Falcon 1 - The Lure of the Falcon

by The Lure of the Falcon (v1. 0) (lit)

  'You are quite sure of that? She did say "ever since their famous Gyrfalcon"?'

  'Yes, I'm quite sure. It was such an unusual word. But I didn't understand—'

  'But I do. Quite simply, in her anger, your mother let fall the key to the riddle. I had hoped for something like this. I know now who your father is – or rather who he was, for I have no idea whether he is still alive.'

  Gilles nearly dropped the incense burner in his astonishment.

  'You know?'

  'Yes. And I am going to tell you. We have a little time to spare. Come and sit by me on this bench. It won't take long, because I'm not going to tell you the whole history of your father's family here and now. It's a thrilling and terrible saga but tiresomely long drawn out. In any case, I've a family tree in my study which I'll show you.'

  'I want to know everything,' Gilles cried, devoured with impatience. 'But first of all, what was this Gyrfalcon?'

  'That is just what I am about to tell you. In the year 1214 – you see, all this did not begin yesterday – when he married the beautiful Edie de Penthièvre, Olivier de Tournemine—'

  'Tournemine? Is that – is that my name?'

  'The name you ought to bear? Yes – but if you keep on interrupting me, we shall never get to the point. Well, at the time of his marriage, Olivier de Tournemine was given as a wedding present by the Duke of Brittany a great white falcon sent from the far north. It was a magnificent bird and a great hunter. It became Olivier's almost inseparable companion and even his surest weapon. Taran, that was the falcon's name, was used to going for large prey and would attack man and beast alike, and when his master loosed him no one could hope to escape him, so swiftly did he fly. His talons drew the first blood and after that the baron's battleaxe had only to finish what the bird had begun. In time, Taran became a kind of extension of Olivier himself, so that the frightened peasants of Trégor came in the end to confuse the man with the bird. Both were called the Gyrfalcon, and each was as cruel and relentless as the other. Through them, the noble, simple coat of arms which the first Tournemine had brought from England, quartered or and azure, were all too often stained with blood – and, unhappily, Olivier's descendants followed his lead.'

  'What happened to the lord and the bird?'

  'They lived together for many years, growing each day a little more alike, a little more locked in their strange friendship. Taran wore hoods and jesses of pure gold. His ascendancy over his master was complete. But naturally he was not immortal and one fine day, he died. Olivier's grief was terrible. For days and nights, and weeks on end, he shut himself up within the turrets of the brand new castle he had built himself at La Hunaudaye, refusing to go out. He no longer cared for the chase, for war, for rapine and plunder. Even the women he had once pursued had lost their attraction for him. And it may have been in memory of the terrible bird that he took as his motto the three enigmatic words Aultre n'auray, I shall have no other, which has been the Tournemines' device ever since.'

  'But surely he must have come out of his fastness one day?'

  'Yes. To follow Duke Pierre and the sainted King Louis to the crusades. He was killed at the battle of Masurah. But his story became a legend in time and he has never been forgotten in Pleven, or in a great part of Brittany.'

  'How is it that Rozenn has never told me of him? She knows so many tales.'

  'I don't know. Perhaps she simply does not know of it. Or perhaps she had some suspicions which she kept to herself.'

  'But – my father? Tell me about my father now.'

  'Your father? He was the last of that fearful line of Tournemines who, for centuries, had swooped like birds of prey on whatever came within their grasp. An extraordinary collection of robber-barons, knowing and loving only violence. And even he did not belong to the elder branch, which died out two centuries ago. There was nothing left to him of the power or the immense riches which at one time made the lords of La Hunaudaye spoken of as little lower than the King in France. His name was Pierre and he served in the same regiment as my brother, the King's Infantry. I never met him personally, but I know that he was staying in our house at Leslé, with some fellow officers, in the summer in which you were conceived.'

  Gilles' eyes were sparkling and his cheeks on fire as he drank in the abbe's words like a draught of fresh air. It seemed to him that a great window had opened suddenly before him, revealing a distant horizon where, before, there had been nothing but a high black wall. At last he could give a name to the unknown father he had sought for so long – and it was a fine name indeed.

  Softly, almost timidly, as if he feared to break a spell, he murmured: 'Is it so very difficult to find out what has happened to him? If he was in the same regiment as Monsieur de Talhouët—'

  'He would have to have stayed in it. But his visit to us was in the nature of a farewell. He was tired of poverty and had dreams of restoring his family fortunes and buying back La Hunaudaye, which is now in the possession of a Talhouët cousin of ours who presides over the Parliament at Rennes. With this object, he had decided to go to sea, to sail to the West Indies by way of Africa and engage in the slave trade. If I remember rightly, when he left Leslé, he went directly to Nantes to embark on a vessel belonging to the shipowner Libault de Beaulieu, bound for the Gulf of Guinea… Come, don't tremble so. One would think you had the fever.'

  'I think I have. I should so like to find him.'

  'You might as well look for a needle in a haystack. He never came back and he may even be dead. But if it will give you any pleasure, I will make inquiries. I will ask my family and I'll write to M. Libault de Beaulieu and see if I can discover anything. Now, we must go and welcome the dead. There is the passing bell beginning to toll. Help me to finish robing… I will tell you tonight what decisions I have come to concerning yourself.'

  Realizing that it was no use to persist, Gilles did as he was asked, then left the church, taking with him the first fine youthful dreams he had ever had. But he did not go far. Coming towards him was the cortege bringing the body of the late Baron de Saint-Mélaine to lie in the church until the funeral service on the morrow. Concealed behind the clump of holly and box which marked the entrance to the churchyard, Gilles watched the little procession with a strange and quite novel feeling of pride. He might be still a bastard, but at least he now had a father. He knew whence he came, even if he did not yet know where he was going, and the blood in his veins, the blood of the Gyrfalcon, was older and nobler than that of most of the people coming towards him. His destiny, too, must be greater than theirs.

  He looked for Judith among the bobbing heads but it was a man who first drew his eye. He was walking just ahead of the senior curate of the parish, the Abbé Gauthier who, mounted on the docile Eglantine, was preceding the coffin. He was built like a bull, his thick red hair was unpowdered and tied with a black ribbon on the nape of his neck, and he was carrying a small horn lantern containing a short, lighted candle. Custom decreed that the person who carried the candle should be the closest relative of the deceased and Gilles never doubted for an instant that the man with the lantern was Tudal, the elder of the Saint-Mélaine brothers.

  This discovery gave him little satisfaction. The new baron seemed to be about twenty-five years old and his looks matched his reputation exactly: a hard-faced brute with a pair of eyes the colour of granite and about as soft, set beneath brows too low for any great intelligence. His figure was encased in an old-fashioned suit of puce which must have belonged to his father.

  Knowing that the man had a brother, Gilles looked to the other side of the simple hearse, draped in white like the horse that drew it, on which lay the open coffin. He had no trouble in picking out an almost identical copy of Tudal, the only difference being that Morvan, the younger, was smaller in build and his dark eyes held a look of cunning. The only resemblance either bore to their sister was that of the unhewn block of stone to the finished statue of a medieval angel: the colour was the same, but the divinity was absent.

&
nbsp; The girl was walking in the front rank of women, in between old Marjann and a neighbour. She was wrapped in her great black cloak and bowed as though under the weight of a burden too heavy for her, and Gilles would hardly have known her, so unfamiliar was her attitude, if it had not been for a wilful red-gold curl escaping from the edge of her hood and dancing in the wind.

  But just as she came abreast of Gilles' bush, Judith lifted her head, as though prompted by some inner voice, and looked, as she had done the night before, straight into his eyes. There was the same look of anguish in her reddened, grief-drenched eyes as there had been then, only multiplied tenfold. This time it was fear, a fear not far removed from terror, which Judith let him glimpse.

  A rush of pity drove out the last vestiges of resentment.

  Behind that white-draped hearse, with the billowing wave of long cloaks trailing grimly after her, Judith looked so like one of those youthful captives drawn after the chariots of victorious generals in days gone by that Gilles had to exert considerable self-control not to leap into the middle of the cortege and snatch her away. But already the coffin was entering the deep porch where the priests in black and silver waited to receive it. Judith vanished with it and Gilles went on his way. He did not want his brand new happiness marred by funeral prayers. Moreover Judith would be engaged for a long time to come in the lengthy rites that would precede the funeral itself. He had no business in the church.

  Just as in those days the autumn before, when he had ranged the country like a frightened animal seeking to rid itself of the arrow that had wounded it, he made for the banks of the Blavet, only now he turned his back on the sea and lost himself in the hills where the chestnut buds were beginning to burst. He had to share the great promise of joy that was in him with the earth, the hope which was as strong and vital as the rising spring. He stayed there for hours, sitting on a tree stump at the edge of a wood, his eyes following the swift flight of a small coal tit, his ears tuned to the curlew's cry, inhaling with delight the mingled scents of earth and sea. He felt as if the world belonged to him, the whole world, with one possible exception which was enough to mar his perfect happiness. For that exception was Judith. It would be a long time before he saw her again, if ever, if the rector were to be believed and she was obliged to take the veil as the only means of escape from her brothers.

  Gilles had no very clear idea, in his rather wild dreams of the future, what place the girl was to hold. But he had the utter certainty of the very young and also the foreknowledge of those in love. He knew that a place was there and, for good or ill, Judith would one day come to fill it. And because she was the one link which still bound him to this land of Brittany which he knew that he was soon to leave, for it was highly probable that his godfather would send him somewhere a long way off, he swore to himself that he would not go without making one more effort to speak to her. As for what he would say, that, too, was something he was not very clear about.

  Perhaps he would simply tell her that he loved her, even if she did laugh in his face.

  He thought about her so hard all day long that, seeing her appear beside the river when he was going home as dusk was falling, he thought he was seeing things. Yet it was indeed she! And in such a state!

  Both hands holding up her black skirt and the red-gold mass of her hair unfastened and tumbling down her back, she was running as hard as she could towards the main gate of Notre Dame de la Joie which Gilles had passed a few moments previously. She was not screaming or crying, but her whole bearing proclaimed her terror and Gilles did not need to look twice to find its cause. A man was chasing her, and the man was Morvan, the younger of the Sainte-Mélaine brothers.

  Catching sight of a figure on the path, he called out: 'Stop her, damn you! Hi! You there! Stop her, do you hear—'

  Gilles, naturally, did nothing of the kind. Instead he stepped aside as she came panting up to him to let her pass.

  'For pity's sake,' he heard her gasp. 'Help me!'

  But Judith's appeal ended in a cry of pain. Already tiring, the girl had scumbled in a rut, twisted her ankle and coming down heavily on the ground. Her pursuer, bearing down on her, greeted her fall with a yell of triumph.

  'Ha! Got you!'

  'Not so fast!'

  Gilles stepped into the middle of the path and barred his way. Morvan was on him in an instant.

  'Out of my way, bumpkin!' he roared, enveloping the younger man in a breathy blast oddly compounded of onions and cider. 'Stand aside!'

  'Stand aside yourself,' Gilles retorted boldly. 'You must get by me first. Run, mademoiselle,' he added to Judith. 'I'll hold him off.'

  'We'll see about that,' Morvan said, charging his unexpected adversary head down.

  They met with a violent shock. Morvan de Saint-Mélaine might be smaller than his brother but he was still a powerfully-built man. As for Gilles, this was the first time he had ever used his own strength against another man, except for the inevitable fights at school from which he had always emerged with honour. Taller and leaner than his adversary, he had the advantage of agility and, above all, he was carried beyond himself by that most powerful of tonics, the exhilarating joy of fighting for Judith, with Judith looking on! And so he laid about him mightily.

  The fight was over surprisingly quickly. It was all amazingly simple. Gilles, as happy as a king, scarcely felt the other's blows and used his fists as though he had done nothing else all his life. The two of them pummelled and grappled with one another, rolling on the ground and doing their level best to throttle each other, without success, then getting up and laying into one another again, until at length Judith's knight, taking advantage of his opponent's loss of balance on the slippery bank, delivered the final blow by striking him full in the face with such force that he toppled straight over into the Blavet.

  Wasting no time on looking to see how he fared, Gilles turned back to Judith who was still lying on the ground, rooted there by surprise as much as pain.

  'Let me help you up, mademoiselle,' he said, holding out his hand. 'Have you hurt yourself?'

  All trace of fear had gone from the pretty face now lifted to his and it was almost eagerly that Judith's little hand reached out to rest in his. She even smiled at him.

  'You again!' she said, with a little touch of mockery. 'You do seem very set on rescuing me.' Her face clouded again. 'Only this time,' she went on, 'I did truly need it. In another minute I must be safe behind the convent walls. It is only there that I can escape them.'

  'Escape whom? Your brothers?'

  'Oh! You know, then, that they are my brothers? Yes, from them. They want to take me with them tomorrow, after my father is buried.'

  Gilles felt the hand that still lay in his tremble slightly. Her fear had returned.

  'Take you with them? But I thought they wanted to make a nun of you?'

  'They have changed their minds. They want to take me home with them and marry me to a neighbour of theirs, a horrible old man, but very rich, who, it seems, is in love with me. So help me now. My foot is hurting dreadfully and, as I said, I must get to the convent quickly. Morvan won't stay in the river for ever.'

  This was true. The cold water had revived Saint-Mélaine and he was beginning to swim towards the bank. Gilles shrugged contemptuously.

  'He won't be able to get out before the bridge. It's full of mud here and terribly slippery. I've tried it and I know.'

  'You don't know what they can do when they are angry. Oh, how it does hurt! You will have to help me to walk. Luckily, it's not more than a few steps.'

  Gilles' only answer was to bend and catch Judith round the waist and under the knees, lifting her off the ground with no apparent effort at all.

  'There!' he said gaily. 'The best thing is for you not to walk at all. If you'll just put your arm round my neck—'

  She had already done so. With a thrill of happiness, he felt the softness of her cheek against his and her silken hair against his neck. At that, he dared to hold her a little closer and s
he did not protest.

  Gilles' heart began to hammer wildly in his chest. Never had he pictured anything so sweet, so wonderful. This was not the arrogant, scornful Judith that he held in his arms but a new Judith, tender and yielding, neither rebellious nor proud, a Judith who might even love him in return. He could have wished the convent far away on the other side of the woods so as to prolong the delicious journey indefinitely, if it cost him his last breath.

  All at once, he heard her sigh.

  'You are strong and you fight well. What a pity they want to make a priest of you.'

  He laughed. 'Ah, but that's just it. I am not going to be a priest. My godfather, the Abbé de Talhouët, will tell me this evening what he intends for me.'

  He was tempted momentarily to tell her what he had just learned, to tell her what blood ran in his veins, if only to see her eyes widen in surprise. But he thought that it might also remind her of his bastardy and decided it was wiser not to. So he merely added: 'He may send me to fight in America. There is nothing in the world I want more—'

  He felt the arms round his neck tighten very slightly and, bending his head, saw the dark eyes sparkling.

  'America!' she breathed. 'Oh, how lucky you are! It is only men who are so lucky. All there is for me is a convent. And I do so want to live – a convent is like the grave—'

  Judith's rebellious cry found its echo in Gilles' own heart. It was too like his own refusal to enter the seminary. The girl was rejecting the veil just as fiercely as he had rejected the soutane. The Abbé de Talhouët had been wrong in thinking her resigned, when she was simply submitting.

  Gilles found himself wanting suddenly to tell her all about those last months in Vannes, about his fears, his refusal, his flight and even the theft of the horse, but there was no time for already they had reached the ancient, medieval-looking doorway in the wall that surrounded the convent grounds. Panic seized him. In another moment Judith would be on the far side of that door. He would no longer be able to see her, hear her, touch her.