Thief of Souls Read online

  So many years had passed and still I could barely say it.

  “He . . . vanished,” I whispered.

  My voice abandoned me for a few moments, during which time Madame joined me in a comforting silence. “So Jean is in Avignon . . .” she eventually said, “a fair city, à bon temps, I have heard. But so far away . . .”

  “I have never traveled there, though his Eminence has had audiences with the Holy Father many times during my service to him. He says it is a comely place indeed, especially the palace where his Holiness lives. I miss Jean terribly, but he seems happy in his work—and there are finally plans for me to visit him in a few months when his Eminence travels to Avignon.”

  I saw genuine pleasure in her expression. “How wonderful to have such a journey ahead of you! The traveling will be hard, but—”

  “I have never feared setting out into the world—indeed, I have always viewed it as something of a pleasure. What awaits me at the end of this road makes the journey itself seem a mere trifle of inconvenience.” I patted my sleeve. “He writes often; I carry the letters on my person until I have memorized them. But it is not the same, Madame, as reaching out and touching his cheek.”

  “Please,” she said, “my given name is Agathe.” Then came another bitter smile. “We are true sisters, n’est-ce pas? With something as strong as the souls of our sons to join us, we ought to be on quite intimate terms.”

  Her tears flowed again. I put my arm around her shoulder until she stopped weeping.

  “Well, then, Agathe,” I said to her, “you must tell me all that you know of what happened to Georges.”

  She bit her lip. “Ah, Mother—”

  “Guillemette,” I corrected her.

  “Guillemette.” She tried to smile, but it was a halfhearted gesture at best. “There are times when I cannot seem to stop speaking of it, but right now, it is as if you have just told me I must walk to the Holy Land and back again in a fortnight.”

  I said nothing but lightly touched her hand in reassurance. She sniffed once again, then began her sorrowful recitation. “My employer—the tailor Jean Peletier, a well-respected man—still dresses Lady Catherine sometimes, although the woman seems a veritable ghost to me, for all that we see of her. Sometimes, when the occasion arises, he will outfit Lord Gilles himself, though we have done much less of that since Milord took to traveling so much.”

  Stories of his entourage were legendary, of lavish trains, multitudes of retainers and servants, all impressively attired. “He seems never to stay in one of his own castles for very long,” I said. “One wonders at his nomadic tendency. He did not show it as a child.”

  “Ah, but he saw it—in his father. We were always outfitting Lord Guy for one journey or another. How his traveling garments became so worn so quickly I will never understand. But now Milord Gilles stays in Champtocé for good stretches, or so Monsieur Peletier says; he has heard this from a tailor he knows there. We serve him only when he is in Machecoul.” She added, hesitantly, “And there is difficulty in collecting what is owed from him, so we do not directly seek his business.”

  Thank God it had not been my responsibility to teach the boy Gilles how to manage money—I cannot imagine the battles we would have had. That gruesome chore fell to Jean de Craon, who terrified his grandson into obedience on all matters with consummate cruelty but still somehow did not manage to impart sound fiscal sense to him. I could almost hear Jean de Malestroit saying, If one gives a man a fish, he will eat it and then be hungry again, but if you teach him to fish, he shall never want. This was never more apropos than regarding Milord’s wealth, which was given to him without tutelage, so when he reached his majority and could no longer be restrained, he was as profligate as any man could be.

  “Perhaps all his traveling is an attempt to outrun those to whom he is in debt,” I offered.

  “No doubt. Nevertheless, Monsieur Peletier will still consent to do work for Milord now and then; he says that he would keep his wares in the eyes of the nobility so additional business might be acquired from those who actually will pay. He considers it a reasonable investment. My Georges is—”

  She stopped in mid-sentence and caught a breath as I had done in speaking of Michel, then let it out slowly before continuing, this time with more care in her choice of words. “Monsieur Peletier took my Georges to apprentice, before . . .”

  Again, she stammered to find the right words. “In any case, the boy has been going into Milord’s castle here at Machecoul with him regularly. What he has told me is unsettling—fantastic tales of how he is treated within, sometimes by the page called Poitou, but on occasion by Lord Gilles himself. The man does not pay his debts, yet he lives lavishly and treats his guests, even commoners, as royalty. And why such an interest in a mere apprentice—”

  She did not recall that day, so many years before, when Milord took the infant Georges away from her.

  Why, little angel, what have you to fear?

  I held my own recollection within and said, “It is unseemly, I agree.”

  “Georges was beginning to speak covetously of all the luxury he saw. I did not approve and told him to accept his own fortunate position with grace. Of course he resisted my advice, but what could I do? He was apprenticed. Almost a man. Out of my control.”

  “When one is a tradesman, it is difficult not to covet such a life as Milord lives.”

  “I myself saw it all, and yet still I knew my place. But the youth of today, they seem to have forgotten that prosperity comes through hard work and diligence.” She shrugged wearily. “What does one know at that age beyond his own desires? He could be swayed by the tickle of a feather. He was certainly influenced by the one called Poitou—a character the likes of which I cannot describe, except to say that he made me feel uneasy in my own skin, like a thousand spiders were crawling all over me. Georges would come home and speak of the promises of benefit the page made to him on behalf of Milord, of compensation for tailoring, even though my son is not yet accomplished. Of materials and goods, needles, expensive scissors—I thought it too far-fetched to be trusted. The last promise I heard him repeat was that he would be given a horse.”

  “A horse?” It was far-fetched. “Quite an excellent gift.”

  “Oui, Mère, it is. Too excellent. Naturally he was enthralled.”

  “As would be any young man.”

  “I told him that he must be suspicious of such unmerited generosity. But he went to the castle anyway, against my wishes, to take possession of the animal on the appointed day. A fortnight ago. Before he left I gave him a pair of breeches to deliver en route and bade him collect the money for them. He laughed and told me that he would make the delivery on his new horse, that such tasks would henceforth be a pleasure and that he would gladly do them for me.” She lowered her head and a tear fell down one cheek. “He is a good boy. A good son to me.”

  I did not wish to disturb what good thoughts of him she had managed to salvage from his disappearance, so I stayed quiet for a moment. When it seemed proper to do so, I asked, “And there has been no trace of him since?”

  “Not one.”

  “Did you inquire at the castle?”

  “My husband would not allow me to do so. He said it was his place as the boy’s father. He went forth to Machecoul but came back with only the word that Georges had never arrived to collect the horse and that the animal had been given to someone else.”

  “Did you ask who told him that?”

  “Again it was this Poitou, Milord’s page.”

  “And he did not question him further?”

  “My husband does not find it necessary to be suspicious of anyone but his own son.”

  Her resentment was plain. Not only had she lost her son, but she had also lost confidence in her husband—a desolate situation.

  “Have you inquired as to whether or not anyone else saw him that day?”

  “Mais oui, Mother. Of course.”

  Not Guillemette this time, or the more
familiar Mère, but Mother. Our young intimacy was already being strained by my pointed questions. And what a fool I was to have even asked her this question—I myself had plagued everyone around Champtocé until they came to dread me like the disease itself.

  “André Barbé told me that he saw Georges picking apples early that afternoon. He saw him behind the house in which la famille Rondeau lives, where they keep an orchard. He was not especially fond of apples himself. When I heard this I thought he must be doing it for the horse.”

  “And no one else speaks of seeing him . . .”

  “No one.”

  How many times had I retraced Michel’s last hours from what had been told to me by others? Too many to count. “This man Barbé, did he tell you anything else about having seen Georges?”

  “It was all he saw. He did not see Georges leave the orchard. Nor did anyone else, for that matter. And I have asked aplenty. But Barbé did have something else to tell me.” She took in a long breath. “He said to me that he met a man, a stranger, on the road between Machecoul and Nantes. When Barbé revealed that he was from Machecoul, the stranger became agitated and told him to watch his children, for they were in danger of being snatched. He sang this little chanson he had heard; the words were, ‘Sur ce, l’on lui avait dit, en se merveillant, qu’on y mangeout les petits enfants.’ ”

  I was stunned. It was the very phrase that Jean had written to me, the recalled words that initially piqued my interest in her plight, the same ones I had vaguely heard from the nervous stranger who had directed me here. But Georges was sixteen years of age; he was not a small child, certainly not small enough to be eaten. But not all sixteen-year-old boys were man-size. “Agathe,” I said quietly, “was Georges of small stature?”

  “He had yet to reach his full growth.”

  “Did this Barbé tell you where this stranger came from?”

  “Saint-Jean-d’Angély.”

  A good-enough distance. But then, shocking news travels quickly, especially on dark roads.

  I stayed with Agathe le Barbier for another hour at her insistence, though there was little more to be said on the matter that had brought me to see her. She found the wherewithal to feed me and I accepted her offer; it would have been an insult not to do so. In the deepest period of my grief over Michel, walking ten paces had been nearly unimaginable until someone forced me to do it. Madame le Barbier had walked from the village, through the forest, and to the abbey church; she had presented herself, albeit shabbily, to the Bishop and myself and told an ill-received tale. Then she had found her way home again in the vile darkness. Today she had withstood the sting of my questions. This was a woman of admirable substance, who had my complete respect.

  Now it was my turn to show such substance. As I hurried through the darkening forest on my way back to the abbey, through the shadows and pitfalls and grabbing branches, I held my own terror at bay with an altogether different distraction: What unpleasant shape would Jean de Malestroit’s magnificent eyebrow assume when I spoke to him later?

  ” ‘. . . someone had told him, marveling, that they eat small children there.’ ”

  “You heard this said?”

  “Yes, in a ditty, Eminence, from a man who told me the way. And it was told to me by someone to whom it had been previously told, who heard it from another . . .”

  I did not mention Madame le Barbier’s part in this chain of news, nor Jean’s; both seemed superfluous and would divert him from the heart of the matter. “But that was exactly what the man said to him, not one word different from what he told me, or so the witness swears—”

  “Guillemette, I have told you many times that gossip is not to be tolerated—”

  “This was not gossip,” I said firmly, though my knees were nearly trembling. “It was told to me in the course of my inquiries.” Finally I pulled Jean’s letter from my sleeve and opened it, more roughly than I ought to have. “And look, here it is, all the way from Avignon, written by my own dear son. And all of this relates directly to the purpose of my going there in the first place.”

  I gasped. I had given myself away. An almost wicked smile crept onto the Bishop’s face. “I must have heard wrong, then,” he said. “I believe you said you were going to Machecoul for threads and needles.”

  Caught in a falsehood—I groped for an explanation. “Indeed, Eminence. That was my original purpose.”

  “Guillemette, you need not lie to me. I am not a difficult man for whom a woman must tamper with the truth.”

  By all the saints, the man fairly invited lying with his strictness. But it was not the time to speak on that matter; that could only be done in a relaxed and quiet moment, when he might be more receptive to helpful criticism. I lowered my head submissively and hoped it would work. “Please allow me to apologize, Eminence, for my lack of confidence in your fairness. I confess that I longed to speak to Madame le Barbier again, and I ought to have told you this.”

  His expression softened. “Yes, you ought.”

  “But I did have need of those things. And since I was going to be in Machecoul, I thought it would be productive to inquire about this other matter.”

  He looked at my empty hands. “You have put your parcels away before coming here, then.”

  Blessed Virgin, save me! “No—”

  “Then, where are they?”

  “There are none!” I cried impatiently. “There was nothing to my liking. The market seemed rather bare for some reason.”

  The eyebrow dipped lower on one side again. “None at all?”

  “None,” I said sheepishly.

  “Hmm. Perhaps all the vendors were here in Nantes today; such a pity. Often you come back from your forays with more purchases than you intended. And then you spend hours on your return chatting about the wonders of your acquisitions, in what I have come to recognize as an effort to justify what you have disbursed from the abbey’s treasury, which effort I must confess I have also come to anticipate with great enjoyment, for you fairly glow and it is a pleasure to see how inventively you come up with uses for the things you buy. Today you came back with empty hands and no stories, except wild tales of children being eaten.”

  “At least they were at no cost—”

  “—in keeping with their probable worth.”

  I wondered for a stunned moment if Etienne had known me as well as this man seemed to. “I confess I was a bit distracted by the matter of the missing child. But at least I wasted no money.”

  “No, only time. And a bit seems a mild expression to describe your distraction today. One hopes you will not be overtaken by it.”

  “Eminence, my duties were attended to before I left here. I will admit that one of my purposes got the better of me as the day progressed. But you must realize that this is a tale worth pursuing—children have disappeared and cannot be accounted for by any means. Children. One understands they are not noble children, but—”

  “We know only of one child for sure.”

  “There are strong rumors of others.” My voice had gone quite shrill, bothersome even to myself. “You know everything that goes on in this realm. Surely your advisers must have spoken of this.”

  “You exaggerate. There are many things I do not know. And my ‘advisers,’ as you so gently call them, have said nothing.”

  A man with as much power as he, with so much to protect for himself and others, would have many spies bringing him information. He would know what he needed and wanted to know with little difficulty. “It is not in the natural order of things for children to disappear,” I said. “Surely you can discover what is happening to them.”

  “Sister, do you propose that something unnatural is happening to them, if there is indeed a pattern? It would make more sense that these young ones have run away or vanished due to some unfortunate oddity and their remains are not yet found. And we are talking about a few children, not dozens. Were there dozens, it would be a different situation.”

  “Perhaps there are dozens. It would
be wise to determine that before we dismiss the disappearances as nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “Oh, bah,” he said. “A waste of time.”

  I let a moment of cold silence pass before saying, “You would not think so were it your child.” I cast my glance at the implements of worship that lay ready on the tray. “Your preparations are complete. With your permission, Eminence, I shall retire to my room. For private devotions. I think perhaps the journey got the better of me.”

  Without waiting for his response, I lowered my head and moved toward the door. Then I felt his hand on my shoulder. I turned back and gave him an angry stare.

  “I apologize, Guillemette.” He was all contrition, at least for that moment. “You are right,” he said. “I am ill-equipped to understand your feelings about this.”

  A smile of gratitude was aching to slip onto my face, but I forced it back and pressed my advantage in the strategic moment he had provided—the Maid of Orléans herself had little on me in that realm. “Eminence, let me discover if there are more, and if there are, then I would ask your blessing to pursue my inquiries even further.”

  His contrition, it seemed, might not extend to sanctioning such a bold request. “You have duties here, need I remind you.”

  “You need not.”

  “It would require you to go out into the countryside—a dangerous thing to do.”

  “I am an abbess. No one will harm me.”

  “An abbess is a woman. There are men out there who would ravage the Virgin Mother, given the opportunity.”

  I swallowed hard, and spoke. “I shall go, nonetheless. And if you forbid it, I shall remove this veil, and you will then not be able to forbid me anything but the sacraments.”

  Harumph. “God may curse you for this obstinacy.”

  “Au contraire, Brother, God will reward me for my bravery. You will see.”

  “Only He knows if either of those characteristics pleases Him. Do as you wish, Guillemette; you will anyway.” Then he added with some reluctance, “If you find this worthy of your time, then I suppose I will just have to trust your judgment. But please be discreet. We do not want to cause any unnecessary upset among the people.”