Daevil’s Tears is a book about a walled garden. I did not know this when I started writing it. I knew it had a great house in it, and a master, and a girl who came to scrub his pots. I knew it had a god whose name the servants spoke only in whispers, a drug, and a faith. What I did not yet understand was that all of those things were facets of a single, older idea—one that has been arriving in the human imagination, in different costumes, for as long as humans have built walls around the things they wanted to keep private. A walled garden is the oldest architecture of seduction. It is the place where the rules of the outside world stop applying, where what is forbidden becomes permitted, where the chosen are admitted, and the unchosen never know what they have been excluded from. Every one of the eight things I am about to name is a walled garden. Daevil’s Tears was assembled, slowly, from all of them.
The Art of Ferdinand Knab
The first walled garden in my imagination was painted. Ferdinand Knab was a nineteenth-century German painter who specialized in romantic ruins: overgrown classical gardens with broken statuary, fountains gone to moss, ivy claiming the architrave of a temple no one had worshipped in fifteen hundred years. His paintings are technically realist and emotionally pure dreams. I came across them years ago and have not stopped returning. They are what the gardens of Ca’Thessana look like when I close my eyes. Knab understood that a garden becomes most beautiful at the moment it begins to forget what it was for. The gods his statues represent have been gone for centuries, and the gardens are still tending themselves, and the marble is still beautiful, and the air around the fountains is still consecrated. Somewhere inside that consecration is the question the book is built to ask: what happens to the worship when the god is gone? Or, more dangerously: what happens when the god is not gone—only patient?
Royal Palace of Caserta & Villa d’Este
The Royal Palace of Caserta gave me a sense of architectural scale. I have written elsewhere about my pilgrimages to the great houses of Italy, but Caserta is the one I keep returning to in my mind, because Caserta is the largest royal residence in the world by volume, and walking its central axis is the closest a person can come to feeling the proportions of the cult inside the book. The gardens stretch for miles and feature a sequence of terraced cascades, classical follies, and grottoes designed to disorient the visitor in beautiful, deliberate ways. The whole estate was built to demonstrate, in stone and water, that the king who lived there was operating on a different scale than the rest of human life. Villa d’Este, in Tivoli, taught me the other half of the lesson. Its gardens are smaller than Caserta’s but more astonishing, because every fountain and water organ and cascade in them is driven by natural pressure alone. Water from springs above the villa is forced against gravity into every corner of the garden by means the visitor cannot see, with no pumps and no machinery and no visible source. The water arrives because the geology has been arranged to deliver it. The whole garden is a pressure system disguised as a paradise. Ca’Thessana is not as large as Caserta and not as engineered as d’Este. But it borrows from both: Caserta’s logic of a private universe whose physical proportions are themselves the argument for its inhabitants’ secrets, and d’Este’s logic that the most beautiful spaces are the ones where the engine of the beauty is hidden, and the visitor cannot tell where the pressure is coming from.
Thermal Springs of Saturnia
The thermal springs of Saturnia, in southern Tuscany, are the sensory ground. They are natural hot springs that have been considered sacred since the Etruscans: milky blue water cascading down terraces of pale travertine, steaming in the cold morning air, fed by a warm river that rises from the earth and has been rising forever. People have been bathing in those waters for three thousand years. There is no roof and no fee and no priest, and yet the place is one of the most reverent spaces I have ever stood inside. Saturnia taught me that sacredness does not require a temple. It only requires water, warmth, and the recognition that something older than you is happening there. The bathhouses and pools and underground springs of Ca’Thessana all have Saturnia in them somewhere. They are also the literal infrastructure of the house—the source of its scalding hot water, its cool summer rooms, its kitchens and its baths, drawn from the same warm river the Etruscans worshipped two thousand years before there was a house to draw from it. Ca’Thessana was built on the water before it was built on the faith. Most great houses were. Roman villas, medieval monasteries, Renaissance estates—they were all sited wherever the water rose, because water irrigates the farmland and feeds the gardens and fills the cisterns and washes the bodies of the people who can afford to be washed. Wealth has always followed water. So has worship. The springs are everywhere in the book, and so is the body in them, because the silent assertion of those waters is always the same: that the body, submerged, becomes available to forms of knowledge it cannot reach on dry ground.
Oscar Wilde’s Interiors
Oscar Wilde’s interiors are the aesthetic permission. Wilde, more than any nineteenth-century writer in English, understood that beauty is a moral position. He decorated his houses the way other men wrote manifestos. The peacock feathers, the lilies, the sunflowers, the blue china, the velvet, the candles, the conviction that a room could be a sanctuary to keep the world’s rules at bay. The opium dens of late-Victorian London were structured for the same purpose—silken rooms in the city’s hidden corners, lit for surrender, devoted to a flower whose chemistry let the world fall away on the other side of the door. The aesthetes were the late-Victorian walled garden. They built private universes inside their drawing rooms and lived inside them as deliberately as cloistered monks. Ca’Thessana is, among many other things, a Wildean house. Its master would have been at home in Wilde’s salon. He would have understood the peacock feathers immediately. He would have known what the candles were for.
Ouida’s Scandalously Gothic Novel
Ouida’s In Maremma is the closest literary ancestor I know, and the parallels run deeper than I understood when I first read it. Ouida was a Victorian novelist, now mostly forgotten, who wrote sensuous prose considered scandalous in her time and reads more like scripture today. She was, among other things, a friend of Oscar Wilde—the two of them aesthetes and outcasts together, writing the same kind of overheated, indecent prose, scandalizing the same Victorian audience. Ouida went into exile first, voluntarily. She left England for Italy in her thirties and never returned, living first in Florence and then in a series of decaying Tuscan villas, surrounded by dogs, ruined finances, and Italian sunlight. Italy is everywhere in her late work. In Maremma is the most Italian book she wrote—a late novel, slow, strange, unfashionable even when it was published, about a young woman named Musa who lives alone in an Etruscan tomb in the Tuscan wilderness and shelters a fugitive she finds half-dead in the marshes. It is also unmistakably a gothic novel—perhaps the last great gothic novel of the Victorian era, written when the form was already considered exhausted, by a woman who refused to let it die.
But it is the tomb itself that I keep returning to. Musa does not just live in a hole in the earth. She inhabits an underground sacred space—a chamber sealed by stone, lit by candles she has placed herself, decorated with the bones of her dead stepmother, which she has carried down into the cavern and arranged with the patience of a priestess tending an altar to a god no one else worships. Above ground, the world goes on with its laws and its taxes and its church bells. Below ground, Musa is forming her own private theology in the dark. She is the only celebrant. The bones are the only relic. The cavern is both her shelter and her temple, and the longer she lives in it, the more clearly the reader understands that she has built—almost without intending to—a religion of one. When the fugitive arrives, she takes him into that religion before she takes him into her body.
The cavern is a walled garden taken to its furthest extreme. It is enclosed not just by walls but by the earth itself, sealed against the sky, sealed against the rules of the world above. Inside it, a small circle of celebrants—even a circle of one—can become anything they decide to become, with no one watching and no one to interrupt them. The underground sacred space is the oldest version of the walled garden in human imagination. The Mithraic temples buried under Roman cities. The Eleusinian mysteries in their cavern at the edge of the sea. The catacombs, where early Christians met when meeting above ground, would have killed them. The cave-shrines of Capri, where pilgrims and tourists still descend into grottoes whose air has been thick with cult worship for two thousand years, and where the figure who haunts those grottoes—for me at least, when I went looking—was Midas: not the schoolroom king who wished too well, but the older Midas, the cult-figure, the god of touch that transforms, of love that turns the beloved into something the beloved has not asked to become. Musa’s tomb belongs to that tradition, and it is the literary ancestor of every sacred underground space in Daevil’s Tears—and there are more of them in the book than I will name here.
Musa is not Liriel. The tomb is not Ca’Thessana. But the register of Ouida’s book—the sustained attention to a woman’s journey inside a landscape that has its own slow agenda, the patience with which Musa builds her dark theology, the willingness of the prose to stay underground for as long as the underground takes—is the register I have been trying to write inside my entire adult life. In Maremma gave me permission to write at the speed Ouida wrote at, which is the speed at which seductions actually happen. And it gave me Liriel: a woman whose interior life is organized entirely around the person she has secretly chosen to love in the dark, outside the theology that governs her.
The story ends in a cavern. I will not say more.
Lancelot, Arthur, and Guinevere
The forbidden love triangle is older than any inspiration I have named so far and harder to escape. Lancelot and Guinevere and Arthur are the western imagination’s most permanent and most painful versions of it: the king, the queen, and the knight who loves her, all three honorable, all three doomed by the geometry of their own affections. And it is worth noticing where that triangle finally breaks. Not in the great hall at Camelot. Not at the round table. The lovers find each other in a forest bower—outside the walls, outside the watch, outside the law of the kingdom that depends on their fidelity. The bower is its own walled garden. It is the leafy room where the rules of the court do not reach, where the queen is no longer a queen and the knight is no longer sworn, where two people can be, for an afternoon, only what they want to be for each other. Every reader who has ever loved the Arthurian legend has loved that bower more than they will admit. It is the most dangerous room in the story, because nothing said inside it counts back at court—until, eventually, it does, and the kingdom falls. The genius of Camelot is that the triangle does not break because of anyone’s decision. It breaks by accumulation. It breaks because love, loyalty, and faith eventually run out of room to coexist, and because the bower cannot remain sealed forever. I learned the geometry of doomed triangles from Malory and from Tennyson, and I have been thinking about it for thirty years. Daevil’s Tears is the book where I finally write inside one. I will say no more here. The geometry is the inspiration; the angles are for the reader to discover.
And there is something older inside every walled garden than its walls. The wild wood—the kind of wood the Lancelot legend leaves its lovers in—was sacred to the Greeks before any temple was built in stone, and the figure who haunts the wild wood is the satyr: half man, half goat, the embodiment of the part of us civilization has agreed to forget. Walled gardens, secret gardens, painted gardens, sacred groves—each of them is a place where the satyr is allowed back in. Each of them is where the human admits, briefly and behind a wall, that he was never only human in the first place. The frescoes at Villa Grazioli, the Italian villa where I first lived inside this kind of imagery, are crawling with satyrs—painted into the corners of every ceiling, leering and laughing and piping from the architraves, reminding the people in the rooms below that the marble is a temporary courtesy. Underneath the marble, the wood is still wild.
Civilization has always known this and quietly built around it. The most upstanding moral households of any era have drawn a sharp line between what may happen inside the walls of the house and what may happen in the gardens outside them. Inside is decorum. Outside is the satyr. A respectable Roman or Renaissance or Victorian family would never have permitted the rites of Bacchus in its dining room—but the same family would happily host a hunting party, a moonlit feast under the trees, a masque in the garden, a fête champêtre. Outdoor revelry was the licensed exception to indoor virtue. Sintra, the Portuguese mountain town northwest of Lisbon, is the most concentrated version of this duality I have ever walked through: great houses with initiation wells spiraling down into the earth, masonic chambers carved into the hillside, grottoes built to honor pagan deities that the Christian owners of the houses could not officially worship. The temples to Diana—the ancient Roman ones in their sacred groves, the romantic nineteenth-century ones built in private parks by aristocrats who wanted a goddess of their own—were always in groves outside the household, never in the family chapel. The household kept its public faith. The grove kept its secret one.
Epstein Island
And then there is Epstein Island.
I am going to be careful here because the topic deserves care. Jeffrey Epstein, his island, and his inner circle are not literary inspiration in the way Knab, Ouida, or Wilde are. They are the contemporary horror that clarified, in the most painful possible register, what I had already been writing for years. I started Daevil’s Tears in 2017. The Epstein revelations broke into broad public consciousness in 2019 and have continued to unfold ever since. Each new wave of disclosure—the flight logs, the photographs, the names of the men who visited, the ages of the girls who were brought to the island—confirmed for me, with sickening precision, that the imaginative work I was doing was not a fantasy invention but a real archetype. The walled garden where the rules of the outside world no longer apply. The chosen. The drug, the secrecy, the master, the inner circle. The careful aesthetic refinement that made the predation feel, to its victims and even to some of its perpetrators, like privilege. And underneath all of it, the oldest engine of all: girls with nothing offered everything they had been told they deserved and never been given, by men who understood that beauty becomes a form of coercion the moment it is shown to someone who has never been shown anything. All of it is in Daevil’s Tears, and all of it is in the historical record now. The book is not a roman à clef. I am not writing about Epstein, nor about any specific real person. I am writing about the moral architecture that produces an Epstein, and the kind of architecture that has been producing him, in different costumes, for as long as wealth and power have been able to buy private islands and walled gardens. Fiction is the place where you can walk around inside something like that without becoming complicit in it. Journalism can tell you what happened. Court documents can tell you what was alleged. But only fiction can take you inside the head of a young woman who walked into the great house with nothing and slowly, beautifully, willingly, decided to stay. That interiority—what it feels like from the inside to be chosen by a system that wants to consume you—is the thing the public discourse around Epstein cannot reach. It is also the thing the book is built to do.
I do not know whether that is a brave or an indefensible use of fiction. I have not entirely decided, and I am the author. What I know is that the book exists, and that it would have existed even if Epstein had never been arrested, because the archetype was already in Knab and Ouida and Lancelot and Caserta and Saturnia and Wilde and a hundred other places I drew from. Epstein only made the archetype urgent again. He reminded the world that walled gardens are not historical curiosities. They are still being built, and they are still being walked into, and the women who walk into them do not always run when they should—and not because they are weak, but because the walled garden is engineered to make the running inconceivable. Daevil’s Tears is, among other things, my attempt to write that engineering from the inside, with the patience and lushness and moral seriousness it deserves. Outrage is easy. Understanding is harder.
Brugmansia: Angel’s Trumpet
And then there is the eighth garden, which is the one I could not find anywhere outside until I went looking—and which turned out to have been blooming in plain sight the whole time. Burundanga. Devil’s Breath. Scopolamine. The compound is a tropane alkaloid distilled from the flowers of brugmansia, the angel’s trumpet, a tall fragrant ornamental shrub that grows in gardens all over the warm world, beloved by horticulturists for its enormous pendulous white blooms and its sweet narcotic evening scent. People plant it for the perfume. They do not always know what else it is.
In Colombia, burundanga is the street name for a powdered preparation of the same alkaloid, and it has a mythology—and a documented criminal record—that should be impossible and is not. Victims have been dosed in bars and on buses and have walked willingly to their own ATMs, emptied their accounts, brought thieves into their homes, and handed over their car keys. They remember none of it. The pharmacology is more complicated than the legend—what scopolamine actually does is dissociate and erase, not literally compel—but the legend is correct about the terrifying part: a person can be walking through her own life under the chemistry of someone else’s intentions and not know it. The same compound is used in modern medicine—as a patch behind the ear of seasick travelers, as a pre-anesthetic before surgery, as a palliative for the dying. For most of the twentieth century, it was given to women in labor in a regime called twilight sleep, so they would have no memory of giving birth. The doctors called it mercy. The molecule does not change. Only the intent. The flower in the garden becomes the drug in the bloodstream, becomes the suggestion she follows, becomes the choice she will believe was hers.
Daevil’s Bells, the drug at the heart of Daevil’s Tears, is brugmansia in everything but name. It is distilled from a flower in the cult’s garden. It is beautiful, sweet, and ornamental. It is administered in small ceremonial doses by people who love the women they are dosing, and who are loved in return. Religious intoxication is older than monotheism. The Bacchic rites of the ancient world were built on wine, frenzy, and the deliberate dissolution of self-possession. The maenads—the female worshippers of Dionysus—fell into states of ecstasy so complete that they tore animals apart with their bare hands and ate the raw flesh, and in the oldest myths, their own children’s. The Greeks did not consider this evidence that the maenads were monsters. They considered it evidence that the god had taken them. The drug and the god are an old pairing, and the cult of Bel is the latest costume of a very ancient practice.
Beyond that, I will not say. The flower’s work in the book is subtle and beautiful. The cult needs no bars.
This is the eighth walled garden, and the most terrible one, because it is the only one that does not need walls. It travels inside the person it has chosen. The garden becomes her bloodstream.
Eight inspirations in different costumes. The painted ruins of a forgotten god. The longest corridor in Europe. A natural hot spring older than written history. A room decorated by a man who thought beauty was a moral position. A novel about a girl in a Tuscan tomb. A queen and a knight in a bower. An island. A flower that grows in suburban gardens and rewrites the bloodstream of anyone foolish enough to drink from it. Each of them, a walled garden. Each of them is a place where the rules no longer apply. Daevil’s Tears is the book I wrote after finally understanding that all those gardens held the same secrets. Wealth, power, and religion combined.
Welcome in. The flowers behind the wall are not what they seem. Neither is the gardener.
—Narcisse
