The Erl-King towered over the scene, the horn still in his gloved hand, surveying the work of his wolves. They had finished with the Marquise and the horses, and now they began to sniff the air and advance to where I lay, padding toward me with their heads low to the ground. They smelled my blood.
Thérion had gotten back up onto his feet after his rolling tumble over the ground. He drew a long knife from the sheath on his belt and stepped forward to meet the wolves, half-crouching, moving sideways with the knife poised to jab and slash. He meant to protect me at the cost of his own life. Three wolves crouched across from him, about to spring on him.
The Erl-King raised the horn to his lips again and puffed two short shrill blasts on it.
The wolves fell back at once. They turned their tails to us and loped away, slowed by their full bellies, back through the trees, leaving trails of dribbled blood behind them.
Thérion ignored the terrifying figure of the Erl-King, as if he weren’t there, as if the ogre were invisible to him. He fell to his knees before me. With one hand he stroked the fur on my forehead, much as he used to smooth back the hair from my brow when I was a woman. He sheathed the hunting knife and reached out to hold my medallion, rubbing his thumb over the embossed figure and the letters that spelled CERNUNNOS.
“I know this medallion. My Violaine carried it with her in her pocket. Her clothes were scattered in the clearing by the standing stone, as though she’d taken them off herself and they’d been blown all around in the wind. How did you come to have this round your neck? Did she put it there? It would have needed a human hand to get it on you.” His voice was so low it was barely a whisper. “Are you her? Has my Violaine’s spirit gone into you?”
I nodded my head. He drew back, startled. The Erl-King still stood over us, watching, his hands on his hips, but didn’t move.
“Did you just nod?” Thérion whispered.
I nodded again, twice, so he couldn’t mistake it.
“You’re Violaine?”
I nodded.
“Am I going mad?”
I shook my head.
“Can you really understand me? Blink three times in a row if you understand what I’m saying.”
I blinked three times, as deliberately and steadily as I could so he would know it was no mere coincidence.
He threw his arms around my neck and burst into tears. For several long minutes, he shook with weeping. The wound in my shoulder throbbed and burned as if seared by a hot iron poker.
“Oh, Violaine, thank the Fates I’ve found you, but you’ll bleed to death if we don’t bind up your wound. I love you more than my life. Stay with me, please.”
His tears wet my face, and I, too, began to weep. I wiped the tears away with the back of my hand, and then gazed at the wet skin of my hand in wonder.
“I’m a woman again,” I gasped, as though I had been holding my breath all the time before. “Your tears. It was your tears that changed me back.”
I sat up now on the ground, naked, with my hair loose and blowing in the wind of the storm on its way. Thérion’s arm was around my good shoulder, and the medallion was still around my neck. My right shoulder was covered in blood from my wound, and I couldn’t lift my right arm. With my left hand I held up the medallion and examined it. There was a dent where the musket ball had bounced off it. If I hadn’t been wearing it, the ball would have pierced my chest, entered my heart, and killed me in an instant. My skin under the medallion was marked by a round purple bruise the size of an apple. My shoulder wound still spurted blood, and now that I was sitting up, a bright red rivulet seeped out of it and down my rib cage. I felt faint and nauseated.
“My God,” said Thérion. “Lie down, you’re losing too much blood. I can’t believe you’re you again.”
“You have more magic in you than you even knew,” I murmured as he lowered me to the ground. I blinked, struggling to remain conscious, though his face was dimming before me and stars were shooting at the edges of my vision. Thérion tore off his jacket, hurriedly unbuttoned his waistcoat, and pulled off his linen shirt underneath. He bunched up the shirt and pressed it to my wound.
“You can’t die. Stay with me.”
“Will you take care of Valentin and Aimée? And Father and Edmée too?” I tried to keep my eyes open, to look into his beautiful gray-blue ones. But now I saw a second face leaning over me. It was the masked, horned face of the Erl-King, the red lips a gash in the pallor of his face. But I wasn’t afraid of him. He smelled of lily of the valley.
“Darling, it’s your ancestor, the roi des aulnes. He’s right next to you. Why don’t you look at him?”
My love’s face went pale. “You see the Erl-King?”
“Can’t you see him? He means us no harm. Didn’t you see how he saved us? He sent his wolves after them. He knew they were hateful and meant to hurt us. Won’t you talk to him? He’s your grandfather’s grandfather.”
Thérion groaned. “Please, Erl-King.” He looked away from where the Erl-King knelt, toward the forest. “If you’re really here, don’t take her from me. I know you want her. She’s beautiful and good. But let me keep her. For the sake of our shared blood. I promise to protect your forest as long as I live, and our children and children’s children and their children after them will protect it and honor you. Only let her live. Take what you want from me. Take my magic, my sight, my money, my lands. Take my years that remain, take the breath from my lungs, but let her stay.”
The Erl-King’s gash of a mouth didn’t twitch or twist, but he removed his stained leather hunting gloves, set them on the ground, and reached out a bare waxen hand with skeletal fingers. The nails were long and sharp and lacquered black like talons. He stroked my cheek, tenderly, and passed a fingertip over my upper lip, then drew it back across my lower lip. He ran his taloned thumb and fingers lightly from my jaw under my chin down to the notch above my sternum. He desired me, I knew it. He was loath to give me up.
But he turned to Thérion and placed a hand on each of his shoulders. He pressed the red gash of his mouth against Thérion’s forehead. Thérion closed his eyes a moment.
The Erl-King turned back to me. He spread out the fingers of one hand and pressed his palm down over the wound on my shoulder. Like a flame snuffed out, the pain ceased to burn me, and I felt life and blood coursing through my body again. He moved his palm to the bruise where the musket ball had struck my medallion and pressed it there too, and it stopped aching.
I sat up. The Erl-King picked up his gloves and put them back on as he rose to his feet. He turned his back to us and strode off without any gesture of farewell, back into the heart of his forest. I watched his antlered head moving through the trees until he was too far away for me to see anymore.
XX
Dr. Guillon managed to save the Abbé’s leg, at least down to the knee. Below the knee he was forced to amputate. The bones were too splintered to set and the flesh too mangled to heal. He performed the operation in the back room of the Jacquenod’s tavern. The doctor only came regularly once a week to the village from Thônes, so it was a great piece of luck that he was there when the Scotsman and Thérion drove the wounded into the village in the carriage.
Donatien didn’t wake for two days. When he did, we discovered he was paralyzed from the waist down. He had broken his back, Dr. Guillon said, and would never walk again. Dr. Guillon took charge of both patients and arranged to bring them to a sanitarium in Annecy to recuperate further under the care of nuns. Thérion entrusted M. Fréret, the village wagoner, with the task of ensuring that the wagon with the hounds and the dog-boys returned safely to Donatien’s manor near Dijon, though Donatien had said he didn’t want them anymore and didn’t care what became of them.
Since there was no undertaker in Maisnie-la-Forêt, Thérion sent for one from Thônes. It was surely no pleasant task for the undertaker and his assistant to gather the Marquise’s remains from where the wolves had scattered them in the forest amongst the bloody carcasses of the hor
ses. However, it had to be done for the law to be satisfied, and to give her a proper burial.
During the inquest that followed in Thônes, the witnesses all testified in agreement with one another: the hunting party was attacked by wolves of a species of unusually great size and ferocity. No one spoke of the Erl-King. I was the only one who had seen him so far as I knew, and I wasn’t called upon to testify. Officially, I had stayed behind in the manor that morning and had seen nothing of what occurred.
Donatien and the Abbé agreed with that part of the story, too. It wouldn’t do to admit that Donatien and the Marquise had set the hounds on me, driven me into the woods in the middle of the night, and left me to die. Aurore and the Scotsman believed I must have been beside myself with terror and grief, that I had removed my own clothes and left them by the standing stone and wandered alone for two days in the woods before coming upon Harlequin at the scene of the attack, after the wolves had gone. I didn’t tell them the truth. By the time we had found each other again, back at the manor, I was still barefoot, my nakedness covered only by Thérion’s bloodstained shirt, but my wounds were gone, healed over without a scar as though there had never been a lead ball lodged in my shoulder.
No one had seen what became of the enormous stag with the silver eyes. He had been there when the shots were fired and then was gone like a vanished mirage, and then the wolves had come. Perhaps the pack had been drawn by the scent of blood from the fallen hind. Perhaps the silver-eyed stag had even been some ghost or spirit of the forest who had led the hunters to the wolves. The wounded hind, too, seemed to have disappeared mysteriously afterwards. Nothing was found of her but her blood on the ground where she had lain. If she had been dragged off by a beast later, one might have expected to find tracks and marks of it in the soil. The magistrate reasoned when he concluded the inquest that she must have limped away to die elsewhere.
The priest in Maisnie-la-Forêt held a service for the Marquise in the village’s small chapel, though her remains were to be repatriated to French soil and interred in her parish churchyard in the family plot in Burgundy. We attended the service, and there Thérion was reunited with his nurse from when he was a little boy – the same woman who had told Aurore the tale of the roi des aulnes, now bent over with age.
As for Ulysse, Séléné, Tristan, and Clio, Aurore told me they had all left for Paris the morning after Donatien arrived with his hounds. They had been appalled to see me beaten and driven off, and Clio had wanted to get away from Donatien and the Abbé immediately. Aurore had stayed and gone out with the hunting party in the hope of finding me in the woods or hearing some word from me, and the Scotsman had stayed for Aurore.
Thérion had suffered as a damned soul in the lowest circle of hell, fearing me dead and tormenting himself for failing to defend me from Léonore and Donatien. But Aurore’s hopes had roused him from his paralysis and he too had gone out with the hunting party.
“I knew what Léonore was,” he told me long afterward. “And even so, I never imagined she would strike you and follow through on her threats. I didn’t know what to do. I froze, and then I fainted like a child,” he choked out bitterly. “When I came to and the others told me what had happened – after that I hardly cared if I went to prison, or if the wolves tore me to pieces.”
I forgave him easily, knowing how overcome he must have been, and remembering my own mistakes in trusting and pitying Donatien. One thing I’ve learned is that genuine encounters with evil in real life don’t often go the way of romantic stories and fairy tales. However brave and virtuous one might be, one is seldom prepared for the shock of seeing a friend or companion cross the line into cruelty. One freezes, one fails to defend oneself and others against it, and evil can all too easily prevail if one’s virtue and courage aren’t helped along by luck, or the kindness of friends – or the forest god who took pity on us. My beloved’s strength and courage were those of an artist, not those of a knight; I told him I was glad enough of a lover with a kind heart and a broad and brilliant mind, who mastered my body through his devotion to my pleasure, who freed my spirit with his generosity and humility.
The morning after the funeral service, we left Boisaulne for Paris by way of the tunnel in the grotto under the spring, the four of us in Thérion’s carriage drawn through the old underground quarries by his horses, with the Marquise’s remains in a casket in back.
Thérion brought Léonore’s casket and the report of the inquest from Thônes back to her father in Paris’s Faubourg, south of the Seine, while I stayed with Aurore at her house in the Ville. The Paris that Aurore showed me over the next three days was vast, fascinating, odorous, and rat-ridden. The grand cathedrals and palaces, the elegant hôtels particuliers and parks and squares overwhelmed me at first. I didn’t know how Parisians could find their way through the tangle of passages and rues that crisscrossed and curled out from the main streets, with no snow-covered peaks in the distance to guide them.
After three days, Thérion returned to me, a free man.
A year later, we sleep late in the velvet-draped bed in Thérion’s study at Boisaulne, warmed by the ingenious octagonal iron stove, though it’s near freezing outside and snow is on the way. At my insistence, we’ve installed the same type of heating stove in most of the rooms, so the château is warm and cozy even in the depths of winter, and we live more comfortably than the French king and the ladies and gentlemen of his court in their drafty palaces at Versailles and Fontainebleau. Through the open door, from the other end of the floor, the harmonies and occasional discordant notes drift in of Valentin and Aimée playing their fiddle and harp, accompanied by Madame Grasset on the harpsichord.
Tomorrow afternoon my love and I will be in Paris for Séléné’s salon, in the new rooms where she and Ulysse have set up housekeeping together. We look forward to congratulating Clio on her latest portrait commission, for we’ve just had a letter from her, brimming with her usual excitement and charm, and telling us how the Marquise de Véquy saw the portrait she had made of Aurore and arranged for a sitting at once. The following afternoon we’ll go to Aurore’s, since the period of mourning for her late husband has passed now. To remain near Aurore, the Scotsman has obtained a post as secretary to a British diplomat in Paris, and he calls on her almost every day.
We’ll have news to share with our Paris friends: Thérion and I married properly last week, in the little chapel at Maisnie-la-Forêt. I’m not showing yet, but from the signs of my body I expect our baby to arrive in the Lenten season before Pâques, and Thérion wanted to be able to give the child his name.
We won’t see Tristan in Paris, so I’ll write to him today with the news. His last few books made such a stir they were condemned, first by the French authorities and then by the Swiss. He and his laundry woman had to flee their falling-down house outside Paris to take refuge in a Prussian territory north of Genève. Even so, Tristan has promised that if he can travel again by next summer, he’ll join us once more at Boisaulne, where there are no longer any rules forbidding talk of families or children.
I don’t expect we’ll always live this happily together, Thérion and I. Though we love each other dearly, our life together is no fairy tale. Sometimes Thérion still falls prey to fits of despair, forgetting he no longer needs to wear masks within masks within masks to hide his true self from me and the rest of the world. Sometimes he struggles with drink, especially when his dreams are troubled by nightmares of Léonore and the daughter he lost. We searched for the child’s mother, Renée, and learned she had died six years ago in the workhouse where Léonore had her imprisoned.
I have faults and struggles of my own. I doubt Thérion’s love sometimes, fearing it will fade as we grow older together, or in the coming months as my body changes with our growing child. I cry over small irritations and pick fights with him. I too have nightmares. And sometimes both of us are exasperated by the children’s mischief, and Thérion rails at them and threatens to turn them out and leave t
hem to their great-great-great-grandfather, the ogre who lives in the forest.
I’m no longer a prisoner of the Castle of Enlightenment. Yet in a sense I remain a captive, bound by longing and anticipation for the nights when my love still comes to me in the dark and teases me with riddles and mysteries, caresses me, and makes love to me. He is still my captive, too, ever eager to do my bidding and give me pleasure. Freed to walk together in the light, we yet remain entangled, body and soul, in the chains of our dark love for one another.
Author’s Note
The Vaudois were a real religious sect with a fascinating history, but the group of secret Vaudois villages in the mountains near Annecy is my own invention. Some of my ancestors were Vaudois of the Piedmont who encountered traveling Mormon missionaries in the nineteenth century, converted to Mormonism, and emigrated to the United States. I grew up hearing family legends about them.
Several of the characters in the book were inspired by historical figures of the European Enlightenment, though I have liberally added, subtracted, and switched around biographical details and dates. The character of Aurore was inspired by salonnière Marie Thérèse Geoffrin (1699–1777) and to a lesser degree Hippolyte de Saujon, the Comtesse de Boufflers (1725–1800), a close friend of the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776). Aurore’s habit of writing fairy tales is reminiscent of women such as Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve (1685–1755) and Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711–1780), who penned different versions of the story of “La Belle et la Bête.” Hume, in turn, was my main inspiration for the character of the Scotsman.
The Prisoner of the Castle of Enlightenment Page 26