The Experimentalist

by Nick Salaman

  So my boyhood continued. When I was seven, my father hired tutors to teach me Latin, logic, poetry and music. At ten, he added Greek and medicine. Every fighting man should know a little medicine, he said; it has served me well. At eleven, I took my first ride at the quintain, and I believe I acquitted myself well with my little lance.

  At thirteen – or was it fourteen? – I discovered a new sport. My penis, which had lain dormant for more than a dozen years suddenly found a life of its own. This, I understand,is not a uniqueexperience but, rather like birth or death or torture, it seems entirely personal at the time. So my small serpent and I began to enjoy a … relationship, which, though it has brought me trouble, has given rise (the pun will not escape you) to no end of personal satisfaction.

  If, at the end of my life, which seems to be next week, it comes to me and says “I trust I have given satisfaction, Master Giles,” I shall be able to give it a heartfelt affirmative and you cannot say that of everything in these troubled times.

  Here the sheets of yellowed, crumpled paper and the Old French came to an end. There were four further pages in the contemporary hand. The first two were matter of fact – an account of the writer’s interest and growing obsession with the life of Gilles de Rais, a monster of part history, part legend. It then continued:

  Our family, the Lavells – directly descended from the Laval-Lohéacs, first cousins of Gilles – have come a long way from the days of shame and disgrace of the mid 1400s when de Rais was a by-word for the most loathsome and profligate depravity, of devil-raising and child abduction. If they were true, the things he was said to have done, then I would not have done more than open the history books, peer into the darkness and then quickly shut them. But what I found led me to think that the abuser was himself abused. He might have been weak, he might have suffered from a kind of madness, but he was certainly framed by those around him who wanted his wealth and who wanted his castles and lands. He was plied with drink and almost certainly drugged by wormwood, the hallucinogenic ingredient in absinthe, and at the same time he was victim to every kind of quackery and deception. There was a recrudescence of witchcraft at the time of which the most famous instance was Joan of Arc herself. I will write down for you the facts as I know them, for I have set out to find out the truth, to clear a family, to remove the blot on our reputation; yes, the stain on the escutcheon. This seems a worthy aim if, like me, you bear an ancient name. Was Gilles’s conviction in 1440 fair or corrupt, tainted by jealousy, envy, greed and the strength of little men? I steeped myself in his life and it became mine. I began to be obsessed – I surrounded myself with ancient documents, buried myself in old books, shut myself up in dark places. So much so that, as you will see, history began to do what it likes best. It repeated itself.

  The next pages were written in a far more orderly manner as though they were almost part of a life her father had had before the darkness fell upon him.

  I write this for you, Marie, so that you can see what it was that at first fascinated and then began, truly, to obsess me. It seems more than possible that we are descended from this gilded, spoilt, yet wretched and ultimately tragic fellow, deceived by those around him and persecuted, vilified, then robbed by his peers. I have told the man who brought you this letter to locate a document of Gilles’s – no forgery – that I have stored in a secret place, so that you may better appreciate our history.

  The story of Gilles de Rais, or Bluebeard as he became known, is fairly common knowledge in France and Britain and even here in America, not just to scholars of the French fifteenth century scene but to the informed layman. The problem is that people generally know only half the story. A brief summary will suffice for the moment, but even this will show that there is more to Barbe Bleu than meets the eye. For a start, in the context of a Baron like Gilles (who was, incidentally, reddish haired), Barbe Bleu does not mean blue beard. None of his contemporaries in the days of his former glory refer to him as having such a distinctive appendage. No – but they do tell us that Gilles had a great liking for his famous half-wild ‘blue’ Barbary horses. The steed more defined a powerful nobleman than did his facial hair.

  Gilles de Laval-Montmorency, then, with his Barbary horses, came to inherit or acquire, while still young, not one, not two, but three great fortunes. The first was his father’s, the second was his grandfather’s, the third was his wife’s, a young woman called Catherine who had large neighbouring estates, the match organised for him by his grandfather, de Craon, a fixer and a ruffian, almost a brigand. And it was he who engineered the acquisition and further building of Gilles’s vast fortune until Gilles became the richest man in France, even richer than the king.

  Gilles’s father and mother both died when he was young. His grandfather either indulged the child or ignored him. The lad grew up handsome, brave and accomplished. His first military escapades were skirmishes against the English with his own soldiery, but he soon made a name for himself as a military leader and became a Marshal of France, marching against the English foe with none other than Joan of Arc. It was said that they became lovers, but it is certain that she considered him a brave and worthy comrade in arms. He was signally helpful in raising the siege of Orléans with her and subsequently in their triumphal progress. He even assisted at the coronation of the King in Reims.

  Then Joan was captured, tried and burned by the Burgundians, in league with the English, and everything started to go downhill. His grandfather, de Craon, who’d kept a jealous eye on the fortunes he had so painstakingly accrued for his grandson, died. Gilles began to spend prodigiously on his chapel and its choir and the concomitant clothes, treasures, art and jewellery. He poured energy into writing a monumental play re-enacting the glories of the Orléans siege. It was composed of twenty thousand lines, had a cast of hundreds, richly clad, with each day’s production requiring a new change of clothing, and it consumed money like a Leviathan gorging on herring.

  He now began to be surrounded by sinister people – a couple of cousins, de Briqueville and de Sillé and a strange youth known as Poitou, who caroused with him and drank massive quantities of heavy red wine and spices, known as hippocras, cut with wormwood, the hallucinogenic ingredient of absinthe. The two cousins seemed to have gained control of Gilles’s exchequer, but there was trouble in that direction. The ready money was starting to run out. Most noblemen’s wealth lay in land and property. So property, in this case castles, had to be sold, and it still wasn’t enough. Various relatives tried to petition the king to forbid Gilles to sell any more of his fortune, but it was no good. He resorted to superstition to try and conjure money out of sorcery, and a priest was found who could raise a demon called Barron. The money was still not forthcoming. Worse, rumours started to circulate. It was said that children were starting to disappear from surrounding villages.

  Just as she was learning the whole story, Marie was disappointed to find there were only three more torn and crumpled scraps of paper now, these looking as if they had been hidden in someone’s shirt, so creased and distressed were they.

  They tell of boys, sometimes girls, strung like capons or dancing on the end of a noose while I buggered them or spent myself upon their flanks; of the orgies of spiced wine and drugged sweetmeats; of the black arts and raised spirits and a demon called Barron; of the missing children in the villages and the huge heap of bones in the bastion wall … These and others too loathsome to number are among the vile accusations levelled at me, for which they have not a shred of evidence and only the hearsay ramblings of my former associates who were too busy taking money from me to write down dates and times, or even to plant a corpse or two. My accusers have never found so much as a single body to bear out their tales. Where is the corpse, gentlemen? Or were you the murderers? I am guilty, it is true, of having spent too much on my play, but the lifting of the Siege of Orléans must be celebrated along with the feat of arms of my dear friend and comrade Jeanne d’Arc without whom we would still be ruled by the English. The costumes mu
st befit such a production with cloth of gold where necessary and siege engines and gunfire and a cast of thousands obligatory. You cannot recreate a siege with less. My other decision, to remove the castle of Tiffauges to the Californian Sierras, stone by stone, might be questioned by some, but it was all part of the plan … I must mount my defence on my own ground…

  She turned the scrap of paper over but there was no more. The writer was evidently confused, veering from the distant past to the present and back again. She reached for the second sheet. The last letter was shorter, and the paper of better quality.

  My dearest daughter,

  I shall never see you again or be able to say sorry to you a thousand times for deserting you and for the weakness that overtook me. Alas, our weaknesses are stronger than our strengths. Your mother died and I was bereft. I was rich beyond reason and yet I felt that I had done nothing to deserve it. I did not feel able to bring up a little girl but I knew I had to keep you in safety, safely away from the kidnappers and the money-snatchers, and soon I was plunged into my work which led to darkness, but the work was important. I had always been fascinated by history, especially the history of our family. I had studied history at university, but now certain documents fell into my hands which lit the fire of obsession.

  They seemed to prove that the Duke of Brittany, a de Montfort of course – a curse on the lot of them – had indeed been instrumental in framing our ancestor, casting the vilest of rumours about him, poisoning his mind, arranging evidence and planting false witnesses. I visited the land of the shadow of death and, like him, fell in with thieves who called themselves cousins. They plied me with pleasures and assailed me with pain, they poisoned me with wormwood and found me powders and potions to take away the agony. I lurched from pain to pleasure sunrise to nightfall and from week’s start to month’s end. There were séances and invocations of demons. I knew not where I was or who I was with, I only knew that I had to finish the work that I had started – the rescuing of our ancestor from calumny and shame. It had started as a sort of game with me, a sort of puzzle, a detective story and then it got out of hand. They played along with me but it soon became as if I was the man himself, accused and alone. And indeed I now realise that they were playing the same tricks on me that Gilles himself had endured. And I, obsessed with the man, went along with it as in a dream.

  I met a man who was evil, Marie. My cousins Mittelberg and Brickville – they said they were cousins and in my hubris I never bothered to check – but I should call them my cozens since they cozened me out of mind and money – made dreams out of his pharmacopeia, and finally they brought the Professor to me. He understood the poisons intricately and knew what each one could do. And then he delighted in exercising his ingenuity on me, in feeding me the ideas like twigs for the fire of unreason and fantasy to burn. It was exciting in a dreadful way, Marie. They called him the Professor.

  He unmade me, my child, and then he made me up again until I did not recognise myself. And when they said I had done these vile things, I did not know but I could only feel that I had not. And all the while, the money was being spent. This sounds like a litany of self-pity as I read it, for it is you that should be the subject of this letter, you whom I abandoned and have allowed to suffer through the wrongs I have inflicted on myself. I could not be more sorry, and I am sorry for myself (again) that I could not get to know you. But, listen, Marie, this is important. They do not know that I am writing this. It may never get to you which is a nightmare in itself. But if it does, there is a way you can destroy them and get the money back for it is in a Trust. They took it from me and made the Trust before I could spend it all; to save it for my daughter, they said. And then they took control of it and used the false story of my evil to make you ashamed and wish to distance yourself from your inheritance. I can read them like the Book of Darkness.

  You have been the victim of a monstrous canard and plot. Your future has been blackened, your family defamed. Every year they hold a Meeting with the Trustees, not all of whom are bad but, like many men of business, they are busy with other matters and they leave it to the executive directors to do the work. That is what the bad men will always try to prevent – your coming to the meeting. You have to go there and show your face. These men need you alive but always absent. That is what they will work on. You must make Brickville and Middleburg no longer executors. And do not marry, especially not marry one of them, until you have attended the meeting. That is the start of your new life. I hear the gaoler coming for me now. It is time to say I love you and will always be with you, for that is the gift of a father, I am part of you and they cannot take that away. Always your father, Giles Lavell.

  The last note was brief, a précis of past troubles, composed after the others, a snatch of communication written in stolen minutes and ending with a fearful injunction.

  They have deceived me. Brickville and his master Mittelberg have taken advantage of my sorrow and my passion of scholarship to build a castle of lies around me. They have abused my friendship, cheated me out of money, drugged my drink, poisoned my food and – if that were not in itself sufficient – now they tell me I have committed crimes of the vilest kind against young men and women, crimes about which they can tell the police unless I provide more money. Well, they can whistle up the devil’s arse for that. There is no doubt, however, that they will do it – and take the money too.

  I am caught in a trap of my own making for I have been stupid, blind, obsessed with my own studies and with the sorrows that have become a way of life for me unless I lose myself in the past. Please forgive me, Marie, if you ever come to read this letter – but never, I beseech you – forgive the authors of my ruin.

  Your ever-loving father.

  ***

  ‘Marie … Marie…’

  She hardly had time to wipe her eyes. It was Holdsworth calling, and her hiding place must not be found. She started up and hastily thrust the papers back into the envelope. They must not fall into the hands of her guardians whatever happened. It would be a disaster. She pushed the envelope back into the recesses of the privet and peered through the leaves. All she could see were Holdsworth’s boots, very close to her now.

  ‘Marie…? Where is the girl?’

  She gathered up her dress and scuttled like a little bird to the other end of the tunnel. She could see Holdsworth moving to the back of the house where the pool was.

  ‘Here I am,’ she called, waving her sketch book. ‘I was the other side of the tree.’

  He came down the slope towards her, looking vexed.

  ‘I looked behind the tree,’ he said.

  She giggled, archly. I am not sick, she thought. I am not tainted or to be pitied. I can hold my head as high as these people – no, higher for I am not set on holding them prisoner against their will. Not yet, at any rate. She felt quite giddy as the shadows that had been around her mind for so long started to recede.

  ‘I was teasing you,’ she said. ‘I just moved round to the other side. Like a fairy.’

  ‘It is very wrong of you,’ he said, ‘to play your games and cause us worry. I shall have to tell your fiancé. It is becoming tiresome. The medication should be increased. You are becoming highly strung and troublesome. I cannot guarantee your safety if this goes on.’

  She could see the beads of sweat on his forehead. He was what Aunt Bertha would have called agitato.

  ‘I am so sorry, Mr Holdsworth. It was just a game.’

  ‘That is as maybe. Mrs Holdsworth will be vexed, that is for sure. She was just baking a cake with her own hands for your tea.’

  It would be a Mary Baker Cake mix, that was for sure.

  ‘Ooh, my favourite,’ she said. There was joy and power in deceiving them, but she must not let it go to her head. She must be calm.

  ‘Well, that will have to be called off for a start,’ he said. ‘There will be no cake today.’

  He was in a huff. She felt like one of the little kittens who would have no pie. But she was o
nly going to be around for another seven days so what did anything really matter?

  ‘We may also have to declare the garden out of bounds.’

  ‘You know I love your garden.’

  ‘We will have to wait and see when I tell Mr Middleburg. He’ll be here by the end of the week, he says.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Holdsworth, please don’t tell him about my little game!’

  He loved it when she did that. Poor Mr Holdsworth, little did he know that the gypsies had come to the castle gate and, as far as she could see, they were definitely of the raggle-taggle variety.

  ***

  The next week was a torment for Marie, especially so since Middleburg’s imminent appearance was anticipated by the Holdsworths with a mixture of pride and awe. Both Holdsworth and his wife worked themselves into little whorls and curlicues of fluster preparing for his arrival. Nothing must be out of place or random. The car was polished, the lawn was mowed and the wax-leaf privet was clipped and clipped again. If they could have re-waxed it, they would have done so with gusto.

  Middleburg telephoned at the last minute to say he was arriving late for dinner and that threw Mrs Holdsworth into a panic: the Lady Hostess filet de boeuf en croute would turn to charcoal if kept in the oven too long and it was already done the way Mr Middleburg liked it. It must be taken out for a while but, at the same time, Mrs Holdsworth wanted him to have it piping hot, the way he liked it. What to do, what to do?

  When Felix finally arrived, full of apology, the beef had the consistency of tennis shoes but it was hot and he praised it fulsomely when he finally came down to table. He seemed in good appetite and high humour and appeared almost uxorious to Marie as they sat in the drawing-room after dinner. He insisted on giving her a green Chartreuse which, at first sip and on top of her medication, made her feel swimmy. Then, when he had poured himself a second Rémy, he came and sat down next to her on the sofa.