In the Garden of Sin Read Online Free PDF

the mothers of all the young ladies want him for marry the daughters, for he have much wealth, and fine family, and he write the
poesie di amore
. But then a bad thing happen …”
    Besides already being a poet of some renown in his early twenties, Bianca told us, Vitturi had been an officer in Venice’s vaunted Navy. Nine years ago, during a battle in the Adriatic against “the Uscocchi,” whom I took to be pirates of some sort, he received such grievous injuries that he was no longer able to serve in the Navy.
    Upon seeing him newly wounded, his mistress was so horror-struck that she vomited and cast him aside. He sought out Galiana Solsa, the wealthiest and most elegant courtesan in Venice, who had favored him in the past, but she hurled stinging insults at him and ordered him out of her palazzo.When he lingered, thinking he might sway her with words, for he’d always been a silver-tongued charmer, Galiana had him dragged into the street and savagely beaten by three brawny footmen.
    “She is a
demonio
, that one,” Bianca said.
“Una striga.”
    “Striga?”
That was a word my Italian tutor had never taught me.
    “A thing of great evil, a devil of the night. Galiana Solsa hunt the peoples in the dark, like the owl hunt the mice, and she drink their blood. She stay young very many years. Her… how you say,
preda
, those she feed upon, they vanish in the night. Still, the men, they cannot turn from her, so great is her beauty. She have a strange power over them.”
    “Bianca, you superstitious little plebian,” Sibylla said. “You don’t really believe that.”
    “Do you defy the Church?” Bianca demanded. “The
Folleti
, the incubus and the succubus, they visit the peoples at night, when they sleep, and violate them. Some of these incubi, the ones called dusii, they can change from man to woman, and back again. Is how they steal the seed from the mens and—”
    Sibylla snickered.
    “The fathers of the Church tell us these thing,” Bianca said heatedly. “’Tis not for us to question.”
    Like Sibylla, I was far too scholarly to credit such tales, but I kept my mouth shut so as not to vex Bianca.
    Addressing Lucy and me, but not the smirking Sibylla, Bianca said in a low, mysterious tone, “Constanze, she tell me there is much strange things at Grotte Cachée. There is a cave which make you feel drunk inside, and things happen there that cannot happen. And by this cave, there is a pool of water that is bewitched. What others in this water feel, you will feel. Oh, and she tell me one day she hear the old lord of GrotteCachée, Seigneur des Ombres, speak an
incantesimo
. I do not know the
Inglese
word for this.”
    “An incantation?” I said. “A magic spell?”
    “Sì, sì, magico
. And she say she think is incubi at Grotte Cachée, but she say they don’t hurt the peoples. There is a hermit who live in a cave who can take the shape of animals, or even make himself
invisibile
. And she say Inigo and Elic, the men who will teach us the arts of love, be no ordinary men. Inigo, the dark one with the beautiful smile, he have
il cacchio di uno stallion
. She say is like a pillar of stone. And Elic, this one is very tall and handsome, with golden hair, like Apollo, and he can take the womens again and again—ten, twenty times, with no rest between
orgasmi.”
    “È ridicolo,”
Sibylla muttered as she gazed out at the passing trees.
    Lucy cut off Bianca’s rebuttal with a gasp. “He’s coming!” she said, craning her neck to look behind them through the tied-back curtains draping their carriage. “He’s riding toward us up the path.”
    “Don Domenico?” I asked.
    “Nay. Well, aye,” she whispered as she pinched her cheeks and patted her hair. “He’s coming, too, and some of the others, but I meant Master Knowles.”
    “What ho, ladies,” Jonas Knowles said as he walked his horse past the carriage, sweeping off his wide-brimmed, luxuriously plumed beaver hat with a low bow.
    Lucy made