V
My days in the manor fell into a pattern much like the first day. I woke, broke my fast, read in the library, and walked in the garden. There was a concert each night in the music room, and I discovered that if I left out a set of sheet music, the invisible players would play it. Every evening I found a letter from the Marquis tucked into the cover of my Book of the Rose. Since I had told him I missed my children, he began to make a regular practice of assuring me they and the rest of my family were well, based on inquiries he claimed to have made. I had his permission to write to my family if I wished, but I hadn’t done it yet. Let Father and Hortense wonder whether I was well or even still alive, since they had thought so little of bargaining away my honor and freedom. Let them explain to Aimée and Valentin why we had been so cruelly parted from each other. Always, every night without fail, the Marquis asked if I would meet him. Always I answered, Not yet.
Some nights I woke to the chiming of the clock at midnight and sensed someone was in my room and lay fearfully awake until whoever it was had left and closed my door.
I ceased to wonder at certain marvels of the manor as time passed. I became used to the silent and invisible hands that helped me with my hair and clothes and served my meals. But the garden inspired awe each time I explored it. I found new species of flowers and birds, and insects with iridescent wings like tiny fairies, spiders of many colors and sizes, frogs, mice, chipmunks, squirrels, hares, foxes, and small golden fish that darted through the murky waters of the little pond. Even shy red deer ran through the forested park. In the absence of any visible human presence, I came to think of all these creatures as my companions and friends. At the same time, I never ceased searching along the garden walls for an exit. I found none. The gate to the stables was always locked, and the walls were too high to climb. None of the trees grew close enough to them for me to climb over by way of their branches.
I continued to make new discoveries in the rooms of the manor as well. The place gave the impression of being larger on the inside than it looked from the outside. Cabinets, doors, closets, and even whole rooms seemed to appear and disappear, and then reappear in different places. One day I found a chest full of maps, embellished with pictures of dragons and monsters from faraway lands. In a cabinet I came upon a trove of astronomical equipment, a set of curious movable brass rings set inside one another that showed the paths of the stars and planets, as well as a telescope and maps of the heavens. I discovered galleries full of small paintings, sculpted figures, porcelain vases, and enameled plates, colored in stunning deep jewel tones. Hidden doors abounded, artfully concealed in the paneling of walls or behind tapestries. Some were locked, others open, and some were locked one day and open the next. Sometimes I couldn’t find doors again that had almost certainly been there the day before.
It wasn’t any one thing that prompted me, at last, to answer yes to the Marquis’s nightly question. I was lonely, true, and felt a great deal of curiosity about him, and I had grown less fearful as I accustomed myself to the manor and its oddities. But perhaps more than anything, it was exhausting to see so much beauty and speak of it to no one. I’d had many sorrows in my life, short as it had been: the passing of my dear mother, far too soon; the unhappiness of my marriage, and of losing the faith of my childhood; a stillborn child, the imprisonment and death of my husband, and for so long, the feeling of being wrong in the life to which I had been born. Sorrow I knew how to bear in silence, for the sake of sparing others the burdens I bore, and to avoid shame and condemnation from less compassionate souls. But joy in my breast, and wonder in my heart, and the exhilaration of new learning, new thoughts and ideas springing forth in me, these felt like children that didn’t want to be cooped up indoors; they wanted to be set free to sing and shout. Sensible of my own condition as a prisoner, I didn’t wish to keep them imprisoned. Though it was a strange imprisonment, to be sure, that contained so many joys. In truth, more and more in the struggle within me between anger at my confinement, the ache of missing Valentin and Aimée, and pleasure in the daily beauties I beheld, it was the joy and pleasure that had taken the upper hand. If only I could be angrier at my jailer, the Marquis …
At any rate, where it had always felt right to keep silent about my sorrows, and so I had found the strength for silence, it felt wrong to keep silent about beauty and joy. It cost me an effort, and the burden of silence grew greater with time. At first I started to write in my notes to the Marquis such things as, “I found it charming to sit at your fountain today, and I saw a bluebird. The book by Montesquieu about the spirit of the laws is fascinating so far, though I must read it slowly to understand it all.”
His responses were formal, modest, and restrained. “I’ve read the Montesquieu book as well,” he wrote back, “and his accounts of other countries and peoples made me want to travel to them, however savage and dangerous they might be. I’m glad you enjoyed the fountain and the bluebird.” On another day, I was so proud of a new poem I had written about the legend of Perséphone that I enclosed it with a note to him. He praised it warmly. “The soul always hungers for understanding,” he wrote, “and it only takes a little of the sense of being known and appreciated for who one truly is beneath the mask of appearances to bond deeply with a friend, so sweet is that feeling. And when it takes hold, it may run as deep as Hadès’s kingdom of death, and may bind one in faithfulness all one’s life, as Perséphone was bound to her deathly lover for immortality. To me that’s what Perséphone’s pomegranate seeds represent in your verses.”
As our letters to each other became longer and more amiable, it finally began to seem silly to write when we could just as easily speak to one another. So one evening I wrote, “M. le marquis, thank you for the news of my family and for recommending the Lettres Persanes to me. The views of those fictional travelers are most interesting. I wish we could discuss the Montesquieu books in person, and it occurs to me we can. If you would still care to meet, I think I’m ready.”
I set the note down on the table with a tremor in my hand, wondering how long it would be before he saw it, how long until he appeared, where and when I would first see him.
I woke again at midnight. It was strange to me how pitch dark it always was at that hour. The moon was nearly full outside, I knew, but none of its light came in through the shutters. I supposed the darkness, and the presence whose breathing I had heard at my past midnight awakenings, were both a part of the manor’s idiosyncratic magic. It had gradually ceased to frighten me, this presence, whatever or whoever it might be. It had never done me harm or even made its existence definitive. Its watchfulness had begun to feel benign and protective rather than malevolent – if it was there at all, and if I hadn’t merely imagined it.
I listened for its breath, holding my own for a moment or two in the hope of hearing better. At first there was nothing. Then a cool wave of air wafted across my cheek, as if the door had silently opened and closed. The slightest creak of the parquet floor. There. I almost felt relieved that my night-watcher had come, as I had come to expect it.
Then it spoke.
“Are you awake?” It was a man’s voice, whispering. He used the polite, formal pronoun, and I replied in kind.
“Monsieur, le marquis? Is that you?”
“It’s me. Did I wake you?”
“No. But … what are you doing here, in the middle of the night?”
“You said you were willing to meet me at last.”
“But I thought perhaps I’d see you tomorrow, or in a few days. Not that you’d come to my bedchamber in the dark, in the middle of the night.”
“I was impatient for our meeting.”
I sat up in bed and leaned against the pillows. “Couldn’t you light a lamp or a candle, so I can see you? It’s so dark.”
“No. No lights or candles. You mustn’t see me. I can only meet you in the dark.”
“What? What do you mean?” I rubbed my eyes, as if it might dispel my night-blindnes
s.
“It’s a precaution, for your sake and mine. It’s for the best. You’ll have to trust me on that.”
“But – then I’ll never see your face?”
“Not for now. Not yet. You’re not missing anything, I assure you. I’m nothing much to look at.”
“Are you ashamed of how you look – is that why? Are you disfigured in some way?”
There was a long silence. Then he said, “Suppose I were to tell you I’d been cursed. That I was an ordinary man who’d been transformed into a horrible beast?”
“Is that the truth?”
He laughed softly. “I don’t know. Perhaps. I don’t know what I turn into when I go to sleep and lose consciousness. Who knows what I become when the moon is full?”
I was reminded of the unsettling and vivid dreams I’d had in the past of flying, falling from a precipice, making love, or committing violence. “I suppose no one really knows what happens when they’re asleep.”
“Exactly. Sometimes I dream I go hunting. I have a reputation as a great hunter, you know. The wagoner from the village comes to deliver our supplies and finds animal skins and slain carcasses in the outer yard. He takes them back to the village and I suppose they’re butchered there. It gives the village meat and leather, and they prosper in the fur trade. All very well and good. But in fact I don’t like hunting. I’ve never liked the idea of killing living things for sport.”
I drew up my knees under the covers and clasped my arms around them. “So you hunt, even though you don’t enjoy it?”
“That’s the thing. I don’t know how the animals get there. It’s assumed I’m a great hunter, that it’s I who slays them, but I have no recollection of doing it. Perhaps it’s a monster who lives in the forest and rules over it, who hunts by night. Perhaps the monster is me.”
I shook my head. “You’re confusing me. This place is so strange. I don’t know what to think. I used not to believe in magic, but I’ve seen so much here I’ve come to believe in it after all.”
“May I sit on the end of your bed?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, before it occurred to me what a mistake this might be. For a moment as his weight settled on the side of my mattress by my feet, I was fearful again, but he didn’t move or speak. At last I was emboldened by his stillness to say, “Let me feel your face. I want to feel if it’s the head of a beast or not.”
“Very well.”
I reached out into the darkness until my right hand found his shoulder. He leaned closer as I felt with both hands: the fabric of his coat, the cravat around his neck. The fabrics were soft and fine to the touch. The coat was embroidered satin and his cravat was muslin. His chin was clean-shaven. He wore no wig, and there was no powder in his hair. Otherwise he seemed to be dressed as a nobleman might be for a dinner or a ball. I reached further and felt his lips, his cheeks, his nose, his eyes, and his forehead. I could form little impression of his looks merely from touching him, but it felt like an ordinary face to me, not that of a hairy, horned, horrible beast.
“I think you’re a man, not a beast,” I said. I drew back my hands and let them rest in my lap on the bedspread.
“There’s an old story that an ancestor of mine was an ogre. The roi des aulnes, they called him. An immortal monster who haunts the forest to this day. Sometimes he took the form of a stag, and at other times appeared as a monstrous man wearing the mask of a stag’s skull. He seduced a great-great-great grandmother of mine. My nurse told me the story many times when I was a child. It’s also said the youngest son of a former marquis, another ancestor of mine, was lured away by the monster into his underground lair. The boy disappeared after going into the forest and never returned. A century later some traveler reported coming across the bones of a child. He’d dug up a mound in the forest thinking it might be buried treasure. The story says the traveler heard fairy bells, and almost followed them down into a tunnel at the base of an alder tree. He was saved by a magic potion that protected him and turned the sound of the fairy bells into the growling of wild animals.”
“A woman in the village told me the story about the ogre. It made me a little frightened of coming here. More than I already was.”
“You needn’t be afraid. I’d never wish to do you harm. There may be dangers in the forest and outside of it, but I’ll do my best to keep you safe.”
I fell silent, because I didn’t believe him. How safe could I be if a man could come into my room in the middle of the night? Especially one who believed he might be wholly or in part a murderous beast, or descended from one?
“Was your day a pleasant one?” he asked.
“How could it be otherwise? I lack for nothing here, except the freedom to leave.”
“Do you wish to leave?”
“No,” I found myself answering honestly, surprised to feel the truth of it.
“No?”
“I only wish I had the freedom to leave if I wanted to.”
“Ah.” There was a pause. “Tell me about your day,” he said at last, and so I did. I told him of the spider’s web I had seen in the garden with sparkling drops of dew like diamonds on it. I told him about two caterpillars that seemed to be having a conversation and then a fight. How I started to write a poem about it, and then looked in the library for books of poetry, because I was curious whether I’d find any that had been written about caterpillars. I told him the story of Valentin befriending a caterpillar and following it all around the garden of our house in the village the previous summer. The Marquis laughed, declared it charming, and told me he remembered reading a verse about a caterpillar, and would try to find it again later if he could recall the author.
I liked his laugh. I liked the sound of his voice. It was somehow familiar to me. I tried to place it.
“Monsieur le marquis,” I said, “you wrote that we met each other before, in the bookshop in Annecy.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t recall our meeting. But if it’s true, then why all this mystery? Why this meeting in the middle of the night? Did something happen to you in the meantime?”
“I couldn’t flatter myself you’d remember me. As I said, I’m unremarkable in the extreme. Call it a peculiarity of mine, if you like. I prefer the darkness. I’m comfortable in it.”
“But …” I struggled to formulate my question inoffensively. “If you took such an interest in me as to … as to come to this arrangement with my father … it must have been at great effort and expense. Doesn’t it trouble you, not to see me?”
“Oh, I can see you. Another peculiarity of mine. I see unusually well in the dark.”
I laughed. “I don’t believe you. How many fingers am I holding up? Tell me.”
“None. Your hands are folded in your lap. And if you don’t mind my saying so, you look very charming in your nightdress.”
I gasped. “How …?”
“I told you. I’m the great-great-great-grandson of the beast who hunts in the forest at night. For all I know, perhaps I am him. Oh, who knows? I grew up thinking it was nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently my father had the same ability, and his father before him. Only later did I realize other people were blind where I could see.”
“And … do you see well in the daylight too?”
“Well enough, but I prefer the night. And shade and shadows during the day.”
It still seemed incredible to me, but I set my skepticism aside to continue. “But then, you have me at a disadvantage. You can see, me but I can’t see you.”
He laughed. “I do indeed.”
“Can I ask a question? Have you ever come into my room before, in the middle of the night?”
He hesitated, and at last said, “Yes.”
“I woke up a few times. I thought someone was here. I was terrified at first.”
He didn’t reply.
“Then, have you been here at the manor the whole time? You weren’t detained elsewhere, as Monsieur du Herle claimed?”
“I come and go. I pref
er to be here, but sometimes I need to take care of affairs away from the manor.”
“I see.”
I heard the clock chiming again downstairs. Could so much time really have passed while we had been speaking? I let out a great yawn.
“I should let you sleep,” he said.
I answered with another yawn, though I tried to suppress it.
“May I visit you again tomorrow evening?” he asked.
I considered it, wanting to be sure of my answer. “Yes.”
The bed creaked and the mattress shifted as he stood. “I’m bowing to you, Madame Bergeret, though you can’t see it. Sleep well, and may your dreams be sweet.”
The door opened and shut. He was gone. At least, I thought he was; in the darkness I could be sure of nothing.
VI
When I woke in the morning, my first thoughts were of the Marquis, the feel of his clothes and face and hair, the sound of his voice, the words we had exchanged. They persisted in my memory instead of fading like the memories of my dreams so often did; yet they seemed absurd and illogical enough to have been a dream. After breakfast in the library, my mind turned to philosophy, and I decided to research the subject of dreams and self-deception. I unshelved treatises from René Descartes, John Locke, and Pierre Bayle.
In the book by M. Descartes, the philosopher wrote of sitting before the fire in his dressing gown with a piece of paper in his hands, so sure of the truth of his impressions. And yet, how often has it happened to me, he wrote, that in the night I dreamt that I found myself in this particular place, that I was dressed and seated near the fire, whilst in reality I was lying undressed in bed! Ah, you see, M. Descartes, this is the very problem. Meanwhile, M. Locke, if I understood him rightly, believed we felt certainty in trusting the evidence of our senses, and this certainty was as great as it needed to be in order for us to make proper choices in the world in which we found ourselves. And if our dreamer pleases to try, he wrote, whether the glowing heat of a glass furnace be barely a wandering imagination in a drowsy man’s fancy, by putting his hand into it, he may perhaps be wakened into a certainty greater than he could wish, that it is something more than bare imagination. Very well then, I had felt certain I was awake at the time. I had heard the man’s voice and felt his skin, and perhaps in a sense I did put my hand to the fire in doing that. But what about the other things I had seen here that were impossible, illogical, magical?
The Prisoner of the Castle of Enlightenment Page 6