The Ghosts of Kerfol

by Deborah Noyes

  After the puppy, all was quiet for many weeks. Master acted ordinary enough. The days passed slowly — and the nights, bleak and horrible now that I knew Youen less and less and longed for him more and more. His injuries were healing, but his silence was impenetrable.

  We none of us spoke of Lanrivain without crossing ourselves, but one night a peddler woman came to sell trinkets to the maids. Milady had no heart for trinkets but stood looking on as her women made their choices. At length the peddler convinced her — I heard not how — to buy a peculiar powder box for herself. When all was quiet once more, Milady took my hand and closed us together in the library, where she sat turning the odd, pear-shaped container in her hands.

  At last, she opened it and fished a rolled strip of paper from the powder. “Turn away.” She hid the paper from my eyes. I knew who must have sent it, though I saw no seal. As Milady read, my own hands began to shake, for I could well imagine the penalty for complicity.

  She dropped Hervé de Lanrivain’s sentiments into the fire, and I saw the spidery script on the page cringe and fold in upon itself in flame. When she waved me out, I was glad to go.

  Youen was not in the stables. I sat shivering behind the woodpile until I saw him return. I found him in the stall of his favorite horse and knelt before him. He looked up with difficulty, as if his head were too heavy to lift, and I searched his eyes. I held his jaw in my hands as the mare stamped and tickled the top of my head with her flicking tail, but Youen brushed my arms away stiffly, his eyes blank.

  “He sent a letter,” I urged in a whisper. Surely this would rouse him. “Lanrivain.”

  Youen winced. He rocked forward, knocking me off balance, and his torso curled over his raised knees. I righted myself and stroked the top of his head. “Please, Youen. What can be done?”

  “It’s not from him.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “The letter.” He lifted his head, his eyes familiar again, flashing.

  “You must tell me.”

  At long last he blurted in a voice like child’s, “I mustn’t tell.” He shook his head, his eyes glistening. “I mustn’t tell.”

  “Youen —”

  He lurched to his feet, and I followed him out of the stables, along the edge of the courtyard. I ducked after him into the winter orchard. He was stealthy and quick. We ran over the icy, cracking earth, well beyond the orchard where I had never been before, until my side cramped and my hem and stockings were full of burrs. Ending in an owl-haunted meadow, we stood under a round moon, panting.

  “There.” He pointed.

  I looked down and saw nothing. Frosty grass and gray, flattened milkweed.

  “He’s there. Lanrivain.”

  I stepped back, the horror dawning on me. “You can’t know that,” I soothed, for he was broken now. My Red Boy had fallen to his knees by the grave, collapsed forward in the cold, and his back was heaving. I bent and stroked it gently as I could, though I was afraid — so afraid — of this place, his pain, the world. “How do you know?”

  He rose up, spent, then knelt again, staring into the bare trees like a wild animal. His eyes no longer glistened. His voice was flat and strange. “Because I buried him.”

  He stood, brushing himself off, and spoke over his shoulder as he went. “Sire bade me do it, and you may tell what gossip you will, but it will be my life.”

  It was the last time I saw him.

  The baron retired that night after dinner. Milady sent me up with a cup of hot wine, and Sire waved me out again with word that he was not to be disturbed.

  Later, in her room, she took my hand, looked hard into my eyes, and swore me to secrecy. Lanrivain would come to the courtyard that night to wait for her, after the moon had set.

  I gaped back at her, mute as a fish.

  “Listen at his door,” Milady pleaded.

  Lanrivain was dead. Did she not believe it, too? After all, the necklace had found its way back, but many weeks later, the young noble had not. My eyes swam with tears as I remembered Youen at the dog’s grave, his boots black with earth, digging intently. Quietly. His red hair dark with the sweat of his labor. Poor love, I thought, for what help had I ever given him? What help had I given anyone but myself?

  “Go and listen,” Milady urged. “Please.”

  Steeling myself, I crept past the second staircase into the master’s wing. Down the hall. I leaned by the keyhole, hearing the vigorous breath of sleep within, rasping, regular. I was shaking so much when I came back that Milady had to stroke and soothe and endure while I ranted under my breath of werewolves.

  “Superstitious girl,” she complained to calm herself, I think, for she must have wondered if her husband was really asleep. Or was he only acting at sleep? “You’re a peasant, but the priests are no better.”

  She wouldn’t let me turn down the bed but bade me lie down beside her, though we didn’t sleep. We stared at the ceiling. I longed to speak, to caution her, to save us both the error I knew she must make.

  I wished many things. That I had been able to read the letter before it curled in flame, the blue-burning script, for I felt half mad with not knowing. Papa had been the only one on our farm who could read, and when the rare letter stained with salt arrived, we huddled in candlelight while Papa read of cousin Étienne’s travels in the New World. The Indians he met as a trapper there had a name for every moon, my cousin wrote. Harvest moons and milk moons. A beaver moon. And the hunger moon of late winter.

  This was the moon Hervé de Lanrivain chose to light his way back to us.

  When first I came to Kerfol, it was still Grand-mère’s loup-garou I imagined out circling the manor walls in moonlight. He might lope beneath my window or leap up on the gable and look in at me through silvery lead panes. Such scenes distracted from an empty belly.

  But when the loup-garou became Youen, I wondered, would the animals in his stable whimper and stir and bump one another in fear at his coming, or would they know and trust and forgive him as I would surely know and forgive? As the moon moves the tide, it pulls and shapes the werewolf’s bones like dough, and so I enjoyed imagining Youen’s pale boy-form being shaped and reshaped, made and unmade, and these tender new terrors worked on me like the merest tide, making the nights hot and exceedingly long. I might wake and contemplate creeping into the buttery for a stolen berry tart from Cook’s cabinet, imagine ripping at the flaky crust, scooping and mashing the sweetness into my mouth, sucking blood-red fingers, for I was starving. Starving.

  Every moon at Kerfol was a hunger moon.

  The moment I met him, Youen became my loup-garou, and this was a girl’s fancy, feverish and exciting but never horrible. Grand-mère’s version, on the other hand, was a beast that stalked in shadow, ripping the dogs to ribbons.

  Youen was not our monster.

  It was Master, two-faced and terribly transformed. He was the inside-out beast that hunted in the night. He had killed Lanrivain — and perhaps penned the note himself, staged this drama to entrap his wife, to confirm his suspicions about her — and the wretched procession of dogs, and he would kill us all.

  About this last, I was also wrong.

  That night, not a year after the little golden dog was brought to Kerfol, Yves de Cornault was found dead by the narrow flight of stairs leading down from his wife’s rooms.

  It was Milady who found him and cried out, poor wretch — for his blood was all over her — and at first the roused household could not make out what she was saying. We came running, afraid for her sanity, but there at the head of the stairs, sure enough, lay the baron, stone dead, the blood from his wounds dripping down the steps. He had been scratched and gashed on the face and throat, as if with a dull weapon, and one of his legs had a deep tear in it, which had cut an artery and probably caused his death. But how did he get there? Who had murdered him?

  Hearing his cry, Milady was roused from sleep. She rushed out, she said, to find him slumped.

  But could she have heard? the prosecution
argued. The walls were thick. Her room was at the far end of a long hallway. She was fully dressed when the others arrived, and her bed had not been slept in. What’s more, the door at the foot of the stairs was ajar, and the chaplain noticed that her dress was stained with blood around the knees, that there were small bloody handprints low on the staircase walls.

  Might not the blood marks on her dress have been caused when she rushed out of her bedroom to kneel by her husband? Or was she downstairs when her husband fell? Had she felt her way up to him in the dark on hands and knees, stained by his blood dripping down on her? Though the open door below and the direction of the finger marks on the staircase seemed to support the latter view, Milady held to her statement for two days.

  But on the third day, word came that Hervé de Lanrivain, a young nobleman of the neighborhood, was wanted for complicity in the crime, though none had succeeded in locating him. Two or three vaguely disreputable witnesses came forward to confirm the local rumor that Lanrivain was, at one time, on good terms with the Lady of Cornault, though people no longer associated the two of them in light of his extended absence from Brittany. Many, myself included, knew that he was dead, buried in a wild meadow out beyond the orchard — murdered by the baron — though this evidence was not, of course, admissible. Not if we valued our lives. And yet . . . I had seen the rolled message. I had even thought I glimpsed, when Milady’s scream woke me and I ran to the window, a hatless, beardless figure pacing below in the courtyard, a white glimmer of loose shirt.

  But we at Kerfol had long since ceased believing in what we saw.

  One witness was an old herb-gatherer suspected of witchcraft, another a drunk from a neighboring parish, and the third a half-wit shepherd. “He was pale,” the half-wit kept saying furtively, wringing his hands as if this point were of secret import. “Very pale.”

  “Speak up,” barked the judge.

  “He was white as winter,” said the half-wit more confidently, like a dog with a prize bone.

  The prosecution would require more definite proof of Lanrivain’s involvement than the herb-gatherer’s claim that he had seen the young nobleman near the wall of the park on the night of the murder.

  It’s not clear what pressures were put on Milady, but on the third day, when she was led into court, she seemed weak and vague, and after being told to collect herself and speak the truth under oath, she confessed that she had in fact gone down the stairs to speak with Hervé de Lanrivain but was surprised, before she could reach him, by her husband’s cry and fall.

  I was the first to answer Milady’s scream by the stair that night. Her eyes were too hollow to read, her hands too bloodied to grasp in comfort. If only I had not succumbed to sleep, I might have stopped her. Stopped this. I shuddered on the cold step, looking down at him. Or died trying.

  Her one thought as we lay side by side in the stillness, waiting for the moon to set, must have been to get down the winding staircase without stumbling, unbolt the door, wave Lanrivain to safety, and steal back to her room.

  We had tried the bolt earlier in the evening, even applying a little goose grease from Cook’s storage. But it would squeak anyway. Not loudly, she told those assembled in the courtroom, but the sound had stopped her breath. And sure enough, not a moment later, she heard a noise above.

  “What noise?” the prosecution interrupted.

  “My husband . . . calling out my name and cursing me.”

  “What did you hear after that?”

  “A terrible scream and a fall.”

  “Where was Hervé de Lanrivain at this time?”

  “I believe he was standing out in the courtyard. I’d made out a form in the darkness — and I hissed, ‘For God’s sake, go,’ before pushing the door closed again.”

  “What did you do next?”

  “I stood at the foot of the stairs and listened.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “I heard dogs snarling.”

  “Dogs. What dogs?”

  I shuddered at these words, and Milady bent her head, speaking so low that she was told to repeat her answer: “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean — you don’t know?”

  “I don’t know what dogs.”

  The prosecutor rubbed his hands with satisfaction. Those who had been long in the household, including Maria, now testified that in the months before his death, Sire had suffered the same dreadful fits of silence as before he was wed, though none reported signs of open disagreement between husband and wife. There had been none.

  None that would impress these men.

  And what cause had Anne de Cornault for going down at night to open the door to Hervé de Lanrivain?

  Her answer caused a stir in the courtroom. She went because she was lonely, she said, and wanted to talk to the young man, though she had not managed it.

  Was this all?

  “Yes,” she swore, “by the Cross over Your Lordships’ heads.”

  But why at such an hour?

  “Because I could see him no other way. He had sent a note.”

  A smug exchange of glances across the ermine collars under the crucifix.

  “I burned it in the fire,” she added quickly.

  “What did you want to say to Hervé de Lanrivain?” the prosecution asked.

  She answered: “I wanted to ask him to take me away.”

  More murmuring. “Then you confess that you fled to him with adulterous thoughts?”

  “No.”

  “Then why did you want him to take you away?”

  “Because I was afraid for my life.”

  “Of whom were you afraid?”

  “Of my husband.”

  “Why were you afraid of your husband?”

  “Because he had strangled my dogs.”

  Another round of bemused murmuring circled the courtroom. Noblemen had the right to hang their peasants — and most exercised it — so pinching a pet animal’s windpipe was nothing to make a fuss about.

  Her statement was curious, the judges agreed, but what did it prove? That Yves de Cornault disliked dogs? That his wife — to suit herself — ignored this truth? And did she imagine a little spat justified her relations, whatever their nature, with her alleged accomplice? Absurd! Even her own lawyer tried to interrupt her story, but she went on as if hypnotized, as if reliving the scenes of her narrative in her head.

  The one judge who had shown a certain tolerance now demanded, “Then you would have us believe that you murdered your husband because he would not let you keep a pet?”

  “I did not murder my husband.”

  “Who did, then? Hervé de Lanrivain?”

  She shook her head sadly, fiercely. “No!”

  “Who, then? Speak.”

  At that point, she collapsed and had to be carried out of the courtroom.

  The next day, the prosecution ordered Milady to continue her deposition, opening with: “Tell us exactly what happened. How long did you stand at the foot of the stairs?”

  “Only a few minutes.”

  “And what went on meanwhile overhead?”

  “The dogs were snarling and yelping. My husband cried out. He groaned once, I think, and was quiet.”

  “And then?”

  “I heard the noise a pack makes when it’s thrown a piece of meat.”

  There was a collective groan of disgust in the courtroom. “And all this while . . . you did not go up?” the judge asked.

  “Yes — I started up — to drive them away.”

  “The dogs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “When I reached the top of the stairs, it was dark. I groped and lit a candle, and found him lying there. He was dead.”

  “And the dogs?”

  How Milady trembled. I longed to go to her, shield her from those gawping men, hold her slender shoulders still, but I had neither courage nor will, any more than Maria or Cook or the two dozen others who bore witness to our sorrows had. Youen, whom I had not se
en since the night of the murder, was not present. I only later found out why.

  The crowd in the courtroom held its collective breath. “The dogs were gone.”

  “Gone. Where?”

  “I don’t know.” She straightened herself to her full height. “There was no way out.” She shook her head madly, as if her hair were full of bats. “And there were no dogs at Kerfol. There. Were. No. Dogs.”

  In the instant before I and Maria and the judge came forward to calm her, there was a confused uproar. Someone on the bench cried out, “This case wants a priest,” and the courtroom erupted in squabbling.

  Witnesses confirmed that there had been no dogs at Kerfol for months. The master of the house hated dogs. No question.

  Long and bitter discussion ensued as to the nature of the dead man’s wounds. An attending surgeon spoke of bite marks. Witchcraft was suggested, and at length Anne de Cornault was brought back into court at the insistence of the judge.

  Where could the dogs have come from?

  She did not know.

  He persisted, almost gently. “Do you think that you could have recognized these dogs — had you heard them before — by their barking?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you . . . recognize them?”

  She swallowed, whispering, “Yes.”

  “What dogs were they?”

  “They were my dead dogs.”

  Milady was escorted out of the murmuring courtroom, not to reappear. There was a church investigation, but in the end the judges disagreed with each other and with the church committee. Anne de Cornault was released into the care of her husband’s family, who shut her up in the tower of Kerfol. There she died, many years later, a harmless madwoman, and I watched it happen.

  We grew old together.

  Every love she or I have ever had within or beyond the borders of Kerfol has been wrenched from us, until honest love began to seem a peril in its own right.

  On the eve of the baron’s death, I later learned, Youen had left Kerfol a blathering idiot. It took a fortnight of my ruthless badgering for Maria to confess this, for she knew what the Red Boy had meant to me.