The Ghosts of Kerfol (6 page)

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 seen 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.

Perhaps he had confronted the baron. Perhaps he had been caught trying to run away. In any case, she had only glimpsed him after the last beating, his ears a bloody pulp, boxed so often they oozed. She had seen the pauper’s wagon come for him, had watched his poacher-father, a big man with hands like hams, weep as Cook wrapped the wool blanket round him like a shroud.

I tried to summon the courage to seek them out, send a message to Youen’s village, but rumor came that his family had moved away.

A year after the trial, Maria, too, vanished, fleeing in the night with the blacksmith’s son and a rag full of silver spoons. Glassy-eyed Cook read me the note in halting fashion, and after, we never spoke of Maria again:

The spoons were returned to the cabinet one day not long after, without comment; I know not by whom: one or another of the baron’s heirs. When I found the first of those familiar spoons in the drawer, I held it up and found my own distorted reflection in the shine, dull eyes that could not weep.

Milady and I spoke not of these matters. We spoke almost never, though our sorrows united us. I kept close by her, especially when the moon swelled and paw prints dotted the mud round the moat come morning. But when our wrists brushed as I washed or dressed her, we flinched as if stung. To touch, to know affection, was to suffer, and we would not bring that upon ourselves, upon each other. For what judge, what God, would hear us?

I will labor till my last days in obscurity, scrubbing cobbles in the gray light of morning, and — like paw prints in rainfall, like Milady in her madness — fade and be forgotten.

Only this house, only Kerfol, which I once imagined so neglectful, will remember.

V
ICTOR WOULD BRAVE THE WALK
from the crossroads, he said. He needed air.

In truth, he didn’t want to go on with them to Quimper.

Mother struggled out of the carriage to kiss him with all due (on this day) ceremony. Thanks to him, she would have her old life back. Not all of it, surely, not Father, but there would be ease and security again, some degree of luxury: what degree this staunch new democratic world would allow.
Greedy woman,
Victor mused, watching her tame her big bustle of skirts.
Is it not enough that we live?

He didn’t want to go with them and listen to Michel’s maddening whistling the whole way, but he didn’t want to lose his way through the heather or sink into a bog, either, or catch cold or meet strangers or otherwise face the unknown without Mother. “Won’t you at least call at Kerfol,” he urged, “and take your rest first?”

For a moment she ignored his question, going on at length about the caretaker. “His name’s Grenier. Jean Grenier, and his daughter is Marguerite. See that our rooms are ready and have them plan dinner for sundown. Oh, don’t look so, Victor,” she cooed, tweaking his chin. “My darling.” She kissed her fingers and pressed them to his cheek, leaning close. “I never rest. You know that.”

Michel, their one remaining servant, stopped his infernal whistling long enough to extend a hand to help Mother back up, and she stuck her coiffed head out the coach window, waving strenuously as they started on their way again.