The Ghosts of Kerfol (3 page)

“Of Sire you needn’t worry.” Guillemette was not nearly so generous a teacher as Maria. “He has boys to empty his pot and make his bed, but you’ll want to know what trunk or closet holds what, ’case he calls for something. He’ll be at Morlaix all day.” She looked up expectantly from her dusting. “I’m busy. Off you go and have a look around.”

“And then?” I urged, afraid she would vanish again and leave me idle.

“He changes his shirt every Lord’s day,” she begrudged me. “He likes the robe with the wolf-skin cuffs kept on the kitchen hook under the perch for the hunting bird. He had it made special,” she sniffed — as if it were
her
robe, as if they were
her
wolf-skin cuffs —“by the furrier at Valognes. And take care the velvet sword belt don’t get wet. The color runs.”

“But what must I
do?
”

“How should I know?” she blurted, and it occurred to me that Guillemette
didn’t
know any better than I did.

The mistress has . . . limited experience running a household,
a small voice had ventured at table the night before, and a fair number of the upstairs girls had bowed their heads in silent assent. As if sensing my failing confidence, Guillemette added, “She’ll school you when she’s ready.”

I skulked about the west wing feeling desperately exposed, as if I might any moment be found out and made an example of. I wandered airy rooms with lofty oak beams, stone floors, and huge fireplaces, tested the mattress edge on huge paneled beds, marveling at tapestry canopies embroidered with beasts and foliage. I handled red, white, and green serge curtains and spotless white wool blankets as if to do so would instruct me. There were chests everywhere, deep, wide, and elaborately carved, some with heavy locks. I opened those I could, rifling through cloaks in bloody hues, velvet hose, brocade waistcoats with ribbons, fine garments with silk buttons and shoulder knots. Once Guillemette passed bearing a fresh vase of flowers as I was lifting out a bolt of blue and white satin. “From Bruges, in Flanders,” she murmured conspiratorially, and I fought the urge to knock her over the head with it.

But I had no such leisure to explore in the east wing, Milady’s domain. Indeed, when she heard me humming — I thought softly — as I dusted one of the chambers at the far end of her hallway, she came and bade me follow. With thudding heart, I trailed her into a large, elegant chamber. She handed me a brush, saying my name uncertainly as if only now recalling it, and again, savoring it like a sweetmeat.
Perrette.
“I have no girl to brush my hair.”

I reached out slowly, clasping cold pewter with a mermaid carved in. The brush handle was the siren’s scaly tail.

When the lady loosed her black hair from the pins, it danced with static. I had to soothe and train it to the task, raking over-gently at first, afraid I’d snag or harm or otherwise offend, but she urged me on with her hand, permitting me, and to calm myself, I imagined that it was only Grand-mère’s gray mane in my hands. Perhaps that siren on the brush lured me, for I slipped into a rhythm that bloomed in my throat, and it wasn’t until I looked up at Milady’s eyes in the mirror that I understood I had been humming aloud. It was one of Grand-mère’s old country tunes, about an elfin prince and a maiden.

Her gaze was wide and glistening. When it met mine, she looked away almost apologetically, confessing her own defeated love of music. “This we share,” she said, the youthful flesh creasing round her eyes. “I knew it when I heard you out there.”

Turning, she took the brush from my hand, laid it down, and held my rough servant’s hands in hers. Her loneliness must have touched me even then. Blushing, I felt its chill in her creamy fingers and ached, before long, to have my hands back, to sit on them and warm them again.

I tried and failed to meet her eye as she sighed. “But alas. I have no heart for music now.”

She may forget and speak to you like a sister,
one girl at the table had put in,
but when she wills it, you’ll sift through the dung heap. Pray, remember you are a servant.

I waited for Milady to continue, but she only let go my hands, lifted the brush again, and began to fashion her hair into the severe style I had seen in the kitchen. I stood idly by, uncertain what to do, until Guillemette knocked lightly and said the master was returned from Morlaix. “If it please you, Mistress, he would have the household gather in the great room.”

Milady went at once, her satin skirts rustling, but I lingered in the hall, anxious for Guillemette or anyone to lead the way. “Another gift, no doubt,” the dour woman said with a sigh, arriving at last by my side. “Sire favors an audience.”

I followed her down as others drifted in, forming a silent half-oval on the parquet. We kept our backs straight. We did not whisper. Cross-eyed Symonette, dressed in a clean smock, formally announced Sire’s entrance as if the master were the lead character in a play rather than a patriarch returned from a day’s business. The farmer seemed to look at me while he spoke, but it was hard to be certain. Symonette always seemed to be looking somewhere he wasn’t.

Master took his time. The boy servants fought not to squirm. Milady stood looking forcibly cheerful at the center of the human horseshoe, and when he entered, taking up most of the air in the room, she bent at the knee like everyone else.

“Wife.” He bowed gallantly, and she strode forward to accept his hand.

“We are grateful to have you returned to us, Sire.” She kissed the hand with diligence, though her stance was weary. He revoked it with a glad sneer, reaching into his pocket. Craning forward like the others to see what he brought from his waistcoat, I realized this was an established dance they were doing, we were all doing, for could any do other than his or her part? There was no script, but no matter. Neither was there liberty or uncertainty. He gave her a gilt box. She opened it slowly, responsibly, casting long glances behind as we jostled. She let him take the box from her, helpfully, and lift out the shiny object.
Ooh,
we said, and,
Aah.
He clasped it round her neck, encircling her with powerful arms, his gaze daring her not to look away, though she did. She always did, Youen told me later, when we met by the well before supper. And always looked at the edge of tears. “He’s a bully,” the stable boy pronounced.

So I told him how her eyes had teared up that afternoon when she spoke of music while I brushed her hair. I found myself leaning closer as I spoke.

Youen only shook his head as if he pitied me. “Her Ladyship played the violin when she came. She wouldn’t spare you or any of us a glance were she not so starved for society.”

Pride rose in me like sap. Had I disappointed him somehow? Did he think me a stupid baby? I stalked off, surprising us both, I think. I glanced back from the kitchen doorway, and the Red Boy was still watching, with a hint of pleasure in his eyes.

Did
Milady find her life at Kerfol lonely? Master seldom spoke harshly to her, but many days he did not speak at all. She was forbidden to accompany him on business or roam the estate grounds in his absence. “She’s as good as a prisoner here,” Maria confided when I paused in the kitchen with the lady’s washbasin one day, her voice dropping as if the very stones in the walls might overhear. “You should hear her beg him to let her pat the chaplain’s old dog.”

When the baron rode off to Morlaix or Quimper or Rennes, as he so often did, he assigned so close a watch that his young wife could scarce walk from one wing of the house to the other without finding a maid at her side.

But one morning, with Master due to depart for Quimper, Milady called me in from candle making. I couldn’t welcome her advances, feeling, as I often would, like a fly in her hapless web. On the other hand, we made some two hundred candles a day that season, casting them in molds with wicks or stripping the bark from rushes to dip in melted tallow for the common rushlights. It was weary work.

“Come, walk with me.” She did not seem to command so much as cajole, as if I might object. As if I
could
object. She led me through the busy courtyard back to the orchard and reached to touch each branch we passed, elegant fingers trailing over knobs of bark and heavy fruit. The day was bright and blue. Her face was closed and dreamy. Against my better judgment, I found myself at ease.

But two figures back in the courtyard startled me right again. They were too far off to make out, but their stance and focused stillness told me they were likewise watching the two of us: fuzzy figures strolling in the orchard. I had a sinking feeling then, that I’d somehow trespassed; at the core of that sinking feeling was the seed of another. I resented Milady for leading me there so recklessly, for doing what I knew she would do again and again. Her need was such. I felt afraid for no reason I could name.

The first figure revealed itself. Cook came bustling across the wide courtyard, carrying in her oft-scalded hand what looked to be a shiny copper plate. By now, Milady had stiffened like a doe reading the wind. As Cook drew close, we saw that the plate bore a sliced apple, artfully composed, its flesh a perfect pinkish white.

Before the lady could inquire or accept, we saw the second figure striding forth. We stood quite still until the baron reached us, greeting Milady with a tight smile.

“I’m no queen,” his wife protested with a shrug, “to need such honors.” She took the plate from Cook, who looked as uneasy as I felt and who tugged me away by the apron string. We had not been dismissed, so we stood apart to give them privacy.

I heard Milady soften her complaint with a hollow, insistent laugh. “I can pick my own apples, you know, Yves. I might enjoy it.”

He leaned close, lifting her chin, and his shadow darkened her. “I would have you inside now,” he said. “I depart soon, and a man with a treasure does not leave the key in the lock when he goes out.”

“Why do you never take me with you, then?”

So few things pleased Sire, but he seemed to smile as he fished a timepiece from his coat of dark red-flowered silk, gesturing at the house. “Young wives belong at their firesides.”

Abruptly, he set off for the château again with Cook at his heels, and when he’d gone, Milady and I followed the edge of the moat around to the front gardens — so she could hear the birdsong a moment longer, she said. She hurled the already browning apple in among a stand of drooping cosmos. “When he goes, you bring me an apple, Perrette.” Milady spoke over a shoulder, her voice stubborn and rueful. “That one had a worm in it.”

The crunch of carriage wheels on gravel sent me scurrying down to the kitchen, where I secured a basket from Maria and walked — nay, skipped, for this was a precious errand — out to the orchard again. The day was yet crisp and fine, and just as I’d hoped and imagined, Youen found me rummaging through the gnarled branches.

“I saw you go past.” He bit thoughtfully into one of the baron’s perfect apples, a dozen bees circling him as if he were a honeyed treat.

“You make very free.” I glanced round.

Youen leaned easily against a trunk, and his look said,
Do I?

“Maria warned me never —”

“Maria,” he sighed with good humor. “Is there nothing under the sun Maria doesn’t know?” He took another bite while I stood frozen to the spot, basking in his attentions, for he seemed to study me.

Chewing and smiling, he plowed at the soil round the tree’s roots with his boot heel. “I hail from a family of notorious poachers, you know. Ask anyone.” Coppery bangs dropped in his eyes, and he pushed them back again. “Old Yves tried to catch my father in the act, and his father before him, for decades. Don’t imagine I’d ruin my good family name by getting caught.”

“But why —?”

He looked up quickly. “Why what? Why does the lord of the land hire the spawn of a known poacher?” He looked hard into my eyes, and I did not look away.

The Red Boy threw down the half-eaten apple without bothering to bury it, as I’d hoped and expected he would. “Why do birds fly?”

I watched him go, red to my ears, and then rooted out the soiled core from the thicket. I buried it in a hole like a charm.

That night I found Milady in the great hall, weeping. It was the grandest space in the manor, its ceiling painted with nymphs and animals; green and white marble walls; stately pillars framing lead and gilt statues. I stood wringing my hands as she roved the parquet floor in her rustling gown, running her hands over velvet benches and silk curtains embroidered with
fleurs de lys.
She flicked the fresh-cut flowers and painted with one finger in a sheen of dust on a sideboard, erasing her script swiftly.

I stood watching from the shadows, guilty as a thief.

“I have nothing,” she said, looking up as if she’d known I was there all along. I was rapt — bewitched, it would seem. Why didn’t I flee then before it was too late? Take my hemp sack and go.

She lifted and slapped down her riches, one opulent object after another, and my head reeled with confusion.

Nothing.

Like most everyone at Kerfol, I assumed it was Milady’s childless state that grieved her. It must have grieved Yves de Cornault that she gave him no son, but did he fault her? Lonely though her marriage was, could she fault
him
?

But she snatched up my hand before I could ponder further. “Come, Perrette.” Once more, she brought us to the orchard, now silvery in moonlight. In Milady’s grip I felt the same pulsing energy that I remembered in the body of my little pet bird. Birds have hollow bones, Grand-mère had said, closing my hands round Percy’s downy form. Delicate creatures. But my pet was a wild bird, and in that small, quavering shape, Grand-mère said, lived every wind that blew in every corner of the world. “Do not forget and set him down, even for an instant, or off he’ll fly.”

Would it be that way to hold Milady, too?

For once, and not for long, I pitied her husband.

But it took little to see that Sire was the furthest thing from Milady’s thoughts. “It is a different orchard now,” Anne de Cornault whispered as she skipped past and round me — mad, ecstatic, I know not which — turning and whirling under the upraised arms of the trees. “Now that
he
has walked in it.”