The Prisoner of the Castle of Enlightenment

by Therese Doucet

  She left me there for several minutes and came back with a pair of shoes and a pile of my old clothes that she helped me put on. When I was dressed, she sent me into the front room to see Father.

  He was sitting up in bed, drinking an herbal tisane. His face was gray and his hair and beard looked whiter than when I had left. He was thinner too and seemed barely able to muster the strength to raise the cup to his lips. I fell on him and embraced him and then sat down on a low three-legged stool next to the bed.

  He pulled away from me to cough into a handkerchief. When the coughing fit subsided after long minutes, he wheezed, “Violaine. You came.”

  “Shh, don’t talk anymore. Of course I came.”

  XII

  I sat with Father for an hour, long enough to assure myself he was truly no longer at death’s door, and then I begged to be excused to sleep in my old bed in the back room for a few hours after my long night of riding.

  As I slept with the shutters closed against the daylight, I dreamt I heard Donatien’s voice in the dark.

  “Violaine, Violaine, come on, let’s go out to the standing stone. That was fun, wasn’t it? Are you wearing your ring?”

  “No, what ring? What are you talking about?”

  “We’re married. I’m your husband.”

  “You’re insane. You tried to hurt me.” I wanted to get away but couldn’t move. He ran a finger down my arm from the crook of my elbow to my wrist. “Stop it. No.”

  I jerked awake with a little cry. Slowly my surroundings came into focus and my sense of horror receded. Donatien couldn’t be Thérion. I recognized his voice in the dream, though it was dark. And Thérion would have stopped when I asked him to. Thérion was always kind; he would have listened to me. I pushed myself up and shook off my drowsiness.

  It was early afternoon. I got up and went back to the main room to eat some bread, and then took up my post on the stool by Father’s bedside again. Edmée sat knitting in a chair as Father slept. He looked better than he had that morning. His color had returned a little and he wasn’t coughing, though there was still an audible wheeze in his breathing.

  “Will the doctor come back?” I asked Edmée in a whisper.

  “He’s supposed to. Tomorrow morning, he said.”

  “Has there been any word from the Marquis?”

  “Only what Doctor Guillon told us. He said Monsieur du Herle rode into Thônes to fetch him and give him directions to get here. He didn’t tell us you were coming. Did you have a quarrel with the Marquis?”

  “No – maybe. Perhaps a misunderstanding. I couldn’t find the Marquis or Monsieur du Herle to ask permission to come after I received your letter. I waited all day and into the night, but neither of them came back to the manor. I was afraid if I kept waiting it might be too late, so I just left by myself in the middle of the night. I hope the Marquis won’t be angry with me.”

  “Oh, dear. You shouldn’t cross him. What a thing, to ride around the countryside in the middle of the night in only your chemise! What in heaven’s name were you thinking?” She shook her head again. “I didn’t know what to do but write you. Your sisters were here to watch by his bedside, but it was you he kept asking for.”

  “It was right you wrote to me,” I said, looking at Father and not at her. “I needed to come home.”

  “But you’ll go back? You haven’t run away for good?”

  “I – I don’t know.”

  She sighed. “It’s not a good time for there to be trouble between you and the Marquis. Your Father just signed a lease on a house in Annecy before he fell ill. He’s getting too old to spend the winters up here, now that he can afford to move. I’m to go with him and we’ll have room for Aimée and her governess, and perhaps Valentin, if you want to take him out of school. But if the Marquis thinks you’ve betrayed him, running off like that …” She broke off as Father stirred restlessly in his sleep. Then she turned back to catch my eye and look me in the face. “I hope you weren’t thinking of coming back here to stay. That would be difficult, now there’s been so much talk. People saw you riding off with a well-dressed gentleman, and rumors started going around. It was as we feared. We told everyone you’d gone into service in another town, but no one believed you’d humbled yourself enough to become a housemaid.”

  I nodded, feeling struck in the chest. I might have expected as much, but it was still a blow to learn I wasn’t remembered with kindness or forgiveness in the village. At least there would be no more offers of marriage to contend with.

  “Is that why you wanted to leave? Because there were rumors about me?” I asked.

  She looked thin and worn out. Her braids of straw-blond hair were going gray under her coif and there were dark bags under her eyes.

  “As long as father can still afford the house in Annecy, it doesn’t matter. But if it falls through because you offended the Marquis … it might be best if you did go into service. How we’d find a position for you, I don’t know. But never mind, we can speak of it later, when he’s better.” She looked at Father intently, and seeing how easily he breathed, she closed her eyes for a moment in relief.

  I tried to imagine what my mother would have said, if she were still alive and sitting here instead of Edmée. She might have asked whether I was happy with the Marquis and whether I was treated well at the manor. But Edmée didn’t ask.

  After some time had passed with the two of us sitting in silence, I asked, “Will you be all right here with him if I go to Hortense’s to see Aimée?”

  She smiled, “Yes, go and see them, and Françoise-Angélique too, otherwise they’ll scold me for keeping you here so long when they didn’t know you’d come. You’ve plenty enough daylight to get there on that horse of yours. I wonder what a stallion like him thinks of the society in our stable. It’s like a prince bedding down with peasants,” she said, chuckling a little.

  In the barn, Zéphyr seemed to have gotten his rest also. He snorted and paced as though eager to get out of his stall. When I went to saddle him, I felt a weight in the saddle bag, a rectangular form I hadn’t noticed in my haste in the dark the night before. My Book of the Rose. I opened it and found a letter from Thérion tucked into the cover.

  “Dearest Violaine, by the time you read this, I’ll be missing you terribly. Forgive me not writing more just now and, as I wrote before, for not sending Harlequin to accompany you. If you leave a letter here in the book’s cover, it will make its way back to me at Boisaulne, and you’ll also find my letters to you here. When you’re ready to return to Boisaulne, Zéphyr will carry you back to me. Don’t tarry too long, I beg you. Every night I don’t hold you in my arms is a wound. Send word when you’ve arrived safely.”

  The medallion of Cernunnos was still between the book’s pages, too. I slipped it into my pocket and carried the book into the house, into the back room. This was all very strange, even for my strange Thérion who concealed himself behind masks within masks within masks. I sat on my bed and reread the note several times. The words “as I wrote before” made me think I must have missed a letter from him, and the missing letter would explain some of the odd events of the day before – why Harlequin was absent, why Zéphyr was saddled and tied up by the standing stone, as though waiting for me. Of course I knew now the reason Harlequin was missing was that he’d gone to Annecy to fetch the doctor.

  I tiptoed back into the front room.

  “I thought you’d gone,” whispered Edmée.

  “The Marquis left me a letter,” I whispered back. “I just found it. All’s well, but I need to write back to him and let him know I arrived safely.”

  “God be praised.” She set down her knitting, and helped me find a quill, ink, and paper amidst Father’s untidy papers.

  I hurriedly wrote to Thérion that I was safe there at Father’s house. I explained my confusion and worry from the day before and asked whether I might have missed a letter from him.

  “I’ll write again soon,” I scribbled, “but I must leave in a mo
ment to be sure of getting to my sister’s house before dark. Thank you a thousand times for sending the doctor. It was wisely done, and Father appears to be out of danger.” I left it for the next day to tell him what had happened with Donatien. I tucked the letter into the book’s cover and placed the book under the mattress of my bed so that Edmée wouldn’t disturb it by mistake.

  I rode Zéphyr to Hortense’s house. I brought the stallion into the stable and found Pierre-Joseph sitting at a table in the corner mending a tool. He half-stood when he saw me, before sitting back down again and returning to his work, not looking me in the eye.

  “Evening. How do you do?” he said gruffly. “You’ve come a long way, eh?”

  With equal stiffness, I half curtseyed. “I came to see Father. He’s much better. Are Hortense and Aimée inside?”

  “Don’t know. Go on in. I’ve got to finish this and clean up. I’ll take care of the horse too, in a minute,” he said, indicating Zéphyr and nodding me toward the door into the house. I supposed he was none too pleased to see me if I had drawn gossip around the family as Edmée had told me. But no matter. Thérion still cared for me and longed for my return to Boisaulne, so I was spared the reckoning of my lost honor for the time being.

  Stepping into the kitchen, I heard music coming from the next room. For a moment I thought of the fairy music that had nearly drawn me down into the realm beneath the earth, then I shook my head, trying to clear my ears of the illusion. The sounds were still there. I opened the door into the next room and saw Aimée seated on a stool before the hearth with her hands on the strings of a harp taller than she was. She was plucking out a melody lovely enough to draw the fairies’ envy.

  She jumped up when she saw me and ran to me, crying, “Maman! Maman!” I lifted her up and hugged her to me, tears springing to my eyes. Her hair was braided smoothly and tied with satin ribbons in perfectly even bows, as I had never managed to do it myself. She introduced me to her governess, Madame Grasset, who had been sitting on the bench by the wall looking on. She was a pleasant, middle-aged woman with a lyonnais accent. When I had paid my regards to her and learned Hortense had gone out to the pasture to call my nephews home for supper, Aimée and I went outside to walk and look for them.

  I told Aimée what her brother had written to me in his teardrop-spattered letter.

  “But it’s true,” she said. “Cousin Ronald and Jacquot have been jealous and mean to me ever since Madame Grasset came to stay. Tante Hortense says Madame Grasset takes up too much room with her harp and turns her nose up at the suppers Tante Hortense makes. It’s always ‘In Lyon we do this and in Lyon we do that,’ and it gives Uncle ideas of trying new things Tante Hortense doesn’t want to do, so then they quarrel and everyone’s cross.”

  “Do you want to go with Grandfather and Edmée and stay in the new house in Annecy? Edmée says there’ll be enough room for you there.”

  “Only if Madame Grasset can come too.”

  “Of course she’ll come. I’m sure she’d be more comfortable in a town house than up here on the mountain, where she doesn’t even understand what anyone says in patouè.”

  “And Valentin? Maman, I miss him. He wrote me some letters too, and Madame Grasset helped me read them. You should see how well I can read now, almost as good as you already. But Valentin sounds so sad. He shouldn’t be with those fathers, the Jesuits. He ought to be learning music with Madame Grasset like me.”

  “I don’t know, sweetheart. He does sound unhappy, but your Papa would have liked him to become an educated man. I think your Papa would say it was better for him to stay, and the discipline will toughen him, and it’s the ordinary price of learning.” Imagining what the Pastor would have wanted for Valentin, however, was already in itself a sign that it wasn’t what I wished for my son.

  “But they don’t feed him properly,” Aimée insisted. “He could get sick from the bad food. And it’s not fair, he’s beaten worse than the other boys. They punish him for being a bad Catholic because he doesn’t always know how to recite all their prayers. One day perhaps they’ll guess he’s no Catholic at all. He’d be happy with Madame Grasset, I know he would. She’s always nice and doesn’t scold except when I’m really bad. And the harp is the best thing on earth. Do you know she has a fiddle too? He could learn the fiddle with her and we could play duets.”

  “Well, perhaps we can talk about it with Madame Grasset later and see what she thinks.”

  “I’ve missed you too, Maman, so much. Aren’t you ever coming back to stay?”

  The question twisted my heart painfully. “I don’t know, darling. The agreement was that I would stay with Monsieur le marquis as long as it pleased him to keep me.”

  “I wish you’d never leave again and would stay here with us forever.”

  Could I do it, I wondered? Boisaulne felt long ago and far away, as if it had never been never anything more than a wonderful dream. If I hadn’t had the reassuring weight of the silver medallion in my pocket, I might have doubted I was ever there. But I couldn’t truthfully tell her I didn’t wish to go back. Thérion’s love had become as necessary to me as bread, as water, as breathing. I had lived in the world formed by his imagining, a place that was the expression of his soul. It was wrenching to think of ever leaving all that behind me, yet this beautiful dream stood in opposition to my own children’s hunger for love and happiness and my duty to them. But even if it were possible to break the agreement my father had signed with Thérion, even if my heart didn’t cry out in anguish at the thought of never being with my love again, Edmée had already made it clear it might cause no end of trouble if I didn’t return to Boisaulne.

  “I can’t come back forever, darling,” I told her. “But once the Marquis sees he can trust me to visit here and return, when he sees how faithful I am to him, I hope he’ll permit me to visit more often.”

  “Do you love him more than you love us?”

  “Of course not. But the love between grown-up men and women is a different kind of love than that between parents and children. It would break my heart if I could never be with my Marquis again, but it also breaks my heart not to see you. If I could, I’d bring you and Valentin and Madame Grasset all to live with us in the manor, or at least I’d visit you in Annecy every month. When I go back I’ll speak with the Marquis. God willing, he’ll no longer deny me the wish of my heart to see my own children more often.”

  Aimée nodded, but still looked anxious, so I added, “Anyway, as soon as your Grandpapa’s well again, I’ll do my best to see whether you and Valentin can go and live with them, and Madame Grasset too. And then when I visit I can see you all at once.”

  

  With so many mouths to feed at dinner, Hortense was busy and distracted, and there was little chance of speaking with her until the last of the pots had been scraped clean and Aimée had gone to bed. Then she and I walked together with a lantern to the house of our younger sister, Françoise-Angélique. I hadn’t spoken with her since before Father had come back from his trip at the beginning of June. Françoise’s twin girls had been born in April, just as the midwife predicted. Now as the three of us sat whispering around the table before the fire, she alternately nursed each baby to drowsy contentment, while Hortense or I held the other twin who slept.

  “Never mind about us, everything’s gone on just the same here,” Hortense said, when I asked them for the news of the villages. “We want to hear all about your life at the manor. Was I right to tell you to go?”

  “Well, it’s done now,” I said. “I do wish I’d been here to take care of Father when he got sick, and I missed the children terribly.”

  “Of course you did,” Françoise said. She gave the baby on her breast a kiss on top of her fuzzy head. “But have you been happy, apart from that? Do they treat you well there?”

  Much as I hated to give Hortense reasons to feel pleased with herself for how she had treated me in June, I couldn’t refrain from describing Boisaulne in rapturous terms. They listen
ed in astonishment. I didn’t tell them about the invisible spirits who served Thérion and his guests, for they would have thought I’d gone mad, and there was no way anyone who hadn’t been to Boisaulne could believe the things I had seen. Hortense asked whether the servants were well-trained, whether I had my own maid, and whether it fell to me to manage them and give them their orders. I answered in the same phrases Harlequin had used when he had first brought me to the manor, that the Marquis had trained all his servants to be exceedingly discreet, well-nigh invisible. I had little need to speak with them and there was no duty on my part to manage them, though I received some assistance with dressing and arranging my hair.

  “And does the Marquis give you gifts?” Françoise asked. “Do you have jewels and pretty clothes?”

  “He has the most marvelous library you could possibly imagine. It’s filled from floor to ceiling with books. Every wall is covered with shelves and shelves of them, and I can read any of them I like, whenever I want, any time of day or night.”

  “Ah,” Françoise said. “That must be nice for you. But, how about clothes? Do you have brocades or satin things?”

  “The clothes,” I shrugged, “well, they’re not always the most comfortable, and at first I was constantly afraid of getting them dirty. But everything’s always so clean and smells nice there, that’s what I love, even more than the rich fabrics.”

  “What are the dresses made of, velvet? Or silk?”

  “Yes, and there are brocades also. I have a wardrobe stuffed full of them. There’s a fresh chemise laid out for me every time I go into my chamber. The bedclothes are wonderfully soft, too, and the mattresses are all of feathers. I don’t think I’ve seen a single bug or mouse inside any of the rooms since I got there. Oh, and there’s a garden, and a park with paths, almost as big as a village. I can walk for hours in it, and there are always flowers in bloom. For the first month and a half, I was lonely, and the only friends I had were in the garden, birds and deer, squirrels and rabbits, lizards, frogs, insects and spiders.”