of her own? No expectations, no decisions, no responsibility except to meekly accept the punishment that was meted out to her, knowing it was just and right; for there was blood on her hands, the blood of a life cut short through her doing. Invisible though it might be to others, it was a stain that would haunt her until the end of her days.

She ran her hand over the top of the stool, a hefty chunk of satin-smooth walnut carved with rounded edges and a downward slant meant to keep the buttocks elevated, a perfect target for the whip. The leather straps were age-worn, but thick and wide. Charlotte ached to feel their buckles digging into her as she embraced the whipping stool in a posture of abject submission.

She
could
feel it, if she really wanted to, Charlotte realized. She could bind herself to the stool, leaving just one hand free with which to ease her raging lust. There would be no sting of the whip, of course, but she could close her eyes and imagine it as she caressed herself. The cantharides would keep her in an agony of arousal for hours; the pleasure could be extraordinary.

The only problem was the position of the stool itself, which was tucked too tightly into the corner to be usable. Crouching down, the straw crackling beneath her feet, she gripped it from underneath. As she started to lift it, something furry brushed her hand.

Charlotte screamed and dropped the stool, tumbling onto the floor as a flash of gray—
a rat?
—darted out of the straw. She kicked out instinctively, bunting the creature into the wall. It yowled, which was when she realized it wasn't a rat at all, but that gray cat of Elle's—which was almost as bad.

Charlotte scrabbled backward across the floor, squealing in alarm. Yanking the rattan crook off its ribbon around her waist, she whipped it back and forth to ward off the offending beast. “Begone! Get out of here!”

The cat made a dash for the door. Charlotte chuckled at the idiocy of her reaction as she rose to her feet and shook out her skirts. Thank God there'd been no one about to witness it.

Her relief was short-lived, for a shadow drew her attention to the doorway through which the cat had just disappeared. There, silhouetted against the torchlight in the hallway, stood the figure of a man.

“You don't loathe cats at all, do you?” he asked in a deep, slightly accented voice as he rubbed his shoulder. “You're afraid of them.”

“Who is that?” Charlotte asked. He was somewhat taller than average, well muscled and coatless—which meant he was most likely some menial servant or day laborer, for no gentleman, or even a footman, would dream of appearing before a lady half-dressed. “Answer me,” she demanded, brandishing the crook, “or I shall report your insolence to your mistress.”

“I have no mistress.” He retreated to the hallway, returning a moment later with the torch, which he jammed into a sconce near the door. “I am here, like yourself, at the sufferance of our Dame des Ombres.”

In the enhanced light, she could see that he was younger than his voice would suggest, with dark, wavy hair pulled into a leather-wrapped queue. Vestless as well as coatless, he wore an unadorned shirt tucked into fawn breeches, and the plainest of white silk cravats.

He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. “I am Darius.”

It occurred to Charlotte to fling out some quip about the curious new fashion for introducing oneself by first name only, but her wits seemed to have fled the moment this Darius fixed his gaze upon her. To say he was striking would suggest that he was merely handsome. In fact, by the standards of London fashion, he was anything but; with his humble attire and half-grown beard, he put her in mind of a Cossack, perhaps even a pirate. But those eyes…Charlotte had never seen eyes quite so huge and dark, a gaze so shockingly direct, so
intent.
Yet there was a quietness to him, a stillness that was mesmerizing.

“I am the Countess of Somerhurst,” Charlotte said when she found her voice.

Darius nodded thoughtfully. “Are you a countess in your own right? I can't imagine any self-respecting English earl tolerating a wife who plays camp follower to the infamous Francis Dashwood and his cronies.”

She hesitated, uneasy as always when someone raised the subject of the late Nathaniel Wickham, Earl of Somerhurst. “Not that it is any of your affair, but my lord husband went to his maker several years ago.”

“Before or after you took up with the Hellfires?”

“You are an ill-mannered boor, sir.”

Darius smiled. “And you, madame, are a foul-tempered bitch.”

“H-how dare you…,” she sputtered.

“Ladies who make a habit of kicking cats should expect to be called bitches—and worse.”

“I took it for a rat,” she said, while wondering how he could have seen her do that; she would have noticed if he'd been watching.

“You'd have done it anyway. You're terrified of cats.” Before she could summon a response to that, he said, “Whatever possessed you to get involved with the Hellfires, Charlotte?”

“How do you know my Christian name? And what makes you think you're entitled to call me—”

“Were you so very bored…
Lady Somerhurst
?”

She turned away and hooked her rattan crook back onto its ribbon, thinking she really ought not to linger here, encouraging this audacious lout with his prying questions. She should lift her chin, stalk past him, and be gone from this place.