Changeling

by Philippa Gregory

  ‘Good day to you,’ she said, looking from one to another. ‘What are you doing, Tomas, bringing such fine folks here? I hope he has been no trouble, sir? Can I offer you some refreshment?’

  ‘This is the man from the inn who brought the werewolf in,’ Tomas said breathlessly. ‘He would come to see you, though I told him not to.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have told him anything at all,’ she observed. ‘It’s not for small boys, small dirty boys, to speak with their betters. Go and fetch a jug of the best ale from the still room, and don’t say another word. Sirs, ladies – will you sit?’

  She gestured to a bench set into the low stone wall before the house. Isolde and Ishraq took a seat and smiled up at her. ‘We rarely have company here,’ she said. ‘And never ladies.’

  Tomas came out of the house carrying two roughly carved three-legged stools and put them down for Brother Peter and Luca, then dashed in again for the jug of small ale, one glass and three mugs. Bashfully, he offered the glass to Isolde and then poured ale for everyone else into mugs.

  Luca and Brother Peter took their seats and the woman stood before them, one hand twisting her apron corner. ‘He is a good boy,’ she said again. ‘He wouldn’t mean to talk out of turn. I apologise if he offended you.’

  ‘No, no, he was polite and helpful,’ Luca said.

  ‘He’s a credit to you,’ Isolde assured her.

  ‘And growing very big and strong,’ Ishraq remarked.

  The mother’s pride beamed out of her face. ‘He is,’ she said. ‘I thank the Lord for him every day of his life.’

  ‘But you had a previous boy.’ Luca put down his mug and spoke gently to her. ‘He told us that he had an older brother.’

  A shadow came across the woman’s broad handsome face and she looked suddenly weary. ‘I did. God forgive me for taking my eye off him for a moment.’ At the thought of him she could not speak; she turned her head away.

  ‘What happened?’ Isolde asked.

  ‘Alas, alas, I lost him. I lost him in a moment. God forgive me for that moment. But I was a young mother and so weary that I fell asleep and in that moment he was gone.’

  ‘In the forest?’ Luca prompted.

  A silent nod confirmed the fact.

  Gently, Isolde rose to her feet and pressed the woman down onto the bench so that she could sit. ‘Was he taken by wolves?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘I believe he was,’ the woman said. ‘There were rumours of wolves in the woods even then, that was why I was looking for the lamb, hoping to find it before nightfall.’ She gestured at the sheep in the field. ‘We don’t have a big flock. Every beast counts for us. I sat down for a moment. My boy was tired so we sat to rest. He was not yet four years old, God bless him. I lay down with him for a moment and fell asleep. When I woke he was gone.’

  Isolde put a comforting hand on her shoulder.

  ‘We found his little shirt,’ the woman continued, her voice trembling with unspoken tears. ‘But that was some months later. One of the lads found it when he was bird’s-nesting in the forest. Found it under a bush.’

  ‘Was there any blood on it?’ Luca asked.

  She shook her head. ‘It was washed through by rain,’ she said. ‘But I took it to the priest and we held a service for his innocent soul. The priest said I should bury my love for him and have another child – and then God gave me Tomas.’

  ‘The villagers have captured a beast that they say is a werewolf,’ Brother Peter remarked. ‘Would you accuse the beast of murdering your child?’

  He expected her to flare out, to make an accusation at once; but she looked wearily at him as if she had worried and thought about this for too long already. ‘Of course when I heard there was a werewolf I thought it might have taken my boy Stefan – but I don’t know. I can’t even say that it was a wolf that took him. He might have wandered far and fallen in the stream and drowned, or in a ravine, or just been lost in the woods. I saw the tracks of the wolves but I didn’t see my son’s footprints. I have thought about it every day of my life; and still I don’t know.’

  Brother Peter nodded and pursed his lips. He looked at Luca. ‘Do you want me to write down her statement and have her put her mark on it?’

  Luca shook his head. ‘Later we can, if we think there is need,’ he said. He bowed to the woman. ‘Thank you for your hospitality, goodwife. What name shall I call you?’

  She rubbed her face with the corner of her apron. ‘I am Sara Fairley,’ she said. ‘Wife of Ralph Fairley. We have a good name in the village, anyone can tell you who I am.’

  ‘Would you bear witness against the werewolf?’

  She gave him a faint smile with a world of sorrow behind it. ‘I don’t like to talk of it,’ she said simply. ‘I try not to think of it. I tried to do what the priest told me and bury my sorrow with the little shirt, and thank God for my second boy.’

  Brother Peter hesitated. ‘We will certainly put it on trial and if it is proven to be a werewolf it will die.’

  She nodded. ‘That won’t bring back my boy,’ she said quietly. ‘But I should be glad to know that my son and all the children are safe in the pasture.’

  They rose up and left her. Brother Peter gave his arm to Isolde as they walked down the stony path, Luca helped Ishraq.

  ‘Why does Brother Peter not believe her?’ Ishraq asked him while she had her hand on his arm and was close enough to speak softly. ‘Why is he always so suspicious?’

  ‘This is not his first inquiry; he has travelled before and seen much. Your lady, Isolde, was very tender to her.’

  ‘She has a tender heart,’ Ishraq said. ‘Children, women, beggars, her purse is always open and her heart is always going out to them. The castle kitchen gave away two dozen dinners a day to the poor. She has always been this way.’

  ‘And has she ever loved anyone in particular?’ Luca asked casually. There was a big rock in the pathway and he stepped over it and turned to help Ishraq.

  She laughed. ‘Nothing to do with you,’ she said abruptly. When she saw him flush she said, ‘Ah, Inquirer! Do you really have to know everything?’

  ‘I was just interested . . .’

  ‘No-one. She was supposed to marry a fat indulgent sinful man and she would never have considered him. She would never have stooped to him. She took her vows of celibacy with ease. That was not the problem for her. She loves her lands, and her people. No man has taken her fancy.’ She paused as if to tease him. ‘So far,’ she conceded.

  Luca looked away. ‘Such a beautiful young woman is bound to . . .’

  ‘Quite,’ Ishraq said. ‘But tell me about Brother Peter. Is he always so miserable?’

  ‘He was suspicious of the mother here,’ Luca explained. ‘He thinks she may have killed the child herself, and tried to blame it on a wolf attack. I don’t think so myself; but of course, in these out-of-the-way villages, such things happen.’

  Decisively, she shook her head. ‘Not her. That is a woman with a horror of wolves,’ she said. ‘It’s no accident she was not down in the village, though everyone else was there to see them bring it in.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Luca said.

  Ishraq looked at him as if he were blind. ‘Did you not see the garden?’

  Luca had a vague memory of a well-tilled garden, filled with flowers and herbs. There had been a bed of vegetables and herbs near to the door to the kitchen, and flowers and lavender had billowed over the path. There were some autumn pumpkins growing fatly in one bed, and plump grapes on the vine which twisted around the door. It was a typical cottage garden: planted partly for medicine and partly for colour. ‘Of course I saw it, but I don’t remember anything special.’

  She smiled. ‘She was growing a dozen different species of aconite, in half a dozen colours, and her boy had a fresh spray of the flower in his hat. She was growing it at every window and every doorway – I’ve never seen such a collection, and in every colour that can bloom, from pink to white to purple.’

&nbs
p; ‘And so?’ Luca asked.

  ‘Do you not know your herbs?’ Ishraq asked teasingly. ‘A great inquirer like yourself?’

  ‘Not like you do. What is aconite?’

  ‘The common name for aconite is wolfsbane,’ she said. ‘People have been using it against wolves and werewolves for hundreds of years. Dried and made into a powder it can poison a wolf. Fed to a werewolf it can turn him into a human again. In a lethal dose it can kill a werewolf outright, it all depends on the distillation of the herb and the amount that the wolf can be forced to eat. For sure, no wolf will touch it; no wolf will go near it. They won’t let their coats so much as brush against it. No wolf could get into that house – she has built a fortress of aconite.’

  ‘You think it proves that her story is true and that she fears the wolf? That she planted it to guard herself against the wolf, in case it came back for her?’

  Ishraq nodded at the boy who was skipping ahead of them like a little lamb himself, leading the way back to the village, a sprig of fresh aconite tucked into his hatband. ‘I should think she is guarding him.’

  A small crowd had gathered around the gate to the stable yard when Luca, Brother Peter and the girls arrived back at the inn.

  ‘What’s this?’ Luca asked, and pushed his way to the front of the crowd. Freize had the gate half-open and was admitting one person at a time on payment of a half-groat, chinking the coins in his hand.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Luca asked tersely.

  ‘Letting people see the beast,’ Freize replied. ‘Since there was such an interest, I thought we might allow it. I thought it was for the public good. I thought I might demonstrate the majesty of God by showing the people this poor sinner.’

  ‘And what made you think it right to charge for it?’

  ‘Brother Peter is always so anxious about the expenses,’ Freize explained agreeably, nodding at the clerk. ‘I thought it would be good if the beast made a contribution to the costs of his trial.’

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ Luca said. ‘Close the gate. People can’t come in and stare at it. This is supposed to be an inquiry, not a travelling show.’

  ‘People are bound to want to see it,’ Isolde observed. ‘If they think it has been threatening their flocks and themselves for years. They are bound to want to know it has been captured.’

  ‘Well, let them see it, but you can’t charge for it,’ Luca said irritably. ‘You didn’t even catch it, why should you set yourself up as its keeper?’

  ‘Because I loosed its bonds and fed it,’ Freize said reasonably.

  ‘It is free?’ Luca asked, and Isolde echoed nervously: ‘Have you freed it?’

  ‘I cut the ropes and got myself out of the pit at speed. Then it rolled about and crawled out of the nets,’ Freize said. ‘It had a drink, had a bite to eat, now it’s lying down again, resting. Not much of a show really, but they are simple people and not much happens here. And I charge half price for children and idiots.’

  ‘There is only one idiot here,’ Luca said severely. ‘And he is not from the village. Let me in, I shall see it.’ He went through the gate and the others followed him. Freize quietly took coins off the remaining villagers and opened the gate wide for them. ‘I’d wager it’s no wolf,’ he said quietly to Luca.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When it got itself out of the net I could see. It’s curled up now in the shadowy end, so it’s harder to make out, but it’s no beast that I have ever seen before. It has long claws and a mane, but it goes up and down from its back legs to all fours, not like a wolf at all.’

  ‘What kind of beast is it?’ Luca asked him.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Freize conceded. ‘But it is not much like a wolf.’

  Luca nodded and went towards the bear pit. There was a set of rough wooden steps and a ring of trestles laid on staging, so that spectators to the bear baiting could stand all around the outside of the pit and see over the wooden walls.

  Luca climbed the ladder and moved along the trestle so that Brother Peter and the two girls and the little shepherd boy could get up too.

  The beast was huddled against the furthest wall, its legs tucked under its body. It had a thick long mane, and a hide tanned dark brown from all weathers, discoloured by mud and scars. On its throat were two new rope burns; now and then it licked a bleeding paw. Two dark eyes looked out through the matted mane and, as Luca watched, the beast bared its teeth in a snarl.

  ‘We should tie it down and cut into the skin,’ Brother Peter suggested. ‘If it is a werewolf we will cut the skin and beneath it there will be fur. That will be evidence.’

  ‘You should kill it with a silver arrow,’ one of the villagers remarked. ‘At once, before the moon gets any bigger. It will be stronger then, they wax with the moon. Better kill it now while we have it and it is not in its full power.’

  ‘When is the moon full?’ Luca asked.

  ‘Tomorrow night,’ Ishraq answered. The little boy beside her took the aconite from his hat and threw it towards the curled animal. It flinched away.

  ‘There!’ someone said from the crowd. ‘See that? It fears wolfsbane. It’s a werewolf. We should kill it right now. We shouldn’t delay. We should kill it while it is weak.’

  Someone picked up a stone and threw it. It caught the beast on its back and it flinched and snarled and shrank away as if it would burrow its way through the high wall of the bear pit.

  One of the men turned to Luca. ‘Your honour, we don’t have enough silver to make an arrow. Would you have some silver in your possession that we might buy from you, and have forged into an arrowhead? We’d be very grateful. Otherwise we’ll have to send to Pescara, to the moneylender there, and it will take days.’

  Luca glanced at Brother Peter. ‘We have some silver,’ he said cautiously. ‘Sacred property of the Church.’

  ‘We can sell it to you,’ Luca ruled. ‘But we’ll wait for the full moon before we kill the beast. I want to see the transformation with my own eyes. When I see it become a full wolf then we will know that it is the beast you report, and we can kill it when it is in its wolf form.’

  The man nodded. ‘We’ll make the silver arrow now, so as to be ready.’ He went into the inn with Brother Peter, discussing a fair price for the silver, and Luca turned to Isolde and took a breath. He knew himself to be nervous as a boy.

  ‘I was going to ask you, I meant to mention it earlier, there is only one dining room here . . . in fact, will you dine with us tonight?’ he asked.

  She looked a little surprised. ‘I had thought Ishraq and I would eat in our room.’

  ‘You could both eat with us at the large table in the dining room,’ Luca said. ‘It’s closer to the kitchen, the food would be hotter, fresher from the oven. There could be no objection.’

  She glanced away, her colour rising. ‘I would like to . . .’

  ‘Please do,’ Luca said. ‘I would like your advice on . . .’ He trailed off, unable to think of anything.

  She saw at once his hesitation. ‘My advice on what?’ she asked, her eyes dancing with laughter. ‘You have decided what to do with the werewolf, you will soon have orders as to your next mission. What can you possibly want with my opinion?’

  He grinned ruefully. ‘I don’t know. I have nothing to say. I just wanted your company. We are travelling together, you and I, Brother Peter and Ishraq, Freize who has sworn himself to be your man – I just thought you might dine with us.’

  She smiled at his frankness. ‘I shall be glad to spend this evening with you,’ she said honestly. She was conscious of wanting to touch him, to put her hand on his shoulder, or to step closer to him. She did not think it was desire that she felt; it was more like a yearning just to be close to him, to have his hand upon her waist, to have his dark head near to hers, to see his hazel eyes smile.

  She knew that she was being foolish, that to be close to him, a novice for the priesthood, was a sin, that she herself was already in breach of the vows she had made when she
had joined the abbey; and she stepped back. ‘Ishraq and I will come sweet-smelling to dinner,’ she remarked at random. ‘She has got the innkeeper to bring the bathtub to our room. They think we are madly reckless to bathe when it’s not even Good Friday – that’s when they all take their annual bath – but we have insisted that it won’t make us ill.’

  ‘I will expect you at dinner, then,’ he said. ‘As clean as if it was Easter.’ He jumped down from the platform and put out his hands to help her. She let him lift her down and as he put her on her feet he held her for a moment longer than was needed to make sure she was steady. He felt her lean slightly towards him, he could not have been mistaken; but then she stepped away and he was sure that he had been mistaken. He could not read her movements, he could not imagine what she was thinking, and he was bound by vows of celibacy to take no step towards her. But at any rate, she had said that she would come to dinner and she had said that she would like to dine with him. That at least he was sure of, as she and Ishraq went into the dark doorway of the inn.

  Luca glanced up, self-consciously, but Freize had not observed the little exchange. He was intent on the werewolf as it turned around and around, as dogs do before they lie down. When it settled and did not move, Freize announced to the little audience, ‘There now, it’s gone to sleep. Show’s over. You can come back tomorrow.’

  ‘And tomorrow we’ll see it for free,’ someone claimed. ‘It’s our werewolf, we caught it, there’s no reason that you should charge us to see it.’