The Ghosts of Kerfol

Hunger Moon

These Heads Would Speak

The Figure Under the Sheet

When I Love You Best

The Red of Berries

W
HEN THE COACH SET ME DOWN
before that avenue of trees — straight and stern with cicadas screaming in the tall branches — I saw no welcome for a starved brat missing her mama.

At the end of the avenue, past a clearing where many lanes met, past an iron gate and two vast gardens where all manner of herbs and flowers hunkered, still and sweet-smelling in the sloping shadows, stood the gray mass of the château, flanked by towers. A moat circled it, gleaming darkly. A wide sweep of steps led up to the entrance.

My oldest cousin, Étienne, who later became a trapper in the New World, had once been a potboy in a château like this. Serfs were sent each night, he said, to stamp on the bullfrogs in the moat so the master could sleep. Drawing near, I imagined the wet crunch of small bodies, torches reflecting in rank water, and I prayed to the Virgin that I would not be called upon to smash frogs.

The front door was high like a church’s. I longed for the hearth light within, for soup and a bit of crust, but the meaty, sullen maid would not open it.

“Milady’s asleep,” she scolded through a crack, “and I have no instructions for you. The stable’s in the courtyard out back. Don’t blunder into the men’s quarters next door; it’s the stone building you want. You’ll find straw in the empty stall.” She slapped shut the door and then opened it again. “Come to the kitchen at sunup.”

I ventured out back and ducked under the low arched doorway of the stable, feeling my way through the dark as snuffling horses reached out to me. Gripped by the profound silence of the manor, I slept the fitful sleep of a criminal that night, my stomach hollow as a hive when all but one angry wasp has left it. I might have known then that Kerfol was a neglectful house, preoccupied with its woes.

The dull prongs of a pitchfork woke me.

“Look here,” a voice teased. “I’ve found a leg in the straw. A fine-looking one, too. And a shoulder. What else?”

“Ack!” I complained. “Don’t!”

Up I rolled onto my knees to find a lanky boy. I saw at once with grave alarm that his lashes were a bleached shade of copper, like snow where the hawk has hunted, and his hair was a bolder shade of the same. Grand-mère, who had devoted herself to scaring children witless, fancied tales of the
loup-garou,
an unfortunate human who’d lapped water from the left paw print of a wolf. When the moon swelled, he turned savage, though he had no wolf’s tail because, the priests said, God did not permit the Devil or his instruments right form. Sometimes, too, the curse traveled in the blood. A beast in human form inherited hairy palms, a third finger longer than the second, and, yes, red hair. Here stood the very creature from my oldest nightmare, and I hadn’t the sense to feel frightened. Not really. If this Red Boy was a werewolf, he was a pretty one.

“You’ll be the new waiting woman, then.” He spoke with a smiling accent, hazel eyes slipping to my breasts on the count of “woman” as if to prove the claim.

I crossed my arms.

He leaned back against the stall, and we regarded one another awhile.

At length, he set aside the pitchfork and reached down.

“First, promise you were
not
born on Christmas Eve,” I said. According to Grand-mère, all werewolves were.

“I promise,” he said solemnly.

“Whose promise is it?” I went on boldly. “Who offers his hand?”

“Youen, mademoiselle.” He bowed, and I took the hand and let him heave me up. “The stable boy. The horses will speak for me.” He let go almost clumsily, sweetly, stroking a mare in the stall beyond, which whinnied in answer. “There,” he said. “You see?”

The clatter of hooves sounded on the gravel outside, and we both rallied, he to greet the rider and I to grope, blushing, in the hay for my clogs and hemp sack.

In the kitchen, the maid from the night before, whose name was Maria, informed me that it would be my domain only temporarily. Cook had hired me, but in the end, the château had more need in the bedchambers and laundry. “Tomorrow an upstairs woman named Guillemette will see to you,” said Maria, who seemed less sullen in daylight. “But today we’re all needed here.”

The entire staff of Kerfol, it appeared, had been summoned to stage a feast for a Norman noble and his son. The horseman that morning had been the noble’s servant, arrived to announce his master. The riding party would reach Kerfol by evening, he said, so the baron had set off at once to the hunt and sent his servants scurrying to shore and market for fish and produce.

Cook oversaw the excavation of dusty jars of vinegar, mustard, cinnamon, cloves, saffron, and ginger. She fetched from who knew where olive oil and pomegranates, oranges, lemons, figs, and plums. By noontide, pots were full and spits were turning, and I was henceforth tormented by smells.

I quick grew fond of the kitchen, and disappointment that I would be exiled from it, assigned elsewhere, must have shown on my face. Everything did in those days. Maria beat a round of dough, her bright eyes crinkling like an old woman’s, though she couldn’t have had more than three years over my sixteen, and said, “We’re merry today, it’s true, but we’re always so before the public.”