Thief of Souls Read online

  His two unfortunate gamekeepers had dragged him over the rough terrain on a rude carrier while he held his own viscera in place. He would not take his hands away from his belly! We could not put him on the horse. . . . I shall never forget the sight of him, the pain and terror on his face, foreign to a brave huntsman, one who always kept our tables so well supplied with succulent treasures. Rumors ran wild, and there was much blame to be passed around but no clear shoulders on which it might be settled.

  Etienne, I said, when the thick of the scandal was upon us, can it be true what they say? Might Jean de Craon have arranged this?

  It would not have been beyond the brutal and acquisitive old man whose daughter, Marie, then had the misfortune to watch her husband die. I heard things said that I did not want to believe, whispers of treachery. Jean de Craon crossed the palms of the gamekeepers with a bit of gold, and when the moment was right, they looked away . . .

  Gilles stood to inherit his father’s vast holdings, save those brought to the marriage by his mother, who, as Jean de Craon’s compliant daughter, would do what her father bade her do with her property in the absence of her husband. Milord Jean de Craon was a cruel taskmaster who knew he could more easily control the inexperienced young Gilles de Rais than the boy’s mature and intelligent father. Speculations, rumors, whispered accusations flew; none of us knew what to believe, only that power within Champtocé would soon change hands, which notion could not help but be unsettling.

  It was difficult not to conclude that Jean de Craon had indeed played some part in Guy de Laval’s demise and that all kinds of evil can dwell unseen in a man’s heart. How otherwise had these gamekeepers and squires, all faultless in their previous years of service, suddenly found themselves too far away to help?

  Still, the animal was a demon and must have known that the pain of his old wounds was brought about by Milord Guy.

  As if he were possessed by a demon of the most unholy kind, the beast tore deeper still into Milord Guy’s innards and thrashed his tusk about viciously, pulling out great lengths of entrails . . . which Milord Guy desperately shoved back within.

  And then, according to these witnesses, the boar simply disappeared, his evil task having been completed.

  Though I also watched my Etienne die many years later, I must confess I will not be able to understand the terror of standing on death’s threshold until my time actually comes. Mère de Dieu, it was horror enough to observe! For the first two days, Guy de Laval was desperate for the services of anyone who might help him and sent riders out in all directions. He who had such power, wealth, and influence could find no one who would give him the slightest hope, not for all the gold in Brittany. Our wonderful midwife gave him opium to dull his pain, but she would not speak falsehoods—he would die, she avowed, as surely as the sun rose and set. And there would not be many more risings and settings of the sun for him to savor.

  As the truth of this avowal became clear to him, he began to behave like the great fighter he had always shown himself to be. Milord Guy launched into preparations for his own passing with great decisiveness. Through substantial pain, he gathered to him all those men on whom he would depend to carry out his will regarding his sons, including the sons themselves.

  Young René de la Suze was yet a child and could barely understand the significance of the events that swirled around him. He did little more than stare blankly at his father with no true comprehension of what lay ahead.

  But Guy’s firstborn son, Gilles de Rais, who was then but eleven years old, seemed to take it all in with understanding beyond his years. While René was frightened of being in the presence of his mutilated father, his older brother, Gilles, would not allow himself to be removed but stood and watched at even the most terrible moments. He made it known that when his father’s dressings were changed and fresh poultices applied, he wanted to be present. As all the others began to abandon Guy de Laval and cleave to Jean de Craon, Gilles remained at his father’s bedside.

  I, who knew him so well, might have been the only one who noticed that the son’s noble devotion to his failing father was tinged by a disturbing fascination. And despite my tender tolerance for what must have been youthful misunderstanding of our plight’s gravity, I was equally disturbed to observe this in him.

  The boy is far too captivated by all of this ghastliness, and I fear for his soul’s purity, I told Etienne. The midwife complains that he will not leave her to her work but would put his hands on the wound itself as she dresses it.

  It sent a powerful chill through me to recall this curiosity in one of such a tender age, who ought to have been innocent still of morbid preoccupations. All the ladies of the castle spoke against Marie de Craon behind her back, as if she herself had created that strange interest in her son.

  That is, until she herself died, suddenly and without explanation, not quite a month after her husband. Then she became a saint, and I, his nurse, the fiend who had spoiled her son.

  Suddenly I was aware of standing still in the forest; I wondered how long I had been doing so. The dry, crystalline sound of rubbing leaves and the low of the wind sent a shiver through me, which brought me out of the grips of my dark memories. Unshakable images of that powerful boar still coursed through my mind—his thrashing heavy head with its long tapered snout that ended in an exquisite weapon, the sharp cloven hooves that could tear up great clods of earth with a single swipe and rip flesh to shreds.

  The rustling of leaves, the crackling of twigs, the noises behind me in the trees . . .

  I told her she should have sent one of the younger women. That was what his Eminence would say when they finally came upon my torn and bloody corpse. She might have allowed Frère Demien to accompany her. But she would not listen. Guillemette would never listen.

  The thought of him wallowing in such sanctimonious exactitude was all the inspiration I needed to rediscover my legs, which carried me handily away from that place of danger and brought me into a small patch where the trees were sparse and the sun shone blessedly through. I rested in the safety of that dear light until my heart had calmed itself and I had breath enough to continue, which I then did with renewed purpose. The sun was already high in the sky when I emerged at last from the forest path to the flat open meadow outside Machecoul. Not far ahead was the market square, where the day’s bustle would be well under way, and there I would find the safety of the crowd—farmers, notioners, smiths, and bakers all hawking their wares, women bargaining for advantageous prices, the occasional whore whom I was not supposed to notice. One could tramp through an expanse of mud to buy a soap cake with which to later remove that mud from the hem of a gown or robe, a pointless and circular journey but one all wives, save those of the nobility, made at some time in their lives. Those same wives might be gossiping beneath a favored open window or marketplace stall or, more likely, at the common well. Such comfortable familiarity always set me to longing for the days past when I had something to talk about myself: husband, sons, the intrigues of the castle.

  I chided myself for the delusion. After so many years in seclusion, I no longer had sociability of that kind in me. I stopped and stood quite alone in the tall grass. No one else was about, so I removed my veil and pulled the pin out of my hair. It tumbled down my back in waves the color of storm clouds. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes and shook it loose.

  Ah, Guillemette, my husband would say, your hair . . . it can make the birds sing. . . .

  I opened my eyes and saw not songbirds but a falcon circling lazily overhead. It dipped to follow some hapless mouse or shrew, which was oblivious to its imminent rendezvous with a beak. How Etienne could bear to have such a cold creature as a falcon sit upon his arm was beyond me, but as Milord Gilles became more enamored of birding, it fell to Etienne to accommodate the requirements of his lust for that sport.

  It was too easy to dwell on such memories when God’s hat was off my head. So even though the bareheadedness was blissful, I replaced the veil and rear
ranged myself properly. Thoughts of Milord’s lusts were banished and I continued into the village.

  The anticipated bustle was everywhere in evidence, for Pax was coming, and there was much to be done in preparation. I spoke to the first friendly-looking man I encountered, bidding him good day.

  “Good day to you, Mother,” he replied, quite pleasantly.

  “I am looking for a certain woman, one Madame le Barbier, a seamstress from the parish of Saint-Honoré. Can you tell me, please, where might I find her?”

  The man’s face reddened almost immediately, and by the expression he wore, I half-expected him to reach up and cross himself.

  “Over there,” he answered after a weighty silence. He pointed eastward and I had to shade my eyes to see anything because the sun was so strong. “Go past the well and then between the first two cottages you come to on the left. Just beyond them is a round cottage. She lives there,” he said.

  I nodded my understanding and began to thank him, but he interrupted me.

  “May God watch over her,” he said, “and you.”

  He hurried away. My hand was raised and my mouth open; jumbled words of gratitude and confusion poured out of me. But he could not have heard a bit of it, for he was nervously whispering, almost a song.

  Something about small children . . .

  There was more I wanted to ask; I made a halfhearted attempt to hail him, but he was too far gone by then, considering that I did not know his name. To summon the man back as “Sir” would have turned a dozen heads, and I did not want that attention.

  His directions were excellent. Madame’s round house faced into a common courtyard with two others, though both of those were longhouses that would shelter animals as well as people. Madame le Barbier’s trade could be lucrative as bourgeois trades go, and at one time she could probably afford not to have animals inside her house. The woman I remembered from so many years before would have been proud of her prosperity.

  But today she had the same mud in her courtyard as every other resident of the village outside Machecoul; it was a universal affliction, especially at this time of spring. I tiptoed through the ooze with my skirts raised and knocked on the plank door, then stood, clutching my robes about me, and waited.

  And waited.

  “Who calls?” I finally heard from within.

  “Madame le Barbier?”

  After a pause, I heard the same inquiries repeated, though less muffled this time.

  It seemed futile to stand on ceremony. “This is Sister Guillemette. I was present when you called on his Eminence last night. I would have a word with you about the matter in question.”

  There was a decided bustle within and then the door opened. Madame le Barbier looked disheveled, as if she had just arisen from her pallet; had she still been in the straw at an hour when industry, not sleep, was supposed to be the rule? I could not help but think so.

  “What do you want?” she demanded, her voice full of suspicion.

  “I would speak to you of the matter that brought you to the abbey last night.”

  We were preparing for Vespers but had not yet lit the torches in the cathedral itself when Madame le Barbier came to call—the Bishop will not light a candle in the house of God until he can barely see his own hand, for he insists that God sees all even in darkness. How different from Milord Gilles, who adored notice and would cast brilliant light upon himself the whole night through despite its great cost. His enormous wealth made it possible for him to behave so recklessly, a quality of which I distinctly disapproved. Even well into his adulthood, I would take every opportunity to chide him for wastefulness. He would always laugh affectionately in his dismissal of my concern. He had a strange affinity for lesser folk such as myself, though it was no wonder, for he came into this world and settled into common hands, those being my own. Lady Marie could not hold back her convulsions; the midwife had been summoned too late. Were I not there to catch him, he would have made a far less dignified entry than befits an infant who would grow up to own more of France and Brittany than their respective rulers.

  It was as violent a birth as any I had ever witnessed; we all thought it a terrible portent. When she finally arrived, the midwife had much work to do in repairing his poor exhausted mother. Still, he was as perfect-looking as one can hope for in an infant, the unifying member of two powerful families whose wealth and holdings were already unimaginable.

  Mine was the first face into which he gazed, and mine was the first teat on which his hungry little mouth would settle. I recall thinking at the time that his eyes were so dark and deep, and that if nature played her proper role, he would grow to be a handsome lad as befit his fortunate station. Those were days of great promise and joy.

  Madame Agathe le Barbier, Frère Demien had said to announce her.

  And immediately I had recalled a hearty woman of substantial wit. But the woman who entered was small in comparison to the memory and anything but hearty. She wore tattered garb, quite incomprehensible for someone who had been a prosperous tradeswoman. She was all bones beneath the voluminous folds of her skirt.

  When I had a child at the breast—many years running, it seems, since I nursed my own two children as well as Milord Gilles—I could not seem to hold an ounce of flesh on my bones for what it took from me. My hips just seemed to melt away, and my own skirts would have dragged had I not fastened them in tighter. Etienne managed to pad me out a bit with ale, God bless him—he liked me lush. But Madame le Barbier was not of an age where she would still be suckling babes.

  I had felt compelled to speak. Your Eminence, I beg a word before we proceed.

  Immediately he had furrowed his magnificent eyebrow, surely the seat of his power, in frank disapproval. Such handsomeness was sadly wasted on a cleric—he ought to have been a courtier.

  This woman is known to me, I had whispered out of her earshot. A seamstress quite skilled at her trade, enough so to attract the personal business of Milord himself, who takes notable pride in his appearance.

  “Too much pride,” he said with a grunt.

  “She has aged far more than her due,” I told him. “She was once a handsome and robust woman. One wonders—”

  And then the Bishop’s impatience got the better of him. “Guillemette, if you have nothing more substantial than gossip to tell me, I shall proceed to hear her.”

  I blurted out unsolicited insight into the stated purpose of her visit.

  “Her son would have to be fifteen or sixteen years old now.” A brief pang of regret for how time separates us from our fondest memories passed through me. “He was a beautiful babe and, oh, so vigorous! If childhood was decent to him, he would have grown into a handsome youth, perhaps unusually so.”

  Madame went frequently to Lord de Rais’s apartments with bolts of fabric and samples of buttons and other such trimmings, for as his Eminence had been quick to point out, and not with approval, Milord loved finery. One such occasion stayed with me and haunted me still. Milord was late for the appointment he had made with Madame’s employer—not an uncommon occurrence, since he craved the fuss that was made when he swooped in so dramatically. Madame had given the little boy to a young girl to watch over him, but at that moment the child was ill and could not be quieted. The girl had been forced to bring him inside. No sooner did Madame have him calm than Lord de Rais strode briskly into the room. She turned away to hide the child from his view so as not to offend him, but Milord Gilles saw the infant. He came directly over to Madame and plucked him off the breast. The boy began to wail again, this time as if he were being tortured.

  Lord de Rais bounced the boy up and down with a fascination that distressed me, though I could not say exactly why.

  “Why, little angel,” he said, “what have you to fear? I am no demon.” Then he laughed, and tousled the boy’s fine yellow hair.

  How unseemly that attention was, if one gave it any thought—a great lord in the glow of manhood, bouncing the baby of a tradeswoman in his arms, when
so much other business awaited. But I did not think on it further at the time, for the girl whisked Madame’s child out of the room, and, after all, had I not done the same to that lord himself when he was just a babe? More so than his own mother, I daresay. Then we were caught up in the bustle of tasks: measuring, fitting, the selection of trims and fancies—it was all so very engaging that my concerns slipped away. There was Lady Catherine’s wardrobe to be seen to as well; it would not do to have Milord looking fine and his wife shabby, though he hardly took notice of her that I or anyone else could see.

  As was often the case, Madame and I had exchanged pleasantries that day—that is, when she had recovered from her agitation over the incident. She had little awe of those above her station, having seen the naked gentry often enough to have a certain ease about it. Now, so many years later, she no longer seemed to have that ease. She stumbled at first when directed to speak.

  “My son is a lad of sixteen, just last month.”

  I was correct, then, in my recollections of his age.

  The Bishop had seemed perplexed, rightly—this was not a matter for him, but for the Magistrate. Still, he queried her. “What seems to be the matter with the boy?”

  “That I cannot say, for he has simply vanished. I sent him out thirteen days ago with a set of breeches for delivery and he never returned.”

  I had opened my mouth, wanting to speak, but Jean de Malestroit’s flashing glance stopped me. I knew what he was thinking, that the boy had just run off as young boys sometimes do, or that the money he was supposed to collect had been squandered or lost. I remained silent and still against all my inclinations. Then he did precisely what he ought to have done; he advised her to see the Magistrate.

  She had turned back at the door to say, “Other children have disappeared and he has not answered the complaints of their parents.”