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wouldn’t, would you…? Nevertheless, I think I’ll see if I can arrange for someone else to keep an eye on you. The kind of sport I’m about to indulge in is far from dignified, and I’m not certain I want you picturing that in your mind every time you look at me.”
    Charlotte laughed, ignoring the uneasy pinch of her stomach. “Whatever you think best. As long as no one accosts me or demands anything of me I should be quite fine.”
    â€œTrust me, love, no one will. There are few rules among the Heavenly Host, apart from ‘Do What Thou Wilt,’ but one that remains sacrosanct is that all acts must be agreeable to every partner, and no one is to interfere or criticize a member’s choice, be itan unusual act or simply to watch. No one will touch you, darling. I promise.”
    Charlotte glanced down at the bright white ribbon she’d tied around her arm. “I’ll be perfectly fine, Lina. Don’t worry. I have complete faith,” she said. And wondered if she lied.
    Â 
    Adrian stood off to one side, watching the ceremony. He hadn’t bothered with monk’s robes or any of the other ridiculous trappings the Heavenly Host liked to indulge in. He preferred his sinning to be flagrant—the idea of hiding behind robes and secret passwords was anathema to him. He liked to think there was nothing he wasn’t willing to do, and no one he wasn’t willing to let know about it. Including his esteemed, disapproving, hypocritical father, who’d indulged in the same excesses at an even more advanced age than Adrian’s twenty-eight.
    His mother was a different matter. She worried way too much, but he could rely on gentlemanly restraint to keep most people, including his father, from spreading too many tales.
    She wanted him to marry, to give her grandchildren, and he supposed he’d do so, eventually, simply to make her happy. His mother’s happiness was one of the few things he cared about, aside from his own determined pursuit of pleasure.
    She wouldn’t be at all happy to know he was at a gathering of the Heavenly Host. This would havestopped a better man, but, then, he was a very bad man, as Cousin Etienne cheerfully assured him, a rake and a libertine, a seducer of the worst kind. He said it as if conferring a great honor, but Adrian felt no particular pride. In general, he felt nothing at all apart from the pleasure of the senses. The small death of an intense orgasm, the sweetness of the opium pipe, the wild absinthe dreams that could fuel his more intense couplings.
    And that was why he was here, despite all the folderol, the Latin which was hardly up to the standards of his classical education. He came for the sex, in all its most unbridled variations, he came for the total lack of inhibition and restraint. He came for the motto emblazoned across the stone arch that led to this outer garden: Do what thou wilt. He intended to.
    Montague was up on the dais, an ironic smile on his lined, elegant face as he exhorted the motley crowd. He looked paler than usual, weaker, and Adrian knew with a sudden, sinking despair that Monty was getting sicker. He lifted a shaking hand to hold aloft the phallus-shaped goblet they were all supposed to drink from, some sort of profane communion. Adrian himself always avoided that part of the festivities—he was much too fastidious to share a cup with some of the worst degenerates in Europe, and he had no great faith in what exactly lay in the concoction of wine and herbs. On one occasion anelixir of ergot rot had sent the entire party into hallucinations of sometimes horrific proportions. Pawlfrey had never recovered; he’d ended locked up in one of his family’s country estates, raving mad.
    Adrian had more faith in the strength of his own mind, but he preferred to make his own decisions when it came to the ingestion of drugs. He knew how well he tolerated absinthe or opium and regulated his use.