The Prisoner of the Castle of Enlightenment

by Therese Doucet

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  Nearly a month had gone by since I had first met Aurore in the morning room, and I hardly felt myself a prisoner at Boisaulne, now that I was surrounded by such lively companions during my days. The romances and intrigues of my new friends provided me with better entertainment than any theater ever could. It wasn’t always enough to distract me from missing Aimée and Valentin, but distraction enough that I felt guilty sometimes over how long I could go without aching for the sight of their faces. My only other twinges of unhappiness came in the form of wistfulness when I thought of Thérion. As I saw my new friends falling in and out of love with each other, I wished for the normalcy, even the banality, of such love affairs. To read together in the library, to walk in the garden together, to sit on a stone bench in the sun with our arms around each other – what delightful luxuries those must be. If only I could gaze on Thérion’s face, just once, and caress him with my eyes too, not only with my hands. And suppose it wasn’t the face I had dreamt of, suppose it wasn’t Harlequin’s – what of it? I would discover my true lover then. I was ready to face the truth.

  Thérion was adamant, though, and deaf to my entreaties. Now he met them only with silence, as though I had not spoken, and made love to me all the more fiercely until I wept with pleasure, and tears continued to seep from my eyes.

  I sought ways to keep a light in my room, hiding candles and lanterns, flints and tinder, but the darkness that accompanied Thérion seemed to be a part of the magic of Boisaulne. My flint wouldn’t spark, candles guttered out, the fire died in the fireplace, and the lantern wicks were snuffed out by the mysterious invisible hands of Thérion’s servants. The shutters of my window were silently shut and locked against any light of the moon or stars.

  

  One morning I awoke to find a folded letter perched on top of my Book of the Rose, which I always kept next to me on my bedside table while I slept, with the medallion of Cernunnos tucked between its pages. The letter was from Edmée, who wrote that my father had fallen ill. She begged me to come home, and to forgive my father, who cried at the thought of the wrong he had done me in sending me off to Boisaulne. My silence had weighed heavily on him, and M. du Herle’s assurances that I was well had not consoled him. Enclosed was a letter from Valentin, spattered with teardrops. I was delighted to see how greatly his handwriting had improved in the few months he’d been away at school, but he wrote that the other boys beat him, and the Jesuit fathers also doled out beatings as punishments. The food was meager and terrible, and he was always cold and starving. He wished to come home and study on his own, or perhaps to become a farmer like his uncles. Aimée wasn’t getting along well with her cousins either, who were jealous she had a governess and didn’t have to do chores. Both of them missed me terribly and wished I would come home.

  XI

  I had to leave Boisaulne as soon as possible. What a selfish fool I had been, neglecting my children and father for the pleasures of this place. Hadn’t I known, ever since Séléné showed me the way out through the door behind the fountain, that I could leave at any time, whether or not Thérion wished to permit it? In fact, the front door had also reappeared in the anteroom as soon as the guests arrived, yet I had never once tried to go out by it. At the very least, I could have written to the children, instead of letting my spite and bitterness toward Father and Hortense keep me cruelly silent. How long had Edmée’s letter taken to reach me? There was no date on it, and even if there had been, I had long since lost track of the days and weeks. Father could be dead already. Valentin might have run away from school and come to grief.

  And yet – how could I go without speaking to Thérion, or at least saying goodbye to him? Surely he couldn’t be so cruel as to prevent me from going home under these circumstances. Would he have allowed me to see the letter otherwise, knowing it would make me desperate to leave?

  There was also the matter that I didn’t know the way home from Boisaulne, and Harlequin had warned me never to go alone outside the garden at night. I remembered the figure of the roi des aulnes, the Erl-King, and shuddered. I recalled the patch of blood on Harlequin’s sleeve and his shame when I had pointed it out. Harlequin, M. du Herle … Erl-King … something itched just then in the back of my mind, but I let it be. I needed to decide what to do. I couldn’t speak to Thérion until midnight, and time was of the essence. I resolved to speak to Harlequin at the midday meal, where I saw him most often, or earlier if I could find him in the maze of the manor’s rooms and gardens.

  As soon as I was dressed, I went to the library. Neither Harlequin nor anyone else was there. Curiosity drew me to the dictionary of demons, where I had first read about the roi des aulnes. It had never occurred to me before to look up Harlequin, who had his own entry since he too was a devilish figure.

  I read about Harlequin’s role in the Italian commedia del’arte. He was the trickster who aided and abetted his lovelorn master, the inamorato, in seeking to be together with his lady-love, the inamorata. This certainly seemed fitting for the handsome Harlequin I knew, who had procured me for his master, and whom Thérion had compared to an old lady matchmaker in the village. He had also kept an eye out for possible protégées and ingénues for his friend, Ulysse.

  Then something in the last paragraphs caught my eye. The name Harlequin came from a legend of an old pagan king of England who was called Herla. Herla was later corrupted to Herrequin, Hellequin, or Harlequin, as the name made its way to the French-speaking territories and further into the Continent after the Norman conquest. It was said Herla spent three hundred years under the earth in the kingdom of the fairies, and it was from Herla’s legend that the figure of the Elf-King emerged in Saxon lore. Herla was a leader of the wild hunt in the myths of the Celts – the mesnée d’Hellequin or maisnie d’Herrequin in old-fashioned French.

  Maisnie-la-Forêt was the name of the village across the bridge …

  Thérion thought himself a descendant of the roi des aulnes. And Harlequin had chosen a nickname that referred to the same legend. They must be one and the same. They must be. I had unveiled my lover at last. If I told him I knew, would he let go of his pretenses and disguises? Could we be lovers in the daylight as well as in the night? Could we at last join body and soul, like the fragile meeting of sun and moon at twilight? I had to try. I had to speak to him.

  But Harlequin didn’t appear at the midday meal. All afternoon, all evening, I wrestled with myself in an anguish of indecision, whether to flee or wait. Darkness fell. When I understood Harlequin wasn’t coming to the evening meal, I excused myself and went back up to my room, to wait for Thérion. If he didn’t come that night, I would leave at first morning light, make my way to the village and Madame Jacquenod’s house, and from there find my way back home, somehow or another. Perhaps someone would be traveling down the mountain and I could persuade them to let me walk or ride with them. Surely any terrors that lurked in the forest outside Boisaulne’s walls at night would be quiet and harmless during the day.

  I sat in the bed with the candelabra on the bedside table next to me and waited for the flames to gutter out at the stroke of midnight. The clock tolled twelve times, but the candles stayed lit. Terror engulfed me. In an effort to calm myself, I thought, What a strange thing, to be more frightened of the light than of the dark, now that it warns me Thérion is gone.

  My door opened, and Donatien entered the room.

  “Good evening, Violaine,” he said. He came to sit down at the foot of my bed, where Thérion always sat.

  For a moment I was too stunned to respond.

  “What?” he said. “No words of greeting for your lover?”

  A great surge of horror rose up in me. “You’re not him.”

  “Aren’t I?”

  “Your voice isn’t his.” I pulled the coverlet up over my chest and clutched it tightly. “And how did you know my name was Violaine?”

  He tugged off his embroidered satin coat and laid it down carefully over the foot of the bed behin
d him. He slipped off his shoes, stitched in delicately embroidered ice-blue fabric with gleaming silver buckles, first one, then the other. Before I could fully grasp what he intended, he had climbed into the bed on top of me and pressed me down so I couldn’t get out from under him.

  “What are you doing?” I gasped.

  “You begged to see your Thérion’s face in the light, and now I’m here. Don’t you like what you see?”

  His face looked enormous and distended, like that of a giant insect staring down at me, much too close.

  “You listened at the keyhole.” I turned my head to the side in disgust and tried to wrench myself free. “This isn’t funny. Get off of me. Stop it. Help!”

  “I want to see you in the light too. It’s time you are exposed for what you really are.”

  This couldn’t be happening. I imagined for a split second I heard a roar, a terrible roar from an enormous beast, my Beast, Thérion, come to rescue me from my attacker. And then I realized it was only the roar of my own blood in my ears, my heart pounding as Donatien and I struggled and he wrested the coverlet from me. He shoved it aside and pulled my chemise up to my waist, tearing the hem of the fabric. Thérion wasn’t coming to rescue me. For all I know he truly was Donatien. But I knew with certainty I didn’t want this and I needed to get away. Donatien pressed an arm against my shoulders and chest to restrain me and with his free hand began to unbutton his breeches, ignoring my forearms flailing and my fingernails trying to claw at him through the fabric of his shirt and waistcoat.

  “I mean it,” I cried, “please, stop it. Let go.”

  He laughed. “But this is what you were brought here for, wasn’t it? To add to the castle’s amusements.”

  My vision jerked between the gargoyle shadows dancing on the candlelit ceiling and walls, Donatien’s grimacing face, the momentary darkness of my closed eyelids, and then the brilliance of the flickering candles next to me. The candelabra. I contorted my right arm painfully under his weight to reach out for it. It was almost too heavy for me to lift, and it took every last ounce of my strength to raise it up off the table, swing it through the air, and bring it down onto the back of Donatien’s head.

  He let go of me, shouting and cursing. I shoved him aside, wriggled the rest of the way out from under him, and fell out of the bed onto the floor, bruising my shoulder and hip. The coverlet had caught on fire from the candles, and he beat at it frantically with his coat to smother the flames. I pushed myself up and ran out of the room.

  At first I didn’t know where I was going. I was only running, barefoot in my thin chemise with its torn hem, down the hall to the staircase, and then down the stairs. The notion formed that I must get out of the château. I should have long since left for Father’s house, and Boisaulne wasn’t safe. At the bottom of the stairs, I yanked at the handle of the front door, but it didn’t budge. Whatever dangers lay outside, I couldn’t wait for daylight. Better to risk going out through the grotto and find a horse in the stable, better to leave now than stay another day and have to look the others in the eye, now that I had been shamed and humiliated like this.

  I turned and hurried in the other direction, to run out the back of the anteroom along the length of the gallery, out the double glass-paned doors, and into the garden. I alternated running and jogging toward the far back wall of the inner garden, wishing I had brought a lantern. My lungs heaved and I stumbled and nearly fell several times in the dark. As I ran, I blamed myself. How could I ever have felt pity for Donatien? Why hadn’t I heeded the warning of my intuition, which told me of the emptiness in him? It was no mere lack of esteem for me, but a hunger for cruelty. Why hadn’t I defended myself better? Why had I ever let such a creature put his hands on me?

  There, finally, was the fountain and the bricked-in arch behind it. In the faint moonlight, I could just make out the stone mermaid figure on the side of the wall by the arch. I leapt up and pulled down on it with my whole weight, and the gate rumbled open an arm’s width.

  I hesitated before the opening. I was prepared for it to be pitch-black inside and for my eyes to be as blind within the grotto as in my room at night with Thérion. Instead, a faint glow in shifting colors shone from within. Time seemed to slow down, and the lights called to me, mesmerizing me. I moved forward through the opening, pushed the door shut behind me, and walked down the inner steps in a trance.

  The gemstones, the crystalline formations, the channel in the rock of the spring above, and the walls of the grotto all glowed and glimmered and sparkled, giving off light of every color. There were two ways I could go: either forward and out to the forest, passing the fork in the tunnel that led off to join the old mines below the streets of Paris, or down through the low, narrow opening to the right that led underneath the channel of the spring, deeper into the earth. A faint tinkling of bells sounded from the glittering depths of the passage to the right under the spring. The longer I hesitated, the more it sounded like some lovely music just beyond my hearing, plaintive, woven of sorrow and joy, swirling in a seductive rhythm. I couldn’t resist a longing to hear it more clearly, to know what it was about, to dance to it, to feel it resonate through my skin and flesh and bones. My feet carried me forward down into the passage, and I was just about to turn a corner when a new sound tore through the fabric of the air.

  The lights and colors rippled before my eyes. Everything tilted, was disrupted.

  It was the neighing of a horse. The concrete absurdity of this barnyard whinnying made everything around me, the lights, the jewels, the far-off music, seem unreal. It was unreal, I understood then, with the feeling of waking from a dream. The seductive tinkling music was just the clatter of rocks shaken in a bucket. The walls of the passage weren’t crusted in iridescent shimmering jewels, they were stained and slimy with black algae. I was heading down into sulfurous, damp darkness. I stumbled backward, back up to the path that led out the other side into the forest. Now that I had seen what was real instead of the illusion, I understood that the inside of the grotto was faintly lit by a phosphorescent glow of some substance in or on the walls – some natural organism, moss or mineral, like the glow of fireflies, not magic. I panicked for a moment in the greenish darkness, as the rattling of stones continued in the passage below and I stumbled around, recoiling as my groping hands encountered more wet and slimy walls.

  The horse neighed again. It was close by, and I went toward the sound, gradually leaving the phosphorescence behind as the ground sloped downward. There was a long stretch of emptiness on my left hand as I passed the broad tunnel that led down into the old mines, and then the path went upward and out to the open air and the standing stone in the starlight at the edge of the forest. Zéphyr, the white stallion who had first carried me to Boisaulne, stood waiting by the stone, his coat pale-gray against the darkness. He was saddled and tied to a tree branch, neighing as if to ask what had taken me so long.

  “My friend, you saved me,” I said, throwing my arms around Zéphyr’s neck and burying my face in his mane. “What are you doing here?”

  He snorted and tossed his head, and I let go of him.

  “You must have known I’d need you. Someone must have. How long have you been waiting here for me? All day?”

  Was it Thérion who had made sure Zéphyr would be waiting there for me? Donatien was lying – of course he was, he could never be Thérion. Yet my confidence of this morning that Harlequin had been my true lover all along was undermined now, and I no longer knew what to think or whom to trust. Someone had left me the letter from Edmée. Whoever had left the letter was my friend. And I could only think that the same friend had tied Zéphyr up to wait for me, expecting me to leave and guessing I would need his aid.

  But there was no time to waste. In the dark I felt for the reins and untied Zéphyr from the tree branch. I climbed into the saddle and gave the horse a gentle kick in the flanks that started him walking.

  “I don’t suppose you know the way back to my father’s house in the village?”<
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  He whinnied and increased his speed to a trot, and then a canter, and finally we were galloping through the forest. We forded the stream in the dark and lurched up the other side of the bank. I gritted my teeth and focused all my concentration on keeping my seat, holding tight to the reins and ducking my head low to avoid being slashed or struck by branches. Soon after we had left the stream behind, he slowed his pace and kept to a trot the rest of the way.

  Just as the rising sun began to paint the snow-capped peaks fuchsia and salmon, with fiery yellow tufts of clouds clustered at their edges, Zéphyr and I arrived at my father’s house. I brought Zéphyr into the stable room and settled him in to rest with our old mare Claudette and the other animals.

  Edmée came in as I was finishing up. She let out a cry of joy when she saw me and rushed to embrace me in a close hug, as if I were her own daughter – a thing she had never done before in all the years she had lived with us.

  “Thank God, thank God, you’re back,” she said. “And so quickly. I didn’t know if we’d hear back from you at all, let alone that you’d be here so soon. But Mary Mother of God, you’re nearly naked! Why on earth have you come in only a nightgown?”

  I looked down and folded my arms over my chest, trying to cover myself. “Forgive me,” I stuttered, “I left in a great hurry and rode all night to get here. How’s Father?”

  “Mercy, you’ll take sick yourself like that.” She stared me up and down and shook her head. “Oh, he’s much better since the doctor came. But quick, come on in by the fire.”

  “A doctor was here?”

  My teeth had begun to chatter and I shivered convulsively as she put an arm around me and led me through the door from the stable into the main room of the house. Whether my shivering was from chill or exhaustion or both, I couldn’t tell.

  “Didn’t you know?” she asked. “A doctor by the name of Guillon came from Thônes. He said the Marquis de Boisaulne had sent for him, so I assumed … but here, let’s get a blanket on you.” She positioned me before the fire and draped a woolen coverlet around my shaking shoulders. “The delirium seems to have passed and the fever’s broken. Thank God, thank God.”