by James Reese
In deference to me, to my mortal limitations, the elementals rode that stairway in standard fashion: that is, step by step. They, in my company, would always walk through doorways rather than walls, light lamps though the darkness was nothing to them, seat themselves on furniture when they might have easily hovered, weightless but for the water they bore. No one spoke; and the silence seemed only to increase the scale of all I saw. There was, in the construction of Chambord, no concession made to the commonness of man’s lot. No, the excess of adornment, the scale of all I saw bespoke the presence of gods; was, in a word, Divine.
Up we went. Though I was tempted to break from my spirit guides at each landing, to set out and explore on my own, I followed the elementals, wondering why we passed first this level, then that, why we kept to the stairs, climbing, climbing? I had my answer when finally we achieved the openwork lantern that tops the château. There I remarked a large fleur-de-lis of stone, which, in its untouched perfection, called to mind all the scarred statuary I’d seen as we headed south, all the limbless or headless statues on which the Revolutionaries had made their mark. But here this stony flower, the Bourbon emblem, sat in perfect bloom, and I understood that the château entire was but a monument to a tradition, to a system that was once great and might, might have remained so.
From these thoughts, my mind and eyes were drawn to the jagged line of the roof, which spread out all around us like a rough sea sculpted of stone and slate and glass. Up a few steps more, a turn here, a turn there, and we achieved the roof itself; nothing but night obscured my view. And the moon quite generously lit two landscapes: the expanse of park and woodland through which we’d driven and the sculpted sea of the roof.
The night air was chilly; it bore the pungent perfume of burning wood. I remarked the mold and lichen that had spread in corners, climbed walls and the insides of arches, slid sideways over wide sills. I must have muttered something about the cold, for moments later I felt fall down over my shoulders the ermine wrap that I’d left in the berlin. “Thank you,” said I, casting the words out into the night, for I did not know which of my friends had so quickly descended to do me this favor.
We remained on that roof till finally it was time to settle—the elementals intimated that they had something to tell me. It was decided—not by me—that we would settle in the Chambre de Parade, in the Appartement du Roi. “That,” said the priest, “should be suitable, no?” The succubus said nothing, but it was she we followed.
Fabulous busts and tapestries and gilded mirrors, filigreed and finely carved furniture, some of it draped with white sheets. A bed where the Sun King and the King of the Poles had each lain with how many mistresses? But the three of us wordlessly chose a spot on the comfortably thick carpet, in front of the fire that one of the elementals caused to burn—instantly, a half-burned log showed flames end to end, flames that would burn all that night with little tending beneath a mantel of red marble. The mantel called to mind the dining table at Ravndal. Here, as there, I’d sit and listen. I’d trust and learn.
“Won’t the smoke be visible?” I remember asking.
Perhaps, said Madeleine.
“I should hope so,” added the priest, who hoped our fire might give rise to local legend: those living within sight of the château might come to speak of the night when smoke billowed up from its unused fireplaces, curling in purple plumes toward the moon.
I sat cross-legged on the carpet, wrapped in white ermine. What would the night hold? If the elementals had taken me to this spectacular place, and if they struggled to hold their shapes so far from strong waters, well…
And events as they unfolded did not disappoint me. Scare me, shame me, embarrass and edify me? Yes. Disappoint me? No.
34
Chambor d, Part I
—L’Appartement du Roi
THAT NIGHT, with words akin to these, Madeleine introduced the tale she would tell:
It was in a southern city of no distinction, A——, in 1651, that I witnessed my first exorcism.
My objective was plain. I say again: I longed to live so that I might die.
I looked at Father Louis, beside Madeleine. We all three of us sat in the King’s Apartment. I was facing the fire and the elementals, who sat with their backs to it; the arrangement suited us all: the elementals drew what they needed from the fire, and I could see them as they spoke, the flames burning behind them, through them.
“Yes,” adjoined the priest, “I was there too.”
Indeed you were, said Madeleine. Indeed you were.
“But I remind you, dearest,” began the priest, “that was not your first exorcism.” He paused. “There was, of course, Capeau.”
Please, don’t let’s speak of that little screw-backed bitch!
“I should speak instead of Sister St. Colombe?”
You need not speak at all, mon prêtre, for I will speak of Barbara Buvée. Madeleine turned to me. Barbara Buvée, said she, was Sister St. Colombe.
“La possédée,” qualified the priest. The possessed.
“Ah,” I breathed. “Go on, please.”
Madeleine began: Sister St. Colombe was—
“She was ‘a woman of independent spirit,’” finished Father Louis.
Yes, agreed Madeleine. And this nun, this Sister St. Colombe, had been a Mother Superior for some years, even though she was rather young. In that time she had managed to anger her superiors on occasion.
“One such superior,” added the priest, “was a Father Borthon, the convent’s confessor; and he hated Sister St. Colombe.”
Yes, he hated her as only a weak man can hate a strong woman.
“Strange to hear you speak of her as strong,” said the priest. “She certainly wasn’t strong enough to resist you, to fend off your invasion of her body.”
“You possessed the Mother Superior?” I asked, quick and incredulous.
All in time, answered Madeleine. All in time.
It was Father Louis who then said, summarily, and to urge his companion on, “And so we have a man and a woman, priest and nun, each possessed, if you will, of certain powers, mortal powers; and they hate each other.”
Of course, he is more powerful than she simply by virtue of his sex.
“Yes, that is true,” agreed the priest. “Rather, that was true,” and he proceeded to remind the succubus—and himself—that all parties concerned were dead these two hundred years. “Lest we forget,” said he with a wry smile.
Madeleine, brooking no distraction, resumed her narrative, saying that she and Father Louis were late in arriving at A——; indeed, they only went to that city after learning of “the troubles” there.
The tension, long-extant, between the Father-Confessor and the Mother Superior had escalated over an issue that was, according to Madeleine, of no significance. Apparently the nun had openly and publicly defied an order of the priest’s and received, as punishment, an equally open and public flogging; additionally, she’d been ordered to fast for six days.
One month to the day from the pronouncement of said punishment the priest was dead.
“First tell of the sisters,” prompted Father Louis. “Tell of the priest’s blood sisters.”
Yes, of course, said Madeleine. Turning to me, she went on: Father Borthon had three younger sisters in the Order, all of them under the auspices of Sister St. Colombe. They were, I believe, the Sisters Marie, Humberte, and Odile.
“Precisely,” said the priest. “And they were all three of them pious and ugly…hideous things…. Without doubt, the three ugliest women I ever visited.”
“You,” I stammered, “…you, as incubus, moved among the nuns at A——?”
“I did indeed.”
Emboldened, I went on: “Was it the Mother Superior who killed the Confessor?”
“Ah, but you jump ahead of our story…. No, she did not kill him.” And with this the priest deferred to Madeleine, who hesitated before saying:
He died a suicide. A suicide like me.
“Oh,” said I. “I see.”
“He took himself for unknown reasons,” said Father Louis. “Or rather, reasons unknown to us. That happened just before we arrived.”
Yes, in the days before our arrival at A——, the priest disappeared. With two days passed, a search party was formed.
“One in which, of course, the Mother Superior and the priest’s sisters took part.” In groups of three, the nuns combed the village and the woods surrounding the convent. Sister St. Colombe searched in the company of a novitiate and the Confessor’s youngest sister, Marie.
In the late afternoon of the second day of the search, as her party pushed its way through a dense patch of woodland, Sister St. Colombe—who, of course, prayed that the priest was gone for good, had run off for whatever reason—stooped to make her way through some brush. Brambles and thistles snagged the rough cloth of her shift, scratched at her hands and face. Father Louis imagined that she uttered words that were decidedly…un-Christian.
The priest went on: “And when she made her way through that brush to a clearing in the woods, and stood up straight, she was struck in the back of the head by what she assumed was the blunt end of a dead branch. But it was, in fact, the blunt end of a dead man! The priest’s foot!” Father Louis laughed, long and loud. “It was the self-murdered priest, swinging from an old oak!”
The Mother Superior screamed, said Madeleine.
“Indeed she did!” enthused the priest. “And the novitiate and little Sister Marie came quickly into the clearing behind the Mother Superior—who stood in hysteria beneath the rotting corpse that she’d set to swinging with her head—and those two joined in with screams that summoned the entire search party, all of whom soon stood crammed into that clearing, screaming, staring up at the puffy, purple, putrefying priest who—”
Louis, please, control yourself.
Ignoring the succubus beside him, Father Louis went on: “It’s all rather easily imagined, is it not? The fervid prayer, the fainting onto the forest floor…”
Madeleine said they learned all this at the trial. “A trial?” I asked.
Indeed, said Madeleine. And all we’ll tell you will but confirm your low and accurate opinion of such proceedings…. But at A——, she added, things grew a bit more…complicated.
“Yes, they did,” said the priest. He showed his impish, sly smile; his words were light with laughter. “Once we arrived in A——things took a quite interesting turn.” Then, fast as light, lost to my eye, he moved to set a second log, already aflame, atop the first. He was back beside Madeleine before I understood what he’d done.
So, resumed the succubus, having heard about the discovery of the priest’s body, we went to A——to see if—
“Wait! Go back to the woods,” said an excited Father Louis. “Tell what happened when first the body was found.”
Well, when the corpse was seen swinging by the three women—that is, the Mother Superior, the novice, and Sister Marie—the latter, beset by the most extreme hysteria, was heard to scream at Sister St. Colombe, “Witch! You did this! You killed him!” The novice took up the cry too, and so it was that the search party, comprised of nuns and villagers, all loosely allied by faith or familiarity, arrived in the clearing to see Sister St. Colombe beneath the swinging priest, the two other nuns pointing at her, screaming, “Witch! Witch!”…What a sight it must have been!
I interrupted the laughing elementals to ask, “But those nuns had no reason to actually suspect the Mother Superior of being a witch, did they? Had there been other incidents where—”
“Now that is an odd question indeed,” said the priest, “coming from you.” When he went on to ask if I’d already forgotten recent events at C——, I realized, quite happily, that indeed the blessed forgetting had begun.
“Proof of witchery?” asked the priest. “None at all. Witch, this is but a tale of religious, embittered men and women set apart from the world, in equal parts privileged and deprived—and in such surrounds, as you well know, anything might happen…. Anything at all.”
They were but children, continued Madeleine, and they responded as children will: they spat the worst word they knew: Witch. And suddenly the Mother Superior stood accused.
“Tell of the body, the priest’s body,” urged the incubus, who stood to circle the great room, graceful and alert and in full-form. I heard then a wild wind descend the chimney with a whistle; the flames leapt in time, as though to a tune.
No, Louis. There is no reason to speak of such things when all we want to convey to this witch is—
The priest, quickening his pace around the room—I thought then of the lions of Rome, starved in their dens, eager to rip at the Barbarians, the Infidels—accused the succubus of depriving him of his fun. She ignored him, speaking on:
Back in the woods, when first the corpse was discovered, and the cries of “Witch!” rang out, Sister Marie, brandishing the crucifix pendant from her beads, began to shout, “You’ve had your revenge, now God shall have His!” And with no other evidence against her but these words of the priest’s sister, Sister St. Colombe was led back to the convent. From that moment on she’d not be free…. Soon talk turned to exorcism.
“Exorcism,” I echoed. “But why? Who was it seemed possessed?”
“No one, at first,” replied the priest. “But that’s when I…that’s when we set to work.”
I looked to the succubus. Yes, said she, I went along with him; but not, as he is wont to say, “for fun,” but rather because I was angry. She paused; what she said next bore the gravity of the confessional: For a long time, said she, I was very, very angry.
“You are angry still,” said the priest. I expected Madeleine to turn on him, but instead she sat with her head bowed, her hands clasped prayerfully in her lap. She said nothing: the priest’s charge was irrefutable. He spoke on. His words were truthful and not unkind: “She is angry now,” he said, “but back then she was…she was wrathful. Her anger was unbounded. Each new disappointment fanned the steady flame of her anger to…to a conflagration and then, well, she could be positively Old Testament!”
“Disappointment?” I led. What did he mean?
Madeleine answered: I went to A——when I learned that there stood a nun accused of witchery. I knew there’d be an excess of priests, and of testifying nuns; rites would be read and most likely there’d be an exorcism.
“We simply ensured there’d be an exorcism,” added Father Louis.
You see, explained the succubus, I’d already been disappointed by the rite of Bell, Book, and Candle—the rite of excommunication that had come to nothing at the hands of the impure priest who’d read it on the mute. And I thought perhaps an exorcism, if properly done, if done by a pure priest, might just…might show me a way. A literal way—an avenue unto death.
“But it did not?” I hazarded. “And you were once again disappointed.”
“Disappointed, indeed,” answered the priest. “And angrier than ever…. And, witch, do not think I speak of simple pouting or petulance. No, when Madeleine is agitated, let alone angry, the four winds know it, the tides know it, the orbiting clouds—”
Enough, Louis.
“The exorcising priest?” I asked, leading the narrative. “He was—”
Impure, said the succubus. Simply, he had an eye on the bishopric, and his vita lacked an exorcism.
From the moment he—Father François, beautiful, arrogant, ambitious Father François—from the moment he arrived in A——I knew that everything would devolve to a sham. Mere popery. Theatrics, nothing more. I knew that if the Church’s rite had any innate power—and it does, I believe—it would not be displayed at A——. The exorcism would be as fraudulent as all that was done to—
“To Capeau,” I finished.
Yes. Only then did I consent to his plans—she nodded to the incubus—only then did I let him work his ways on those women. As for Father François, well…he’d be mine, all mine.
Madeleine s
howed a smile that was jarring, for her mouth was…her smile spread over lips that did not otherwise move—she spoke not through her mouth but through her torn-open throat—and those lips, those of her wound, now dry of blood and all the more hideous, those lips vibrated ever so slightly, like the cords of a pianoforte, as her watery voice poured forth to say, It was then Louis loosed himself upon those women.
“It was shortly after her brother’s death, if I recall,” and clearly the incubus pleasured in the recollection, “…or was it when they discovered the body…?”
Indeed it was that very night, said Madeleine. You could not wait.
“Yes, that very night,” said Louis, “Sister Marie started to experience…let me think, how did she refer to such in the course of the trial? Oh yes—she started to experience ‘temptations in the night.’”
“The priest, this Father François, had already come?” I asked. “You knew that all was already lost, that the exorcism would be mere show?”
I’d an interest in the rite itself, but yes, once the priest came nosing around—as the ambitious will—and insinuated himself into the search party…. Yes, it was the very day of his arrival in A——that Louis and I decided—
“We decided to ‘have at it,’” finished the priest. “To make a show of it before the priest could. And naturally, I started with the girls…”
“And Sister St. Colombe?” I asked.
She sat shackled, prayerful and doomed, awaiting a trial the outcome of which was already plain.
The Mother Superior was formally accused on 28 October, said Madeleine, three days before Samhain, your great witches’ festival. In early November, testimony was taken, and soon after the Parliament of Dijon heard the case, quickly convicting Sister St. Colombe of crimes against God and sentencing her, as Father François had arranged, to exorcism.