He came, as you knew he would, and as soon as he arrived at the house, I saw his uncertainty. The lamb you had provided was tied up to a fencepost in front of the house, nosing at a patch of dirty snow, and Denis hesitated when he saw it, glancing at me, his clever eyes taking in my bruise-swollen face, my filthy dress, my matted hair; the poor and cringing whole of me. I could not afford a lamb, and he knew it.
“Just inside, Doctor,” I said urgently, not letting him think too hard. “Please, hurry, I fear he’s getting worse!”
Denis looked again at the lamb, but I was close and pressing, guiding him forward, a fervent shepherd, and he moved reluctantly before me, through the doorway.
In the house, Antoine was wailing and shaking, his mouth foamy with vomit, and when he saw the newcomer he let out a howl and thrashed in his bindings. The neighbors had again helped me secure him to the bed by his limbs, and so he could not move much, save for his head, which he whipped around as if possessed. Instantly Denis forgot the lamb in favor of the patient, hurrying to the bedside to examine him.
“Pulse slow,” Denis murmured to himself. “Skin cold and clammy to the touch, burning head.”
“You must begin the procedure immediately,” I said, just as you’d told me to. “We have no hours left to spend. There is the lamb, and here on the table is anything you need. Begin at once!”
Denis looked distractedly behind him at the table, then again with more attention. He stood from Antoine’s side and bent over the instruments you’d laid out not three hours earlier, then put his head up sharply. “Madame, these are surgical tools. Tubes, bloodletting bowls—even a catlin knife. Where did you come by these?”
“They are on a loan,” I said, “but never mind. They do no good if you will not put them to use!”
“Madame,” said Denis, in very firm tones, “your husband is too hot by half, his passions too excited. I can see he has been drinking, taking tobacco. No Madame, I am sorry, but I cannot perform the surgery.”
He was moving towards the door now, and I, terrified it might all be for nothing, threw myself upon his feet and pressed my face into the silk of his stockings, my bruised cheek against his hard shin. “Please,” I begged him, “please, have mercy on me. Look what he has done to me, look how he has beaten me.” I turned my face to him and tilted towards the window’s light so he could see the full, fat swell of mottled purples and reds that painted me from brow to chin. I saw him soften, slightly. “After you first transfused him he was docile, Doctor, as sweet a husband as a woman could hope for, kind and hardworking like I’ve never seen him. So how could you, my only hope, now render me hopeless?”
Antoine let out a garbled, piteous shout, and I began to weep.
You knew your enemy well, Monsieur de la Martinière. Denis could not deny us.
Soon enough, my husband’s veins were once again exposed, his thick blood welling and dripping into the letting bowls beneath his arms, and the lamb was struggling and baaing in its restraints as Denis sliced it open. I sat at Antoine’s head, smoothing his sweating brow and giving him sips of wine.
Wine into which I had mixed not only the rest of the poison but half the other powder, too. The powder I had paid for with your unwitting gold, Monsieur de la Martinière, which La Voisin had delighted in extracting from you for my benefit.
“If any trial should arise, he means to frame you,” La Voisin had said, quite casually, as she skimmed the letter I had carried for you, then handed it back to me. I was in her sitting room, perched on the edge of a velvet chair as she reclined on a sofa. She was dressed as a midwife, capped and cloaked, but even beneath her dress her bosom was formidable, and below her hood her eyes were bright. There were no baby skulls in sight, but there was a heavy smell about the rooms, herbaceous and bitter and bubbling, and I kept hearing a high mewling cry wafting from somewhere in the bowels of the house. A sullen-faced girl who looked very like La Voisin kept stomping in and out as we spoke, and once she went to the door and paid a man for a bucketful of live toads. Anything I touched, my fingers came away streaked: with dust, with soot, with slime.
“He asks me to put your name on all our correspondence, so it can be easily traced,” La Voisin said, and waved the letter I could not read. “Already you are a very sorry-looking thing. If your plans go awry, he will make you sorrier. How do you like that?”
I did not know what I was expected to say, so I told the truth. “I like it not at all.”
“Well, there is no reason not to get something for yourself, in the bargain,” La Voisin said, reaching for the well of ink and quill that rested on a low side table. “I will write back and charge him double, and with the rest of the coin you may choose something of your own. A brew to keep a man’s attention, perhaps? Or a charm of fortune, to bring money in?”
I could not believe my ears, nor my luck. I said, “Why?”
“Why not?” she returned. “I will take any chance to trick a man.” Her laughter was deep and unfeigned. “And of course it is to me the extra coin will come. Two pleasures in one deed. Now, what will you have?”
It was remarkable, Monsieur de la Martinière, how quickly I knew my answer. It was as if I had been preparing for that moment, though no one in my life had ever put before me such an offer; nor even any offer at all. I knew exactly what spell I wanted. La Voisin claimed her witchcraft was more than capable of a feat such as the one I asked, but I could not quite believe it possible that a potion could effect such a blood-borne transformation as the one I sought. However, circumstances had provided me both the perfect subject and perfect situation on which to test the magic.
Antoine drank down both my potion and your poison just as the lamb’s blood began flowing through the metal tube Denis had inserted into his arm. The effects were subtle but nearly instantaneous—if you were looking for them. The whites of his eyes, already yellowed, grew yellower still, and his pupils began to thin and flatten. The hair on his unshaven jaw began fading from brown to grey, and the coarse curl of it grew tighter, as did the hair on his head, the roots of which were going white. One of his hands was gripped in both of mine so I could feel his fingers slowly start to fuse, and harden, and when I looked I saw his nails were turning black and spreading, taking over the flesh.
Denis was slow to see, focused as he was on the transfusion of the blood, and in truth did not notice until Antoine’s low mutterings began to take on a peculiar, throaty whine, too high to be natural. Then Denis paused, and looked closer at the arm into which the lamb’s blood ran. It was sprouting white wool.
“What in the name of Heaven...?” Denis said, and squinted, confused.
At that moment, Antoine began to seize. His body turned rigid and his eyes rolled back in his head, and his arms shook with such force that the tube was knocked away, and blood from both man and lamb spilled onto the floor, where it pooled in a glistening mirror at our feet. Denis leaped into action, attending to I know not what, for I was focused on Antoine’s face, his nose that had started to flatten, his nostrils dark and round and heaving as he struggled for breath.
I was staring into his strange slitted eyes as he took his last air and died.
As you had predicted, Denis wanted to take his corpse right then for an examination, to prove immediately that transfusion had not been the case of death, but I screamed so horribly that finally he relented, exhausted, and he left with a promise of coming to collect the body the next morning. I buried Antoine in all haste with the coin you’d given me for just this purpose, and by the time the last shovelful of dirt had been dropped on his quick-dug grave, roughly eight hours since he’d taken the lamb’s blood, his body resembled no human man. La Voisin’s magic had kept working even after the poison had halted his life.
When it was over I went back inside my house, cleaned the blood from the floor as best I could, hid your medical instruments in a sack of flour, and went to sleep.
The next day you came to collect the instruments, but you seemed unbothered when I
told you that Denis had taken them with him, to examine for flaws. You were too jubilant to mind the loss of a knife or two.
“Well done, Madame!” This uttered with your usual grandiosity. “It is already all the talk, how transfusion has claimed its first victim, and I have it from a friend that when Denis heard you’d buried Antoine, he let out a shout of rage to rival that of Alala herself. It will not be long ’til he is tried for murder, and through him, transfusion itself, and this dark Satanic chapter in medicine will be forever behind us. Into the light go we, Perrine!”
You were so certain your plan had worked, and your enthusiasm was convincing. I fingered the twist of powder in my skirt pocket and considered that perhaps this all would not come to using it. Perhaps I could build my life reputably, as a widow, and find some freedom there; perhaps I would not after all resort to the measures I had set up for myself.
But maybe, even if all you’d set in motion had run smooth as a greased wheel, I would still have made this choice. All my life I had been dreaming of the forest, and the open, star-clouded sky, and how fast I’d move beneath it. Not running in fear, away, but towards.
And so, Monsieur de la Martinière, here we are.
All night long I have been on foot, evading the men sent by the chief of police, men who wish to lock me in the Grand Châtelet forever for the crime you paid me to commit. They would put me behind stinking walls and never let me see the sky again. I have paused only once, in an ill-reputed tavern, to sit by the fire and warm the vial of blood I purchased from a hunter of pelts fresh this morning. It was thick and red and proud, the blood of a predator, and in the alley I coaxed it into my own veins with the knife and tubes you gave me.
You can no doubt tell from my appearance, and from the easiness with which I gripped your throat and slashed your face with my claws, that I have been taking La Voisin’s powder; though far more slowly than did my husband, who swallowed it all in a draught. I wanted to retain my power of human speech so that I could come here and relate all I have recently told. You may hear by the slurring of my words that my teeth grow sharper and speaking becomes more and more difficult. I can feel my throat changing, my voice lowering to what might be called a growl. Finish writing, then, and read it back to me.
Now sign your name, and mine. Do not weep, Monsieur. Are you not certain of a welcome from your God, for all you’ve done in His name? Yes, put that down, too, for I want it known that even now I think of God, and I wonder what will happen to my own soul when I die. If wolves do not go to Heaven, neither can they enter Hell, so perhaps I will run in an eternal forest.
As for you, your servants will find you here tomorrow ripped open like a butchered cow, all your precious blood released—but, take comfort, still pure. Perhaps a maid will claim she saw a wolf leap from your window. Perhaps a butler will swear he heard a howl pierce the night. Perhaps this confession will be read and disbelieved; or perhaps it will be judged credible, and spark a panic in the city. I do not care. I am not for the city any longer. It is the full of the moon, and the sky calls to me.
© Copyright 2020 Emma Törzs
Emma Torzs - [BCS305 S01] Page 2