The Ghosts of Kerfol (5 page)

Day after day, as Milady sat stitching by the hearth with us, night after night alone in bed, she must have wondered these things, too, and anguished, and against my instincts, I ached for her. Questions lapped at my lips like a tide some days, and to hold them back brought a kind of nausea.

As I stood brushing her hair one night, I noticed that she had not worn her silken robe over her shift to conceal the bruise. I touched it with my forefinger, tentatively, and she caught my hand — and then she kissed the hand, almost gratefully, and I fought the urge to draw it back.

“I am not very much older than you are, Perrette.”

I nodded in the mirror, feeling suddenly wise and very old indeed. I looked a stranger in the glass, while Milady looked familiar. I seemed to know her now.

“I used to think there was no fate worse than not being loved,” she told me — told herself — in the looking glass. “But now I know there are worse things.”

When Master was home evenings and smiled across the table at her, I saw that she would not solicit news of her friend or send a trusted servant with a letter. Sire was sure to find out if she did. I imagined — I’m sure we all did — that he could find out anything.

That winter was black and long and rainy.

Youen grew increasingly drawn and distant, taking his meals alone in the stables. He didn’t speak when I brought them, only grunted thanks and stalked away into the mare’s stall. He would sit among the dung and flies rather than with us. Rather than speak. And what could we do? What could
I
do? Some selfish, disbelieving part of me drew away from Youen in turn, because I did not fathom, could not fathom, what he might need, what might heal him, and failing shamed me.

What girlish innocence I still had thrilled when minstrels arrived at Kerfol with a troop of performing dogs. Overjoyed and forgetful, as lovers are forgetful, and with Sire away, Milady bought the smallest and cleverest, a white, feathery dog with one blue eye and one brown, and sat with it on her lap through supper, feeding it scraps.

But when her husband returned from his travels, she came from her bath one night and found that dog, too, strangled on her pillow.

On yet another evening, Youen found a poor, lean greyhound whining at the gate in the bitter cold. Against his advice, Milady took possession of the dog and hid him in a room that no one went to, surprising us all by smuggling food there from her own plate. But Yves de Cornault was not long recalled from business when we found the greyhound stiff and strangled, a tiny wisp of blood on the pillow by its mouth.

Another time, when his wife had merely stooped to pat the chaplain’s watchdog, a grave old pointer who slept in an anteroom of the little church, the baron happened up the path unexpectedly, and by nightfall, the pointer, too, was gone from Kerfol.

“Who next?” our ranks whispered. “What now?”

When Youen graced us with his sullen presence at all, usually only at Sunday’s meal, he refused to comment on the dogs. He would get up and leave the room if pressed. He was never one for gossip, Maria said, but he also had more feeling for animals than most. Once Sire nearly beat to death a young horse he was breaking, and Youen had lunged for the whip. The master struck him hard that time with a ringed knuckle, and the cut on Youen’s brow had shone an angry cinnamon for days.

Milady mourned her losses bitterly, vowing to me never to bring another dog into the manor, no matter what. But longing lasts, while memory is short. Yves de Cornault was on business in Rennes that endless winter when a brindled pup was found in the snowy wood out behind the chapel, its leg mangled in a trap. She warmed and fed it, wrapped its leg, and hid the animal in the west wing until the blacksmith came on an errand. Milady paid handsomely for his confidence, and the good man agreed to bring the dog back to the village and care for it.

But that night we heard whining and scratching at the door, and when Milady opened it the lame puppy jumped at her with frantic little barks, drenched and shivering. We hid him in her bed till morning — when Master’s carriage wheels sounded on the gravel.

She closed the dog in a wardrobe, closed me in the room with the dog, and drew a finger to her lips as she backed out and shut the door. I listened to the coachman leading the horses out back. I strained to hear the soft bustle of servants gathering downstairs to receive him, and Milady’s voice — too high for a moment, until it found its liar’s pitch.

The puppy in the wardrobe began to bark.

Frozen, I pleaded in my thoughts for it to stop, and for just a moment, as if Fate would tease me with her wit, it did. But all sound below, too, had ceased. The house held its breath. I cracked the wardrobe door and the dog snuffled and nudged under my hand. I heard footfalls on the steps and eased the door shut again, but it was Youen who came. “Where is it?”

I pointed.

He went and like a magician put his hands on the dog, silencing it with his strokes. He leaned over to shield and muffle it, and at length crawled in and pulled the pup between his raised knees, still stroking and soothing. “Perrette,” he hissed, for I was still frozen. “Shut the wardrobe door.”

“But —”

“The door. When he’s at table with his wine, tap once at the chamber door, and I’ll smuggle this down and out through the buttery.”

“He’ll —”

“He’ll not hear me.” He nodded helpfully. “Shut it.”

I did tap, and Master did not hear Youen sneak the creature down and out to the stables. Or so we thought.

But when I went with Milady to turn down the bed, we found the animal like the others, dead on her pillow. She moaned and blinked, incredulous, while I, not awaiting her order, wrapped it in the blanket. I ran with my burden banging against my back down the stairs and out through the twisted trees in the orchard, where I left the bundle under the stars for the crows before racing back to the stables.

Youen did not move when I tried to rouse him from the straw. He could not. His ribs were broken. I knelt and turned his face to me, and one side was bruised like the darkened side of the moon. His inner ear was caked with blood. I stroked his fine, fiery hair, and he groaned, so I ran for Cook, who could nurse Youen and ply him with herbs.

After the puppy, all was quiet for many weeks. Master acted ordinary enough. The days passed slowly — and the nights, bleak and horrible now that I knew Youen less and less and longed for him more and more. His injuries were healing, but his silence was impenetrable.

We none of us spoke of Lanrivain without crossing ourselves, but one night a peddler woman came to sell trinkets to the maids. Milady had no heart for trinkets but stood looking on as her women made their choices. At length the peddler convinced her — I heard not how — to buy a peculiar powder box for herself. When all was quiet once more, Milady took my hand and closed us together in the library, where she sat turning the odd, pear-shaped container in her hands.

At last, she opened it and fished a rolled strip of paper from the powder. “Turn away.” She hid the paper from my eyes. I knew who must have sent it, though I saw no seal. As Milady read, my own hands began to shake, for I could well imagine the penalty for complicity.

She dropped Hervé de Lanrivain’s sentiments into the fire, and I saw the spidery script on the page cringe and fold in upon itself in flame. When she waved me out, I was glad to go.

Youen was not in the stables. I sat shivering behind the woodpile until I saw him return. I found him in the stall of his favorite horse and knelt before him. He looked up with difficulty, as if his head were too heavy to lift, and I searched his eyes. I held his jaw in my hands as the mare stamped and tickled the top of my head with her flicking tail, but Youen brushed my arms away stiffly, his eyes blank.

“He sent a letter,” I urged in a whisper. Surely this would rouse him. “Lanrivain.”

Youen winced. He rocked forward, knocking me off balance, and his torso curled over his raised knees. I righted myself and stroked the top of his head. “Please, Youen. What can be done?”

“It’s not from him.”

“What isn’t?”

“The letter.” He lifted his head, his eyes familiar again, flashing.

“You must tell me.”

At long last he blurted in a voice like child’s, “I mustn’t tell.” He shook his head, his eyes glistening. “I mustn’t tell.”

“Youen —”

He lurched to his feet, and I followed him out of the stables, along the edge of the courtyard. I ducked after him into the winter orchard. He was stealthy and quick. We ran over the icy, cracking earth, well beyond the orchard where I had never been before, until my side cramped and my hem and stockings were full of burrs. Ending in an owl-haunted meadow, we stood under a round moon, panting.

“There.” He pointed.

I looked down and saw nothing. Frosty grass and gray, flattened milkweed.

“He’s there. Lanrivain.”

I stepped back, the horror dawning on me. “You can’t know that,” I soothed, for he was broken now. My Red Boy had fallen to his knees by the grave, collapsed forward in the cold, and his back was heaving. I bent and stroked it gently as I could, though I was afraid — so afraid — of this place, his pain, the world. “How do you know?”

He rose up, spent, then knelt again, staring into the bare trees like a wild animal. His eyes no longer glistened. His voice was flat and strange. “Because I buried him.”

He stood, brushing himself off, and spoke over his shoulder as he went. “Sire bade me do it, and you may tell what gossip you will, but it will be my life.”

It was the last time I saw him.

The baron retired that night after dinner. Milady sent me up with a cup of hot wine, and Sire waved me out again with word that he was not to be disturbed.

Later, in her room, she took my hand, looked hard into my eyes, and swore me to secrecy. Lanrivain would come to the courtyard that night to wait for her, after the moon had set.

I gaped back at her, mute as a fish.

“Listen at his door,” Milady pleaded.

Lanrivain was dead. Did she not believe it, too? After all, the necklace had found its way back, but many weeks later, the young noble had not. My eyes swam with tears as I remembered Youen at the dog’s grave, his boots black with earth, digging intently. Quietly. His red hair dark with the sweat of his labor.
Poor love,
I thought, for what help had I ever given him? What help had I given anyone but myself?

“Go and listen,” Milady urged. “Please.”

Steeling myself, I crept past the second staircase into the master’s wing. Down the hall. I leaned by the keyhole, hearing the vigorous breath of sleep within, rasping, regular. I was shaking so much when I came back that Milady had to stroke and soothe and endure while I ranted under my breath of werewolves.

“Superstitious girl,” she complained to calm herself, I think, for she must have wondered if her husband was really asleep. Or was he only acting at sleep? “You’re a peasant, but the priests are no better.”

She wouldn’t let me turn down the bed but bade me lie down beside her, though we didn’t sleep. We stared at the ceiling. I longed to speak, to caution her, to save us both the error I knew she must make.

I wished many things. That I had been able to read the letter before it curled in flame, the blue-burning script, for I felt half mad with not knowing. Papa had been the only one on our farm who could read, and when the rare letter stained with salt arrived, we huddled in candlelight while Papa read of cousin Étienne’s travels in the New World. The Indians he met as a trapper there had a name for every moon, my cousin wrote. Harvest moons and milk moons. A beaver moon. And the hunger moon of late winter.

This was the moon Hervé de Lanrivain chose to light his way back to us.

When first I came to Kerfol, it was still Grand-mère’s
loup-garou
I imagined out circling the manor walls in moonlight. He might lope beneath my window or leap up on the gable and look in at me through silvery lead panes. Such scenes distracted from an empty belly.

But when the
loup-garou
became Youen, I wondered, would the animals in his stable whimper and stir and bump one another in fear at his coming, or would they know and trust and forgive him as I would surely know and forgive? As the moon moves the tide, it pulls and shapes the werewolf’s bones like dough, and so I enjoyed imagining Youen’s pale boy-form being shaped and reshaped, made and unmade, and these tender new terrors worked on
me
like the merest tide, making the nights hot and exceedingly long. I might wake and contemplate creeping into the buttery for a stolen berry tart from Cook’s cabinet, imagine ripping at the flaky crust, scooping and mashing the sweetness into my mouth, sucking blood-red fingers, for I was starving. Starving.

Every moon at Kerfol was a hunger moon.

The moment I met him, Youen became my
loup-garou,
and this was a girl’s fancy, feverish and exciting but never horrible. Grand-mère’s version, on the other hand, was a beast that stalked in shadow, ripping the dogs to ribbons.

Youen was not our monster.

It was Master, two-faced and terribly transformed. He was the inside-out beast that hunted in the night. He had killed Lanrivain — and perhaps penned the note himself, staged this drama to entrap his wife, to confirm his suspicions about her — and the wretched procession of dogs, and he would kill us all.

About this last, I was also wrong.

That night, not a year after the little golden dog was brought to Kerfol, Yves de Cornault was found dead by the narrow flight of stairs leading down from his wife’s rooms.

It was Milady who found him and cried out, poor wretch — for his blood was all over her — and at first the roused household could not make out what she was saying. We came running, afraid for her sanity, but there at the head of the stairs, sure enough, lay the baron, stone dead, the blood from his wounds dripping down the steps. He had been scratched and gashed on the face and throat, as if with a dull weapon, and one of his legs had a deep tear in it, which had cut an artery and probably caused his death. But how did he get there? Who had murdered him?