Free Whispers of the Flesh by Louisa Burton

shrieks. Even some of his fellow clerics were openly skeptical about the existence of diabolical entities. He would not be expounding on the subject with Lili had she not broached it herself by showing him this pagan effigy—not that he regretted it. It could prove beneficial to his investigation to establish the attitude of Lili and her fellow Grotte Cachée residents in regard to demons and demonic forces.
    “I don’t find it at all laughable,” she said, so soberly that David was disposed to believe her. “Did I not tell you that my mind is open to all possibilities? It is just that so few hum—people still credit the existence of these types of beings. I can’t help but wonder how you came to believe in them.”
    “It was my nursery governess, Mademoiselle Levesque. She was an elderly spinster who had served my father’s family for decades in France.”
    “Your parents are French?”
    Cursing that slip, David said, “Just my father.”
    “A Frenchman named Beckett?” she said. “I gather he anglicized his name.”
    David didn’t correct her assumption. “Father had a family in France, a wife and children, before he came to England and married my mother. They were arrested during the Reign of Terror—not my father, who was away at the time, but his parents, his wife, and his four children. A band of revolutionaries abducted them from their château, carted them to the town square, and guillotined them all.”
    “Oh, how awful.”
    “Mademoiselle Levesque witnessed it all, and described it to me in . . . rather graphic detail—how the freshly severed heads of the victims were lifted by the hair to face the mob, because their brains would remain alive for ten to fifteen seconds. Their eyes could still see the faces twisted in hate, their ears could still hear the taunts and jeers.”
    “She was your nursery governess, you say? How old were you when she told you this?”
    “Five, six . . .”
    “What on earth was she thinking, recounting such things to a child of that age?”
    “The Terror had traumatized her deeply. She was devoted to my family, had helped to rear my father and his siblings. Two of his three brothers, who were priests, were brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal and condemned to the guillotine. The third was beaten to death by a mob. His only sister was among sixteen Carmelite nuns put to death at the Barrière de Vincennes in the final days of the Terror.”
    “I know of them,” Lili said. “Their martyrdom wasn’t in vain. People were outraged, and that outrage helped to bring down Robespierre.”
    “By the time I knew Mademoiselle, she was . . .”
Half mad.
“She was a melancholic, deeply tormented soul, very much lost in her wretched memories—she talked of little else. My father was the only member of his family to survive the Revolution. He escaped to England, along with Mademoiselle, in the summer of ninety-four. Two years later, he married my mother, who was a good deal younger than he, and started a second family. He told me he’d very nearly become a Carmelite monk instead, but after praying on it, he knew that wasn’t the path that God intended for him.”
    “I am deeply sorry for your family’s losses,” Lili said, “but I don’t quite see what this has to do with demons.”
    “Mademoiselle Levesque used to tell me that the revolutionary mobs had been acting under diabolical influence. How else to explain such rabid brutality?”
    “You are young, David. You have not seen the
enragés
, with their wild red eyes and their filthy hair, you have not heard them screaming for the blood of the innocents. The Devil’s minions, they crawl into the hearts and minds of the impious and make them commit these
actes d’abomination.
God has a purpose for you,
mon chouchou.
You have a vocation,
oui?
You will hunt the demons down and cast them out, banish them to the fiery pit. This is your destiny, your sacred obligation.”
    David said, “My father told me it was