by Tanith Lee
No sooner was this done than her coat of fur peeled off her, she sprang upright on the bed, and there before him in the moonlight was the lovely girl from the hill, clad only in her long, pale hair.
“You have freed me,” she exclaimed.
“But at great cost,” he answered.
And this was so, for despite her tender care of him, and the equally tender care of his astounded mother and sisters, the young man sickened of the bite. Within seven days he was dead and put to rest in the churchyard. And as for the weasel widow, she slunk away in the sunrise, and none saw her again, in any shape, although in those parts it was the tradition ever after to kill any weasel that they came on, if it should be a female.
The two families, the Covilles and the Desbouchamps, had ruled together over their great sprawling village for a pair of hundred years. And as each century turned, the village grew larger, fair set on being a town. The Covilles’ tailored house at least had business connections with the City. Theirs was the trade of wool. The Desbouchamps’ low-beamed manor, its milk churns and dove-cotes, stables and wild orchards, drowsed comfortably in the meadows. The Days of Liberty had not yet swept through Paradys, changing all the world. There seemed no need to hurry, or to provision for any future that did not resemble the past.
It was to be a country wedding then, between Roland Coville and Marie-Mai Desbouchamps. It started at sunup, with the banging of lucky pots and pans down the village streets, and went on with the girls and their autumn roses taken to the manor, and the silver coin given to each as she bore her flowers into the cavern of the kitchen.
Then out came the lint-haired bride, crowned with the roses, in the embroidered bodice her grandmother had worn, and the little pearly shoes that just fitted her. She was piped and drummed to the church and met her bridegroom in the gate, a dark northern youth, and who did not know or could not see how eager he was? For it was not only a marriage arranged but a marriage arranged from desires. They had played together as children, Roland and Marie. He had pretended to wed her in the pear orchard when she was ten and he thirteen years of age. Seven years had passed. He had been sent to school in the City, and was no longer pure; he had known philosophy, mathematics, Latin, and three harlots. But unscathed he still was. And the girl, she was like a ripe, sweet fruit misleading in its paleness: She was quite ready.
And how he loved her. It was obvious to all. Not only lust, as was proper, but veneration. He will treat her too well, they said, she will get the upper hand. But she was docile, was she not, Marie-Mai? Never had anyone heard of anything but her tractability, her gentleness. She will make a good wife.
For Roland himself, it might be said that he had always known she must be his. At first she had reminded him of the Virgin, so fresh and white, so clean. But then the stirrings of adult want had found in her the other virgin, the goddess of the pastoral earth that was his in the holidays, the smooth curving forms of hills and breasts, shining of pools and eyes, after the chapped walls and hands, the hard brisk hearts of Paradys. She allowed him little lapses. To kiss her fingers, then her lips, to touch fleetingly the swansdown upper swell above her bodice. When he said to his father, “I will have Marie-Mai,” his father smiled and said, “Of course. We’ll drink to it.” So easy. And why not, why must all love be fraught and tragic, gurning and yearning, unfulfilled or snatched on the wing of the storm?
And for Marie-Mai, what could be said for her? She had answered correctly all the searching lover’s questions. Her responses were perfect, and if she offered nothing unasked, that was surely her modesty, her womanly decorum. Could anyone say they knew her? Of course. They all did. She was biddable, and loving in mild, undisturbing ways. She was not complex or rebellious. There was nothing to know. Who probes the flawless lily? It is the blighted bloom that gets attention.
A country wedding, then, and in the church Roland thought his bride like an angel, except he would not have planned for an angel what he planned to do to her. And the church over, outside in the viny afternoon, they had their feast on the square, under the sky. These were the days once sacred to the wine god. The girls had wreathed the clay jugs with myrtle; the great sunny roses crowded the tables like the guests. And when the humped western clouds banked up, and the faint daylight moon appeared in a dimming glow, they bore the bride and groom to the smart stone house behind the wall and the iron gate decorated with peacocks. They let them in with laughter and rough sorties. They let them go to the laundered bedroom whose windows were shuttered, whose candles were lit. They closed the doors and shouted a word or two, and left the lovers alone for their night. And in the square a band played and Madame Coville danced with Monsieur Desbouchamps, and Madame Desbouchamps was too shy to do more than flirt with Monsieur Coville. The moon rose high, and owls called from the woods. The roses bloomed in the dark over the old walls, as if winter would never come.
In the morning, an autumn country morning that began about half past six, Roland’s manservant knocked on the bedroom door, and the maid waited behind him with the pot of chocolate. In the old days – not twenty years before – the elderly women of the house would have arrived, to strip the bed and view the blood of the maidenhead. This was no longer done in such sophisticated villages. When the first knock went unanswered, the manservant knocked again, and grinned at the maid, and called out, “Shall I return a little later, “sieur Roland?”
Then, and what follows now comes directly from the evidence given later in the courtrooms of Paradys, the voice of Roland was raised clearly behind the door. It was not an embarrassed or pleasured voice. It cried in terrible despair: “Oh God, what shall I do?” And then, very loudly and without any expression, “Come in and see. But leave the girl outside.”
The young manservant raised his brows. More sympathetic than he, the maid was already trembling and biting her lip. The man opened to door and went into his master’s bedroom. There he beheld at once, as he said, some vestiges of a slight tussle, but perhaps these might not have been unnatural. Then he saw that the bride lay half out of the bed, in her ribboned nightgown. There were bruises on her throat, her face was engorged and nearly black, and her eyes had extruded from their sockets. She had been strangled, had been dead some while. The manservant exclaimed something like, “My God, who has done this?” To which the young husband replied quietly, “I did it. I killed her.” And at this point it was noticed how two of the fingers of his right hand were very savagely bitten, doubtless by the dying girl in her struggle for life.
The subsequent commotion that next boiled through the house is easily imagined. It passed into every chamber, every cranny, like a noxious odor. There was screaming, and every sort of human outcry, male and female. Roland was led down into the lower rooms, where an interrogation took place, his mother on her knees, his aunts fainting, his father bellowing in tears. And all this was soon augmented by the frenzied arrival of the family Desbouchamps.
To each kind and type of entreaty or demand, Roland Coville would say substantially the same thing, as various testimony later showed. What he said was this: “I killed Marie. I strangled her. She’s dead.”
But to the eternally repeated question Why? he would answer, white-faced and wooden, “I have nothing to say on that.”
In those parts, the unchastity of a bride might have furnished a reason. There were historic tales, to be sure, of girls slain on the wedding night, having been discovered unvirgin. The father challenged his son, but Roland shook his head. He even gave a grim and white-faced smile. No, he replied, she was intact. “What, then – what? Did she slight you?” No, he had not been slighted. Marie was a virgin and she had not insulted him. She had given no provocation. She had encouraged his advances.
“Why, then, in the name of God –”
“I won’t say, Father. Nothing on this earth will induce me to do so.”
It was the father of Marie, of course, who impugned the manhood of Roland. The husband had been unable to fulfill his duties, and had strangled
the innocent maiden for fear she would betray him. There were a couple of girls in the city who could give the lie to this. Nevertheless, the fathers ended fighting in the cobbled yard of the Coville house, under the peacocks.
In their turn, the police came. They had little to add but the uniform and threat of the law.
The village had fallen apart like a broken garden. Stones rattled by night on the shutters of the Coville house, on the embrasures of the village jail to which Roland had been removed. They wanted his death.
He was taken to the City in the dead of night, unpublicized, in a covered carriage, like an escape. The Coville house was locked up like a box. They had gone too into the darkness, to the City. Like all cities, it reeked of Hell. This had a rightness then, the flight toward Paradys, as, not too many years in the future, others would flee away from the drums and blades of Revolution, into the outer night of the world.
The trial of Roland Coville caused no stir in Paradys, City of Damnations. It was not unusual enough. A man had killed a girl, his lover and wife. So what? It happened twice a day. That the case had been explosive enough it was removed from village to City was nothing. A cough out of season was a wonder in the provinces.
The young man stood bravely, deadly, and composed before his judges. He was courteous and exact, and he refused them nothing except what he refused all others, the motive for the murder. He was defended with great difficulty.
“It is plain to me, and to those who sit in judgment on you, that you are no murderer. Let alone of a defenseless girl at your mercy in the dark, your young wife, looking to you for love and protection, receiving death at your hands. Clearly, monsieur, there is a momentous reason. Tell us.”
“No,” said Roland Coville. “I can tell you nothing at all.”
“But it may save your life, monsieur.”
Roland shook his head. He looked only sad and very young.
“But monsieur, for God’s sake. This will end in your hanging. Don’t you prefer to live?”
Roland looked surprised, as if he were unsure. “Perhaps not.”
“His face,” said the lawyer after, considerably shaken, “was like, I think, that of a woman I once heard of. She had been shown the mechanism of the human body, its heart, viscera, intestines, all the tubes and organs that support life. And having seen, she was so disgusted at the method whereby she lived that, when she got home, she cut her wrists and died. To be rid of it all. Just so, he looked, my Roland Coville. He isn’t reluctant to die.”
Once, during the examination at Paradys, Roland was asked about the lacerations on the fingers of his right hand. He answered that his wife, Marie, had indeed bitten him.
“And this was during her final moments, as she fought for her life?”
“No. It happened earlier.”
“Then your wife behaved violently toward you?”
“No,” said Roland.
“But you say that she bit you without any act on your part that would have invited her so to do.”
“No, I did not say this.”
“Monsieur Coville, we must be precise. When was it that these bites occurred?”
Roland hesitated. “When I touched the lips of Marie.”
“But this, then, was an extreme and unloving response.”
“Perhaps.”
“Did you kill her because of this? Because of her attack on you?”
Roland Coville thought for a moment, and then said, “Would it be deemed a suitable defense, to kill a woman because she had bitten me?”
“No, monsieur, of course it would not.”
“I did not,” said Roland, “kill Marie because of the bite.”
“Why, then? You are bound to speak. The weight of this assembly, and of the law itself, insist.”
“I can and will say nothing,” said Roland Coville. “It is beyond me to say it.” And then in a sudden and conclusive passion he screamed, so the room echoed and dinned, the spectators and the judges recoiled, “It would be as if you tore out my heart, to say it. It would be as if you cut out my tongue. Nothing. Nothing! I will say nothing.”
And so he was judged a murderer. He was condemned. In a small gray yard at sunrise he would be hanged.
But in the cell, before that, he must confront the confessor, the priest who was to hear his final statements, and who must, of them all, get the truth from him.
“I can’t tell you,” said Roland Coville to the priest who angrily confronted him.
“You have forfeited your life,” said the priest. “Is this not enough? You have spat upon the robe of God, and upon the gift he gave you.”
“No, father,” said Roland. “God knows, and understands, what I have done. And why.”
And his face was then so pitifully pared, trusting, and desperate, so positive of the pity of God after all, that the angry priest was softened.
“Come, then,” he said, “make what confession you can. I will absolve you, and God must do the rest.”
Roland then knelt down, and unburdened himself of all his crimes, which were none of them terrible, but for that one. And then he spoke of that too, quietly and stilly. “I strangled my young wife, she was only seventeen, and I loved her. It was on her wedding night, in our bed. She was a virgin and died so. I killed her with no compunction, and would do it again.” And then, head bowed under the hands of the priest, he added softly, “For my reasons, I believe such things can’t be spoken of. This would be like showing the face of the Devil. How can I be responsible for that?”
The priest was in the end very sorry for him. He was a handsome and a good young man, guilty of nothing but the one appalling and senseless act. The priest absolved Roland Coville, and went away to watch all through the night before the execution, in the little church on a slanting street of the City. And when through the narrow window a nail of light pierced in and fell on the crucifix and the white flowers, the priest knew the rope in the gray yard had performed its office, and one more benighted soul had struggled forth into the Infinite, toward long anguish or the life eternal, or toward oblivion, for he was a wise priest, faithful and doubting, a man like men.
Two days after the execution of Roland Coville, the priest was brought a letter. It was on the paper obtained in the prison, and came from the dead man, written in the last hour of his life. As such it had extraordinary weight. But on opening it anxiously, the priest read these words: “I cannot after all go into the night without passing on this burden that has consumed me. Forgive me, father, that I turn to you. Who else can I rely on? Who else can bear it?”
And after that the priest read on, and the scales fell from his eyes, the dark glass was clear before him. He did not believe, then he believed. And he locked the letter from Roland Coville away in a place where none could come at it, not even he himself. And there it stayed for seven years, burning slowly through the wall of the safe and of his mind.
One spring, when the roads were muddy, a priest came to the village by means of the coach that stopped there once a month, and he inquired for the domicile of the family Desbouchamps. On being directed, he took himself off toward the manor house in the meadows. The lanes were spare and washed with rain, the tall poplars swept the sky. The manor had lost its roselike abundance and seemed now decaying, the shutters half off, the lofts rotting. No doves flew from the cotes. A dog barked only sullenly in the courtyard.
To his inquiry at the kitchen door, the housekeeper shook her head. “Mistress sees no one.” The priest indicated his habit. “What does she want with another priest? She’s had enough of you, burying the master.”
But he won through, because he had set his mind to it. He stood with his habit and his bag and would not go. Finally a thin old woman of no more than forty years came down to the cold parlor, where drapes were on the furnishings, and she made no pretense at removing them or lighting the fire. The hearth gaped black, and cold whistled down the chimney. She leaned to it and rubbed her hands.
“We are unfortunate,” said Madame
Desbouchamps. “In a year, everything must be sold. Those men, those men in their holy day coats!” (She presumably meant the lawyers.)
“I’m very sorry to hear it.”
“It’s been a great loss. Ever since monsieur died. It was the tragedy killed him. He always loved her so.” And over her worn and discarded face there crossed a slinking jealousy, out in the open now, having no need any more to hide. Marie-Mai was dead, and her loving father was as dead as she, why dissemble?
“Your daughter, do you mean?” asked the priest with some care. “But she was very young to die.”
“Murdered,” said madame, “in her bridal bed.”
The priest said what was inevitable.
“You will have heard,” said Madame Desbouchamps. “It was the talk of the City. They made up songs about it, the filthy wretches.”
The priest had never heard one, and was glad. He said, “I believe I caught a rumor of the case. The bridegroom had no motive for his action. The girl was innocent and chaste.”
Madame Desbouchamps compressed her lips like withered leaves. She sat a long while in utter silence, and he intuitively allowed this. At length, the blossom came.
“She was a sly girl,” said the mother. “She hid things, was secretive. She was no daughter to me. I knew no better then. But it was never affection she gave me. She saved that for her father, a clever pass. I remember, her courses came early. She wasn’t nine years, she was crying and there was blood, and I said, Let me see, Marie, what’s the matter with you? But she ran away. And the blood stopped, and then there was no more till the proper time. She was eleven years then. She wasn’t fearful when it happened, only asked me for a napkin.”
The priest might have been astonished and shocked at being awarded such information. Even in country people madame’s reminiscence was forthright. But in fact he was not thinking of this. He had gone very pale. And she, she had a crafty look, as if she had meant to tell him something, and saw that she had.