by Lisa Jensen
“That will be all, Ferron.” His voice comes from inside. “See to my lady’s apartments.”
“Very good, monsieur le chevalier.”
“And you may leave the door ajar.” His voice has turned charming, humorous. “We have no desire to scandalize the servants.”
How kind of the chevalier to consider my lady’s delicate reputation! But of course, his gentlemen-in-waiting have taken themselves off, now that he has company.
“As you wish, sir.” Monsieur Ferron bows and retreats, then turns on his heel and marches off toward the wing of private apartments beyond the dining salon and the ballroom. The other servants have all melted away, leaving the chevalier utterly alone with the Lady Honoree.
Or so he believes.
Assuring myself no one else is about, I creep through the salon to the open doorway that leads to his private sitting room and peer inside.
A small, rosy fire burns in the grate of the white marble fireplace. A crystal chandelier with cream-colored candles hangs before a mirror above the mantelpiece, reflecting more warm, soft light into the room. It shimmers in Lady Honoree’s golden hair and on the folds of her lush gown. The young comtesse stands at a tall, arched window that gives onto a small balcony, watching the rain. The chevalier perches on a chaise longue in a corner of the room, watching her. It appears they have been speaking lightly of nothing in particular, their dinner, perhaps, or the weather, or the state of this year’s wine. But now, they have grown quiet as my lady leans her golden head against the glass.
“See how it rains,” she murmurs. “I may be a burden on your hospitality for days to come, monsieur le chevalier.”
“Please, call me Jean-Loup. And it is no burden, Lady Honoree.”
“You must allow me to repay your great kindness to me.”
“But your beauty and virtue are recompense enough, my lady,” he assures her, this great champion of virtue. “I shall carry them always in my heart to sustain me.”
She turns her face from the window to look at him. “Sustain? How so?”
“After you are gone and I return to my solitary pursuits. When the memory of your beauty and virtue shall be all I have left of you.”
Her hand rises to her bodice as she regards him. “But — you speak like a suitor, Jean-Loup.”
“Would that I had the opportunity to press my suit, my lady.” He rises in agitation. “But you are but a step away from the altar, and I am far too late.”
“We are ever pawns in the hands of fate, people of our station,” she agrees sadly.
“And yet, fate has brought you here,” he reasons, daring a step closer. She turns again to the window, lowers her head, and sighs, so she does not see him come one step closer still.
“Only to wound you, it seems,” the comtesse murmurs. “It grieves me to think you will suffer because of me.”
She cannot see what I see, the smile slowly spreading across his handsome face as he looms behind her. When he speaks again, his voice is low and urgent.
“But there is something you can do for me . . . Honoree. Something that would ease my suffering.”
“You have but to name it, Jean-Loup.” Her voice is small, fluttering like a fan. “You have been so kind to me. What may I do for you?”
“A small thing only, a token,” he murmurs, lowering his face close to her bent head. “The smallest of kindnesses, to carry in my heart for all the rest of my lonely days.” He raises one hand to rest on her shoulder; the other inches around her waist.
Lady Honoree’s posture stiffens immediately. “But, monsieur le chevalier —”
She tries to twist out of his grasp, but he does not let go.
“Come now, Honoree,” he says, more urgently still. “We may never meet again. Why should we not be kind?”
How dare he speak to her like a mistress, like one of his maids!
“You must let me go, Jean-Loup!” exclaims the comtesse.
“Grant me a kiss, and we shall see,” purrs the chevalier, tightening his grip.
Rage boils up inside of me; I mean to throw open the door, upset the wine decanter, overturn chairs — anything to disrupt the scene. But my hand is frozen to the door handle, my feet will not leave the floor, and my words stick in my throat.
“A kiss? A kiss only?” echoes the lady, and there is something strange about her voice. It’s less melodious now, more harsh. She seems to shrink into her gown, eluding the chevalier’s groping hands, and he pauses, bewildered. She whirls around to face him again, and he cries out and staggers back several steps. Lady Honoree’s golden hair uncurls into long, straggly grey-and-white strands, and her dazzling raiment dissolves into shapeless grey rags. Her skin withers, her features wizen, and her black eyes blaze. She is Mère Sophie at her most frightful.
“So that is the price of your kindness, Chevalier de Beaumont!” she crows at him. “A kiss! Had you only told me so at the well, we might have made a bargain. But it’s too late now, as you say. You have sealed your fate.”
“Hag!” he cries as he stumbles backward. “Witch! What do you want with me?”
“My wants?” she taunts. “When have the wants of others ever mattered to you? I’m here to see to your wants.”
“Ferron!” he roars. “Andre! Guards!”
But his gatekeeper was dismissed, and the rest of his men fail to appear.
“You want to dishonor women for the sport of it,” Mère Sophie goes on. “You want to pursue your pleasures without restraint, whatever the cost to others. You want to live like a beast, and so you shall.”
The storm outside has suddenly risen to a horrendous pitch; lightning cracks across the sky, and hailstones rattle the window. And yet, I can hear the panicked shrieking of horses in the stables and dogs howling in fear from the kennels. His yelping for his servants goes unheeded. The nervous buzz of the servants downstairs escalates into frantic shouting; an atmosphere of calamity, sorcery, and doom now grips all within these walls, a fear of unnatural forces greater even than their fear of the chevalier’s wrath. What has become of Lady Honoree’s golden coach? I wonder. Is it crumbling to dust before the servants’ eyes down in the carriage house? Are her footmen turning into frogs skittering away under their feet? Have her snow-white steeds flown off as bats?
In the next heartbeat, the household servants are all in flight, terrified of witchcraft. I see them emptying out of the upstairs rooms and fleeing down the staircase. Their footfalls are pounding down the turret steps, amid wails of mounting alarm. Down the stairs flee Monsieur Ferron, Nicolas the page, and Treville, the abused secretary. None of them come to aid the chevalier. The babble of a hundred terrified voices fills the entry hall below and then bursts outside like a fist shoved through the door. I hear shod feet crunching on the wet gravel in the courtyard as they stream out of the house. And I realize I am suddenly in command of my own limbs again. I might join the others and flee. But I don’t. I am mesmerized by the spectacle of Jean-Loup, Chevalier de Beaumont, crouched low on his haunches now, cowering from the fearsome Mère Sophie, arms thrust up to cover his face, bellowing like a wounded animal.
“You will know what it is to be wretched and alone,” the wisewoman tells him calmly. “What beauty will want you now?”
The chevalier cannot seem to rise. Something is wrong with his body. His trunk is thickening, swaying lower to the ground; his hind end is rising. His howls are deepening, becoming more savage.
But my heart is leaping. Can this be the reckoning Mère Sophie promised me? I am astonished, fascinated, but not afraid.
The chevalier lowers his hands to support himself, and they are covered with hair; they have become large and furry paws. His jacket, tunic, and breeches, his shoes and stockings all split apart and fall away, revealing a thickening hind haunch covered in short, curly brown fur, over goat legs tapering to heavy, sharp-edged cloven hooves. And his head! Devil horns sprout between shaggy, pointed ears above a broad neck. His profile lengthens into a snout, eyes forward, lik
e a predator. A ragged, goatish beard decorates his chin, and great tufts of straw-colored mane erupt from his sloping forehead and down the back of his massive neck, to cascade over his chest. Long rows of raptor feathers sprout out of his fur-covered shoulders and ripple down his back.
He is hideous!
He shakes back his mane in a fury, his expression full of rage.
“Wha . . . what have you done to me?” It’s hard to understand his words because of his new animal snout and the lower, rumbling pitch of his voice.
“I have done nothing,” Mère Sophie declares. “This is the truth of who you are inside.”
“Change me back!” he thunders.
“I cannot. That power lies with you, not me.”
Then Mère Sophie turns to me; her voice seems to be right in my ear, but she is still standing above the chevalier, across the room. “And you, girl.” She lifts her face and fixes me with her black eyes. “What do you want?”
“I want to see him suffer,” I breathe.
The wisewoman nods. “As you wish.”
“Witch!” the chevalier rages. “Undo this spell you’ve put on me!”
Mère Sophie rounds back on him, her words precise and full of rage. “You are such a champion of virtue, Jean-Loup. Find a maid of good virtue to marry you as you are now, and you shall be restored.”
I hear him suck in a breath, shocked at the impossibility of such a task. But I am delighted; what use will Jean-Loup’s wealth and honeyed words be to the beast that stands before us now? With a nod of satisfaction, the wisewoman turns away.
“You cannot leave me like this!” he bellows after her. “Release me, you foul, vile —”
Mère Sophie waves a hand in irritation, and his hateful words freeze on his lips. He rears all the way up on his hind hooves, pawing at the air, his awful mouth open in mute rage. The wisewoman neither shrinks away nor quails, and he hurls himself away from her as if to march out the door. But his heavy chest sways lower and lower toward the ground; he is nearly on all fours when his head swivels around to stare at me for an instant, where I stand in the doorway. Then he lunges past me out the door, through the outer salon, and into the dark, deserted hallway.
Mère Sophie walks toward me. I am surprised at how large she’s become; she towers above me. She bends low, stretches out a hand, and takes me up in her grasp. How still I’ve become, how small. I feel that my arms are upraised, but they don’t ache in that awkward position. My legs seem bound together. She lifts me up and shuffles over to the fireplace. When she sets me on the mantelpiece, before the glass, I see how I, too, have been transformed.
I am woman no more. I am flesh no more. I am made of silver, sleek and smooth and slim. My arms curve upward to hold two long, tapered candles; a third rests in the crown of my head, or what was once my head. I have no human anatomy, no vulnerable parts to be hurt or betrayed, no face, no eyes, and yet I see.
I am beautiful!
Time passes, but it matters little to me. My tapers burn at all times, day or night, dark or light.
I am not a waxen candle, subject to every whim of heat or weather, draining away my life in service to others. I am proud, strong silver, holding up the candles. Their wicks burn, but they are enchanted; hot wax never drips down my silver arms, my tapers never shorten, and their flames never die.
But the candles in the crystal chandelier are ordinary wax and subject to the laws that govern ordinary things. They have all burned out, and the chandelier hangs dark and forlorn from its gilded chains. The fire in the hearth below me has gone out as well. It’s so quiet now. No servants to bustle about. No hounds to bay.
His dogs set up a fearful racket when he went down to the kennels the next day; they could be heard all over the property. They might have torn him to pieces, but in the end, they seemed as frightened by the witchcraft as the servants and ran away. From my perch, I can see out the window and over the balcony to a great deal of the grounds and the park behind the château. I saw the dogs’ dark shapes racing away into the park and the wood. He tried to follow, perhaps to join their company, for want of any other. But he was not yet in command of his strange new limbs and was left panting at the edge of the park, snarling and cursing.
Even his brutish hounds abandon him.
He is the only thing that moves in this place. I often hear the distant clop of his hooves on the marble floor or his heavy tread upon the stairs. Or sometimes a crash of pans in the kitchen as he searches for food. There are no servants to cook for him now. No one dares to come here anymore. His companions have forsaken him for other sports, other tables. He has only himself for company. And poor enough comfort he must find it, for I often hear him howling at night in his misery. A pitiful, beastly howl. Yet it warms me to hear it. Let him know what it is to feel despair!
I despair no more. I am elegant and strong, with no clumsy human body to be abused, no heart to be shamed. I feel no pain, no weariness, no anxiety of any kind. I do not thirst or hunger. I am sustained by his misery, and I feast upon it.
He never comes back here. I suppose he can’t bear to return to the place where his life was destroyed, can’t bear to go into his old apartments where everything is still laid out so luxuriously for the man he was. I am the only sentinel here, watching the nights lengthen outside the window as the winter comes on, that brooding time of year when all the country appears cold and dead.
But tonight I hear a sullen footfall out on the stairs, and he appears in the doorway, hunched forward but not quite on all fours. He hesitates there, then enters the room gingerly, still in a crouch, peering into the shadowy corners as if he expects Mère Sophie to come cackling out of the dark, flinging more curses at him. Finally his paws touch the floor, and he follows his snout around the room, sniffing at everything. Perhaps he hopes to pick up the scent of Jean-Loup in the last place he ever existed, to find some trace of his old self that will make him whole again. He creeps up to the chaise longue, sets his heavy paws upon the seat, and snuffles at the cushions. From up here, I gaze down at the mottled rusty brown-and-white stripes on the black-tipped feathers that cover most of his back; they tremble slightly as he roves about. He circles around to sniff at the cold fireplace below me, then turns his face up toward the mantelpiece to peer at the light reflected in the glass. My light.
He rises slowly, steadying his paws on the marble ornaments until he is up on his hind feet, balancing carefully on his heavy hooves. He cocks his giant head to one side. His eyes are still strangely human-shaped; stony dark under his new, thick, beastly brows and shot with a cold light, reflecting my flames.
“What, still alight?” His words are thick but intelligible; the wisewoman has not permanently denied him the power of speech, although he hasn’t had much cause to use it of late. He snuffles at me with his long snout, his animal breath hot, fogging my smooth surface. I am mute, of course, and serene.
“Little Candle,” he breathes. I see recognition dawning in his eyes and a fleeting shadow of that crafty look, that possessive smugness I remember from the night he called me by this name. Once it would have made me shudder inside, but he has no power to hurt me now. I wonder if he has sniffed out some trace of my former humanity, as he came looking for some trace of his.
“Of course,” he rumbles. “Who else could you be? Come to light my way again, have you?” His expression darkens with anger. “To mock me? To show me what . . .”
His words fade away as his eyes shift from me to the mirror behind me, where his reflection hovers in the glass. Horns, snout, ratty, strawlike mane — he sees it all. By my light.
His roar of rage would split my ears, if I still had ears; the tapers rattle in my silver grasp. His huge paw closes around me, and I’m lifted off the mantel; then my heavy base is dashed into the looking glass. A hailstorm of glass bursts over us both, but I am undamaged. I feel no pain. My candles and I are unbreakable.
This is what he thought of me once, an object to be used and discarded. But look at
me now! I am strong, as I never was before. I am here to show him what he has become. I will illuminate his crimes.
Still howling in rage, he stumbles across the sitting room, wielding me like a club, throws open the wardrobe, and smashes me into the looking glass bolted inside the door. Then he carries me into his bedchamber and smashes me into the mirror overlooking his bed.
Glass crunches beneath his hooves as he lurches, half-upright, back out through his apartments. He smashes me into a mirror on the wall outside his chamber door in the entryway across from the staircase. Holding me in one paw, he crosses to the dining salon. We dispatch a huge mirror in a gilt frame above the sideboard, then proceed into the ballroom. It is an enormous cavern of a place in the dark. I have never been here before. Every wall is hung with panel after panel of full-length mirrors, veined with gold. Each one reflects my light, which of course has not gone out, will never go out. Each one shows him what he is.
Still gripped in his paw, I am hammered into one glass panel and the next and the next. With each crash, glass splinters, flies into the air, and rains to the floor, each explosion amplified in the vast, echoing room. It sounds like a battlefield, like the end of the world. It’s exhilarating, his rage. I am glad to be the instrument of his self-loathing.
At last nothing is left but four blank walls marked with gilded brackets and a carpet of shattered glass. Spent and panting, he props himself by one heavy paw against the wall and lets me slide from his grasp down into the broken glass. My candles still burn; the glass bits glitter with their light. They illuminate his face as he stares down at the destruction we’ve wrought.
He no longer has breath to bellow, but as he sinks down on his haunches, he makes a different noise, a wounded-animal sound, mournful and hopeless. His paws rise to cover his horrible face, and he crouches there, shuddering. I recognize his hopelessness. I revel in it.
At last, he lowers his paws. His eyes search the floor, then he springs at something. His paw rises out of the rubble, clutching a long shard of glass with a wicked point; its edges are so sharp, I can see blood on the thick pads of his paw where he grasps it.
