Free Whispers of the Flesh by Louisa Burton Page A

true, what Mademoiselle had said about the demons inciting the Terror. He also taught me that honor, duty, and religious devotion would protect me from Satan’s influence, and that there was no more worthy calling on earth than the . . .” David bit off the rest, cursing his loose tongue.
    “Than the priesthood?” Lili smiled. “You said last night that your parents are content with the path you’ve chosen. I’m glad of that for your sake. A man should choose a vocation based on what he’s passionate about, not afraid of. A life devoted to fear is a sad thing, indeed.”
    David tried to summon a response to that, but none was forthcoming.

    As they were walking away from the
Cella,
David turned to glance behind them at the stretch of corridor that led deeper into the cave. It was black as Hades that way, the cresset torches extending no farther.
    Testing the waters, as it were, he said, “I would dearly love to explore a bit more. Is this cave system really complex enough to get lost in?”
    “Oh, it’s a warren of twisting and turning passages,” she said. “Even I get confused if I wander too far off the main corridors, and I daresay I know this terrain as well as anyone—except, perhaps, for Darius.”
    “I have yet to meet this mysterious Darius.” David’s investigation would be sorely lacking in scope were he to leave here without having personal contact with each and every inhabitant of Grotte Cachée. “I cannot help but wonder if he really exists.”
    “Darius is a solitary soul,” she said. “He tends to avoid our guests. As for the cave, if you really want to go deeper, I suppose I could guide you, say another half mile or so—providing you don’t tell Archer. There’s something rather interesting that you might enjoy seeing.”
    “Indeed?” said David, thinking of the curious little bedchamber described to him by Serges Bourgoin. “I should be very much in your debt.”
    “You would, at that,” she said, smiling as she wrested a cresset from its bracket. “But I believe there is a way you can repay me.”

Seven
    O
NE WISH,
DAVID mused as he stood gazing at what Lili called the Lake of a Thousand Diamonds—which was resplendent, but which was not Bourgoin’s
petite salle confortable.
    He had promised to grant her one wish of her choosing—her whimsical notion of how he could “repay the debt” of her having guided him here against the
administrateur
’s wishes. Not once, that he could recall, had he ever reneged on a promise, and he did not intend to do so now. He prayed that what she asked of him wouldn’t be something he would have to confess to Father Cullen when he got back to Stonyhurst.
    That is, part of him prayed for that. The other part, the part that lived chained up in the shadows, hot and hungry and trembling with need, would gladly say a lifetime of Hail Marys for the chance to cast off those crippling fetters just once.
    “What think you, David?” Lili gestured with her cresset toward the shimmering subterranean pool, a crescent-shaped widening of the cave stream, which flowed mostly belowground.
    The pool was tucked into its own glittering grotto, the walls and ceiling of which were encrusted with a dazzling array of crystal formations—flowers, feathers, coral-like nodules . . . Rippling draperies of peachy, translucent stone swooped and swayed at the entrance to this enchanted niche like curtains frozen on a summer breeze. The water itself was a glassy aquamarine that glowed from within, projecting lazy waves of iridescence onto the interior of the grotto, making the crystals sparkle and wink.
    It was dizzyingly beautiful—literally. All that dazzling splendor . . . it just looked so unreal, so not of this earth. A rush of vertigo overtook him for a moment, then faded away. The light-headedness he had experienced previously had escalated considerably as they’d ventured deeper and deeper into the cave. His perceptions felt skewed, his thoughts strangely