The Passion of the Purple Plumeria (17 page)

“Not so fast,” said William, grabbing Gwen’s arm before she could slip away into the crowd. “What is it?”

For a moment, she looked as though she meant to argue. Arriving at her decision, she said, in a rapid, low tone, “I just saw one of the men who ambushed us in the alley. He went that way. If you’d unhand me, I might be able to follow him.”

William followed her. “Not without me, you’re not.”

She didn’t waste time fighting with him. “If you must come, keep quiet and try to keep up.”

He still wasn’t feeling entirely robust, but he would have keeled over rather than admit it. “I’ll do my best not to swoon on you.”

She cast him a long look over her shoulder. He could see the concern in her eyes, but they both knew there wasn’t time to argue. “If you must swoon, do so quietly. Now, hush!”

She moved rapidly through the crowd, William following a pace behind. Their erratic route took them out a side door, away from the crowd waiting for their carriages, and around the back of the theatre, just in time to see a door slam shut.

Holding her finger to her lips, Gwen took hold of the door handle, waited ten seconds, and then pulled it open. In front of them was a long flight of stairs leading down, perilously steep. There was a red glow of light at the bottom. Gwen beckoned to William. He eased the door carefully shut behind him and followed her down into the darkness.

The landing let out in a cellar. To one side, he could see the storerooms of the theatre, boxes, crates, and barrels. But that wasn’t where the light led. A lantern had been hung from a rough iron hook beside an aperture in one of the walls. Without hesitating, Gwen dropped down on her knees and crawled through.

Trying not to put too much weight on his bad side, William did the same, following the waggle of his companion’s backside down a short tunnel. It let out into an edifice of stone that looked like an advertisement for a stonemason’s junk shop, bits of statuary and fallen masonry littering the ground. A ramp of sorts curved off to the side, lined with the remnants of columns. Staying close to the wall, they started down.

“You’re sure he went this way?” William murmured.

“Someone placed those torches to be followed,” was all Gwen said.

Where in the devil were they? William felt as though he’d stumbled into the more fantastical sort of novel. Flaring torches marked their path, spaced at uneven intervals. In the patches of light, William caught sight of more fallen masonry and other tunnels leading out in other directions, an entire complex beneath the opera house.

“What is this place?” William whispered.

Gwen turned her head just enough to answer. “Roman ruins. The city of Bath is built on them. They must have unearthed them when they were building the new—”

She broke off abruptly, bumping into William as she backed up. His arms automatically went around her, keeping them both steady.

“Down!” she hissed, and pulled him back, behind an outcropping of stone.

They had come out onto a clear space, the remains of what had once been a form of balcony, looking out over a sunken area below. There was a stair that led down to their left, the steps cracked and treacherous.

From their vantage point, William could see that theirs wasn’t the only open archway. There was a regular pattern of them, semicircular openings overlooking a great rectangular area below. There must once have been ornamental stonework creating a balustrade, but most of it had crumbled away, leaving uneven piles of rubble, some carved with what looked to be some sort of frieze.

There was a piece lying on the ground next to him, featuring the torso and part of the leg of a woman as she lolled in a position of considerable abandon. The carving was still clear and sharp, showing the sensuous curve of breast and hip.

“An old bath,” Gwen murmured, without moving her lips. “The place is riddled with them.”

There was no water now in the giant sunken area. Above them, the ceiling rose in a grand arch, so high that the top was lost in the shadows. There were darker spots among the shadows, and a sound, as of wings. William’s lips set in a grim line. Bats, he’d be willing to wager. He wasn’t afraid of the wee beasties, but that didn’t mean he had to like them, either.

Around them, a series of arches, in various states of disrepair, overlooked the old bath. There was a tiered descent into the pool, ten steps down. What must once have been a fountain dominated one end, a satyr tugging at the legs of a fleeing water nymph, all floating draperies and bare limbs. Around the base of the fountain milled men, if men they might be called. They were all garbed in robes of a shiny black material that caught and reflected the torchlight.

Underneath the black hoods, their faces shone an eerie white in the uncertain light, their lips an unnatural red.

William shook his head. “What in the devil—”

“White lead and lip rouge,” whispered Gwen.

“I’d gathered that,” William whispered back. “But who are they?”

Gwen held up a hand to silence him. “Something is about to happen.”

Smoke was belching from the old water pipe, billowing into the sunken pool, twining around the legs of the hapless water nymph. As the smoke rose, William caught a whiff of a familiar scent: opium, and a lot of it, mixed with some sort of incense, unless he missed his guess, sickly sweet and undeniably narcotic.

Down in the pit, the ghoulish revelers fell silent, turning away from the fountain, towards an arch at the other end.

Through the mist strode a man in a black cloak wider, larger, shinier, than the others. Where the others wore hoods, his was thrown back, revealing a face painted a dead white, his lips crimson. He must have been wearing lifts of some kind, for he seemed to tower over the others, taller than a normal man. As he passed, the other robed figures sank to their knees, touching their heads to the ground in obeisance.

Accepting the homage as his due, he strode through the ranks of his followers, jumping up onto a platform formed by a stone placed over the remains of two pillars. As he turned, William finally saw what it was that he carried before him.

In his hands, he held a human skull.

Slowly, the leader raised the skull over his head. Somewhere in the back of the room, William could hear the faint beat of a drum, only barely audible in the expectant silence.

“Brethren!” the leader called in a voice rich and dark. “Lords of the night!”

“Merciful heavens,” murmured Gwen. “We’ve stumbled into a meeting of the Hellfire Club.”

William had heard tell of a similar organization in Poona. “Orgies, debauchery, and general idiocy, all in fancy dress costume?”

“Precisely,” said Gwen. Her eyes were shining with excitement. “What luck! I’ve always wanted to see one of these.”

William wasn’t so sure he would have called it luck. The atmosphere in the subterranean chamber was decidedly eerie. And there had been stories about that society in Poona, stories that had shocked him, world-weary old campaigner that he was. He had taxed Jack with them, Jack who had sold the young idiots the opium.

“What do I care as long as they pay on time?” Jack had said.

But William had cared. He had cared when they had raped the daughter of a friend, a half-caste, like Lizzy, in one of their debauched pseudo-ceremonies.

But by then, Jack had been gone.

Downstairs, the minions were getting restless. William could practically feel their intensity, like the crackle in the air before a storm.

“Rise, brothers!” the celebrant called. “Rise and greet your sacrifice!”

The men in the bath clambered to their feet. Slowly, then faster, they began clapping, clapping in time with the drums. The frenzied drumming pounded faster and faster, hands clapping, feet stamping in time to the beat, the hollow echo of booted feet against the old stone floor echoing through the hollow vault, bringing the pounding to a fever pitch, thrumming in and around them.

With a burst of flame and a whiff of sulfur, two women appeared, clad only in wisps of red gauze, their nipples rouged, red ribbons around their necks, their ankles, spiraling up their arms. They bore between them a litter, draped in black gauze, heaped with white flowers whose sickly scent warred with that of the drugged smoke.

Pale against the black cloth lay a young woman. She lay on her side, as though in sleep, her gown falling aside to display her leg as far as the knee. She was all that was innocent in her white night rail, the thin muslin edged with white lace and satin ribbon.

Over the side of the litter trailed her long, unbound hair, the red-brown curls bouncing with the movement of the litter.

William found himself leaning forward, his heart in his throat, his hands clutching the masonry, knuckles white, hunting for a glimpse of her face, praying and fearing, all at the same time.

The drumbeat rose to a frenzy pitch as the bearers slowly tilted the bier forward.

“What ghouls be these?” marveled Sir Magnifico.

“No ghouls, sir, but members of a society so secret that even those with secrets know not what this society is. Tonight, they practice their ancient rites, with skull, tome, and torch. Hark! Silence! Their leader comes. . . .”

—From
The Convent of Orsino
by A Lady

“I
t’s not Lizzy.” William let out a deep, shuddering breath. “Thank God.”

Gwen’s hand briefly touched his arm before dropping again to her side. “God has little to do with this place.” She looked critically down at the revelers. “Although if I were the devil, I’m not sure I would want to lay claim to it either. It looks to be a highly ramshackle operation.”

William wasn’t diverted. He edged forward, trying to get a better look at the bier. “Is it the other girl? Miss Wooliston?”

“No.” Agnes was a paler copy of Jane. Her hair didn’t have even the hint of a curl, and she still had all the gawkiness of youth. Even underneath that virginal white gown, one could tell that the woman on the litter sported the curves of a woman grown.

“It’s someone’s daughter.” William started forward.

Gwen’s hand closed over his arm. “Stop. Look.”

As the bier tilted forward, she could see that the woman on the elaborate litter was older than she had originally supposed, and that what she had imagined as a drugged stupor was a pose of carefully staged languor. Gwen recognized her from her perambulations backstage.

“She’s one of the ballet girls. She works here at the theatre.”

William paused, his muscles tense beneath her fingers. “Hired?”

Gwen nodded. “Undoubtedly.” Prima donnas might command rich protectors; the members of the chorus were forced to find alternative ways to supplement their incomes. “As are the other two. They wouldn’t thank you for interfering.”

William wasn’t convinced. “She looks drugged.”

“They’re all drugged, every man jack of them.” That was all she needed, for William to go charging in, half-healed wound and all. They would tear him to shreds and leave his body among the ruins.

The thought roused Gwen to real alarm. This might be playacting, but she had no doubt that the men below would turn violent if someone tried to balk them of their promised pleasures. They were panting like dogs down there.

“Does she really look unwilling? Besides, if we were to go charging down there, how would we fight them all off? I don’t have my parasol with me.” Only her fan, but he didn’t need to know about the dagger in the ivory casing. “It’s twenty to two, and those two unarmed.”

William looked at her fiercely. “I shouldn’t have thought that would stop you.”

“It wouldn’t,” said Gwen, stung, “if I thought they needed rescuing.”

As if in illustration of her point, the woman on the bier curled her legs beneath her and rose to her knees, stretching sinuously. Every man in the place—including, Gwen noticed, her companion—held his breath as she took hold of the fabric at the neck of her modest gown and, with one fluid motion, ripped it straight down the front, from breast to knee.

She wore nothing underneath.

“Point taken,” said William, staring like the rest of them.

The woman on the bier was extremely well endowed. Gwen resisted the urge to glance down at her own neatly covered and far less protuberant chest. With every eye in the place on her, the girl shrugged out of the remains of her gown, shaking her long hair down around her shoulders, the twining brown curls highlighting rather than hiding her most obvious attributes.

“Showy.” Gwen sniffed.

“Mmm,” said William.

Gwen glowered at him. “You’re not here to admire the view.”

William lifted innocent blue eyes to hers. “If it’s there . . . sure and I wouldn’t want to let it go to waste.”

“Hmph,” said Gwen. It was all staging, anyway. She could look equally sultry lying on a bier. Not that she wanted to lie on a bier for the delectation of a gang of hardened roués. But it was the principle of the thing.

The celebrant went through a mockery of a blessing. Dipping his fingers in the wine, he anointed first the woman’s closed eyelids, then her lips, tracing the shape of her lips with his finger. She sucked his finger into her mouth with every sign of pleasure.

Next to her, Gwen could hear William swallow. Hard.

Men.

Raising the skull in his hands, the celebrant upended it over the lounging figure of the woman. Red liquid trickled down around her breasts, down her belly, along her thighs, staining the crumpled material of her gown on the litter beneath her.

From a distance, it looked like blood.

“Wine,” murmured Gwen. When she used the scene in her novel, she decided, it would be blood. Much more dramatic.

“Do you think the skull is plaster?” whispered William.

“One can only hope.”

The wine traced elaborate trails along the woman’s naked body, the reddish lines glowing in the torchlight against her pale skin like ancient runes. Or, thought Gwen sourly, like a treasure map leading to
X
marking the spot, with very little doubt what that spot might be.

The celebrant spread his arms wide. The broad black folds of his cape fell back to reveal a line of rich, crimson silk.

“Come!” he commanded. “Drink!”

His congregation didn’t need to be asked twice.

From the front of the room, a man stumbled forward, clumsy in his eagerness. The others were chanting something, low, rhythmic. It took Gwen a moment to realize that it was nothing more than “drink, drink, drink.” In that tone, in that place, the words had a far more menacing sound. And above it all, the drugged smoke swirled.

For a moment, she thought he meant to bite the woman’s neck. He hovered like one of the dark predators of fiction, his black cape flowing behind him.

Instead, he swooped down, his tongue licking up a long swath of wine, from her neck to her breastbone. Gwen knew it was all nonsense, but she couldn’t look away, as the man followed the crazy, zigzagging trail of wine, over and around the woman’s breasts, circling around her nipple as she writhed with every appearance of enjoyment.

The room was eerily silent. Gwen licked her dry lips. It was decidedly airless in the subterranean chamber. The neckline that had been modest and appropriate upstairs felt quite uncomfortably close down here; the lace frill around her neck was choking her.

As the first man continued his amorous ministrations, another man fell to his knees before the bier, taking possession of a foot, licking at a trail of wine that had dripped all the way down to her toes. He followed it up the inside of her calf, past her knee. The woman let her legs fall wide as he made his way up, farther and farther still.

Gwen had thought herself unshockable, after all these years, but there were some circumstances that took one by surprise.

The celebrant clapped his hands, twice, and the litter bearers stepped forward, flinging off their scraps of gauze. Reaching into the ranks of hooded men, they chose their lovers seemingly at random, pulling men to them in a heady, confused dance. The skull cup must have been refilled with wine; Gwen could see it making the rounds, being passed from hand to hand. One of the hooded men lifted it, laughingly trickling it over one of the dancing girls, who tipped back her head to drink, then, moving the cup aside, transferred her mouth to another object.

There was no chanting anymore, just the unmistakable sounds of murmurs, laughter, and heavy breathing.

Gwen was having trouble breathing at all. She forced the air through her throat. It came out as a sort of wheeze.

Good heavens, was that woman really—yes, yes, she was.

“So. This is what an orgy looks like.” Wiping the sweat off his brow, William cleared his throat. “Warm in here, isn’t it?”

Warm? She was boiling. Her dress felt painfully tight, the fabric of her bodice rasping against her nipples. The fichu at her neck was smothering her; she wanted to rip it free, to yank the turban off her hair and shake it free, to reach out . . .

Well.

“Suetonius suddenly makes so much more sense,” she said shakily.

It made it easier to think about Roman emperors, something far removed, dull and dry and long past, as if the writhing, twining bodies in front of them were something out of the illustrations in one of those forbidden books on the top shelf of the library.

“They’re certainly”—William tugged at his collar, loosening his cravat—“inventive.”

His throat looked very brown against the white of his shirt. There was a little hollow right in the middle, where the pulse was pounding. She could see the sweat beading there, just as it was beading down her own throat and between her breasts. It would be so easy to lean forward, to lick away that drop of saltwater as the man below had tasted the wine, to pull open jacket, waistcoat, shirt, and follow the paths of the scars she had seen there before, curving and winding, down, down, down.

“Indeed,” Gwen said hoarsely. “Although I imagine it’s nothing that hasn’t been done before.”

William looked at her. “No,” he said, and there was a curious intensity in his gaze, in the light in his eyes as he looked at her, the way his eyes traveled over her. “It’s as old as time, it is.”

Good heavens, was there no air in here?

Gwen tore her gaze away from William’s, drawing in deep breaths of the dense, drugged air, trying to make sense of her muddled thinking. Gwen dug her nails into her palms, forcing herself to concentrate, to think. The man who had ambushed them—that was what they were after. He was down there somewhere. But where? Below, hoods had been thrown back, and more than hoods, but it was impossible to identify a face.

There were, however, two men who weren’t participating, either as actors or as voyeurs. They had removed themselves to the side, to the relative privacy of a niche between two pillars. One was still hooded, in the same anonymous black cape and hood as all the others. The other was the celebrant.

Gwen poked William in the arm, leaning just close enough to whisper, “Look over there. Those two. They’re not participating.”

She could feel the warmth of his body beside her, the heat coming off his skin in waves. Blinking, with an obvious effort, he directed his gaze where she pointed.

“So they are.” He nodded towards the crumbling staircase to their left. “There might be a way down. Are you game?”

She would sooner bite off her own hand than admit otherwise. “Of course.”

After all, if they caught her, it wasn’t as though she was the sort of woman from whom they would strip every last scrap of clothing and whom they would tie to a bier and . . .

“Gwen?”

She could feel her face going a deep, betraying red. “Be careful on those stairs,” she said curtly. “They don’t look stable.”

“A pity we don’t have the cloaks,” he murmured as they picked their way carefully down, keeping to the shadows. “We could slip right in.”

In more ways than one. “See something you like down there?” muttered Gwen.

William’s blue gaze lit on her.

“No,” was all he said, but she found herself shivering at what he left unsaid, her skin all goose bumps. She had drawn off her long gloves, and her arms felt naked and bare.

“Keep to the shadows,” she shot back, “or it’s all over for us.”

“Hush,” he said, and reached for her hand. To her surprise, she let him take it. His thumb pressed intimately into her palm, silencing her. “I’ve done reconnaissance before. Stay close.”

She would have told him what she thought of his giving her orders, but he was right. This once. She followed softly behind him, picking her way carefully down the crumbling stair, which must once have been a path from the galleries to the side of the bath. It led out into the shadowed arcade.

On the ground, the smoke was chokingly strong. The shimmering of the torchlight through the smoke made Gwen’s eyes ache, turning the smoke into a living, shifting, treacherous thing. It formed shapes, like clouds, dragons and dancing girls and menacing satyrs, and through it all, intensified by the smog, she could hear the pants and grunts, the cries of pleasure, as the orgy throbbed around them.

William tugged on her hand, pulling her into a narrow aperture. Yanking his cravat from his throat, he tied it around his own nose and mouth, creating a screen. His eyes, tearing from the smoke, narrowed at her over the cloth. It took her a moment to realize what he meant. Then, fumbling, she tugged the fichu from the neck of her gown.

Without it, the gown felt dangerously décolleté, the satin of her gown slippery against her damp skin.

With fingers that wouldn’t quite obey, she tried to fold the fabric into a triangle, to tie it at the back of her head as her companion had done, but her hairpins kept getting in the way. William took the cloth from her, draping it carefully over her nose and mouth.

She could feel his knuckles brushing against the nape of her neck as he tied the lacy fabric into a clumsy but effective knot. His touch tingled. She looked up at him and found his eyes on hers. It must have been the smoke that made breathing so difficult, the smoke and the lace-trimmed muslin brushing her lips.

His fingers stroked her neck in a caress before his hand dropped to his side.

Gwen bit down hard on her lip, using the pain to recall herself to their purpose. Her eyes stung and her head spun, but she forced herself to attention, turning on her heel, using the rough wall to guide her through the smoke, towards the alcove where the two men were still in conference. She could see the crimson lining of the celebrant’s cape through the smoke.

There must have been a form of colonnade at some time, a place for people to lounge and eat by the side of the bath in the privacy of their own niches. A corridor ran behind, a service corridor, at a guess. There were openings in the walls, by which food might once have been passed. Gwen shamelessly put her ear to the opening. A few feet down, she could see William doing the same.

“This is the last of the old lot.” It was the celebrant speaking. She could see only the back of his head, his hair close cropped in the fashionable style. “We were supposed to have a shipment a month ago.”