Bloodstock and Other Stories

by Margaret Irwin

  As I rose to the summit of one of these mounds, I stopped and listened. I thought that I had heard music, but as the wind rushed onwards through the pine woods behind me, I could no longer distinguish it. At this moment the whole light of the full moon shone out from behind a hurrying cloud, and I saw vaguely before me in the mist a vast circle of apparently human figures, revolving in furious movement round some huge and dark object of fantastic shape. Clouds of smoke, reddened now and then by fire, rose round this object and were swept onwards in the wind.

  I ran towards the circle; as I did so, the music came nearer, now loud, now faint, on the uncertain blast, and I recognized the tune as the same that Mademoiselle Claude had sung to me. I approached cautiously as I drew near. Sometimes the ring of dancers swung so near me that I was within a few feet of them, sometimes it receded far away. All the figures were holding hands and faced outwards, their backs towards the centre of the circle that they formed. I saw the figures of men, women and even children flying past me; not one had a human face. The faces of goats, toads and cats, of grinning devils and monkeys showed opposite me for one instant, clear in the moonlight or obscured by the drifting smoke. Those that seemed most horrible of all were white faces that had no features.

  Suddenly the ring broke for one instant as it swung within a yard of where I crouched, and at that moment a blinding cloud of smoke blew into my face. A hand was flung out and touched mine, a light cold touch that I knew. I seized it and sprang to my feet, immediately my other hand was clasped and I was swung madly onwards into the movement of the dance.

  I could now no longer see the dancers, not even those on either side of me whose hands I grasped. I saw nothing but the night, the smoke, the flying landscape, now vague and vast as of an illimitable sea of fog, now black and hideous shapes of mountains that rose sharply in the moonlight. I felt an exhilaration such as I had never known, a brusque and furious enjoyment, as though my senses and powers were quickened beyond their natural limit. Yet again and again I found I was trying to remember something, with the urgency and even the agony that besets one in a nightmare; but my mind appeared to have forsaken its office.

  Then without any warning the hands in my clasp were torn from me, and the ring broke in all directions. I staggered back unable to keep my balance in the shock of the suddenly loosened contact; the next instant I realized that she who had first taken my hand had gone, and I was hunting madly for her through that monstrous assembly. Though the ring had broken, the music continued, and I jostled many who were still dancing, back to back, with their hands joined. In the misty confusion it was impossible to distinguish anything clearly; I thought I saw gigantic toads dressed in green velvet who were carrying dishes, but I did not stay to remark them. Huge clouds of duncoloured smoke arose before me, lit up momentarily by flames, and in their midst I saw for an instant a shape that seemed greater and more hideous than the human. A mighty voice arose from it, speaking it seemed some word of command, and straightway all the company fell on their knees.

  Then I saw her whom I had been seeking. She stood erect on what appeared to be a black throne, the fiery smoke behind her. The moon, darkened of late, shone out on her white limbs that were scarcely concealed by the fluttering rags she wore. Her loosened hair blew straight before her face, and appeared snow-white in the moonlight. Something gleamed in her uplifted hand, she bent, and at this moment an awful cry arose, a sobbing shriek so deformed by its extreme anguish and terror that though it was certainly human I could not distinguish if it were from man, woman or child. The figure rose erect, her arms flung wide as in triumph, her face revealed. It was the face of Mademoiselle Claude.

  I rushed towards the throne; it was the huge stone I had observed on my ride. She turned towards me, her face bent down to greet me, her lips parted in laughter, her eyes gleaming as I had never seen them, her whole body transfused with some mysterious force that seemed to fill her with life, pleasure and attraction more than human. My senses reeled as in delirium, I seized her in my arms and dragged her from the stone. In doing so, my hand closed on the knife in hers, and something warm and wet drenched my fingers. The meaning of that hideous death-cry I had just heard suddenly penetrated my numbed and stupefied brain—and I stood stiff with horror, cold sweat breaking out on my hands and forehead.

  She twisted herself in my arms till her face looked up into mine; her eyes shone like pale flames and appeared to draw near and then recede very far away, and with them my horror likewise receded until I felt I was forgetting the very cause of it. Yet it seemed to me, as though someone not myself were telling me, that if I did so, the consequences would be worse than death. I struggled desperately to recall what I had felt, and with it something else that all that past day and this night I had been trying to remember. I longed to pray but was ashamed to enlist the aid of a Power that until that moment I had doubted and mocked.

  Her arms slid upwards round my neck; my flesh shuddered beneath their embrace as from contact with some loathsome thing, yet she seemed but the more desirable. My consciousness began to fail me as I bent over her. Again the eyes came close, enormous, and I stared at the pupils, black and perpendicular in their green depths. A voice that I did not at first recognize for my own shrieked aloud—“They are not human. Remember, the eyes are not human.”

  As I cried out, I found that I could remove my eyes from hers, I looked down at what I held, and on her naked shoulder saw the scar I had observed that morning. I knew now that it had been made by my own sword the night before when I had struck in the darkness at her familiar, and the discovery turned me sick and faint. I frantically repulsed the accursed white body that clung to mine, and made to draw my sword. The witch screamed not in fear but in laughter, and flung herself upon me with her knife before I could get my sword free from its scabbard. I fended off the blow on my heart, and with my left arm dripping blood I seized her wrist while my right, now holding my sword, was raised to strike.

  In that instant I was seized from behind by what seemed to be a hundred slippery hands clawing at my neck, arms and ankles. The whole mob, laughing, sobbing, screaming, chuckling, was round me and upon me. It appeared certain that I should be overcome, but I struck out madly with my sword and succeeded in effecting some clearance round me. A kind of berserker fury consumed me; I rushed upon that obscene herd, striking right and left to hew a passage through them. They fled shrieking in front of me but closed on me from behind; I was bitten, clawed, scratched, hacked at, cut at, with no proper weapons it seemed, but the blows would have been sufficient to overcome me had not all my forces been so desperately engaged.

  After a period that seemed to endure for hours, I found that I was hacking blindly at the empty air; I wiped the blood from my eyes and looking round me saw that I was alone, surrounded only by the mounds and hillocks through which I had approached to that frightful merry-making. My legs could no longer support me, my senses fled from me, and I fell upon the ground.

  I woke to consciousness to see the light of dawn behind the mountains. All was silent; at some distance, a thin column of smoke, as from a dying fire, ascended straight upwards in the still air. I struggled to my feet and with all the strength that was left in my bruised body I dragged myself towards the château.

  One of my grooms was in the courtyard as I entered, and cried out on seeing my condition. I cut him short and ordered him to assemble the rest of my band and have my horses saddled with the utmost expedition. I commanded Jacques to leave all my baggage and we were ready for departure before any of the Comte’s household, excepting the servants, were aroused. My men implored me not to attempt to ride in such a state, but it seemed to me that any feat was possible that could withdraw me immediately from that loathsome place. In raw and foggy daylight we rode out of the courtyard and down the road that led from Riennes.

  I will finish this event in my memories here, though I must traverse six years to do so. The other day, while on a protracted visit to London, I was sitting in White’s
coffeehouse when Jacques brought me the papers that I have sent me regularly from France. In one of them was a notice which so much engaged my attention that I lost all account of the conversation around me. My Lord Selborne asked me what news I found so engrossing. I read aloud: “In the French Juras a nun, youngest daughter of the ancient and noble family of R——, has been tried and found guilty of sorcery. She was burnt at the stake and with her the priest, chaplain to the convent, who had confessed to having performed the Black Mass regularly in the same church where he had conducted sacred worship by day. The nun’s two sisters are also in the religious life, and the eldest, who is in the same convent, fell under suspicion for some time but has been cleared. In fact so many arrests were made both within the convent and through the whole countryside that it was found impossible to prosecute them all, lest the whole district of R——, the scene of these horrors, should require to be burnt.”

  Here my lord interrupted me with expressions of horror that France, even in her remotest provinces, should still be so barbarously superstitious as to burn a woman of quality for a witch.

  “In England,” he remarked, “we got over such whimsies in the time of the Stuarts, and since then the women, God bless ’em, have been allowed to enchant with impunity.”

  That very able man, Monsieur Voltaire the playwright, who was then on his visit to England, burst forth in great indignation against the priest-ridden laws of our country that could make such executions possible. What could it matter, he declared, if an ignorant peasantry, rebelling against the tedium of its miserable existence, cared at certain seasons to make a bonfire, dress up one of their number as the devil, put masks on the rest, and indulge in the mummery of the Witches” Sabbath? In his grandfather’s day, sorcery had been a fashion extending even to the noblesse and gentry; the trial of La Voisin, the famous sorceress and poisoner, had implicated hundreds, even, it was whispered, the King’s reigning mistress, Madame de Montespan herself. Whole villages, indeed whole districts in the Basques and Juras had been devastated by the laws against witchcraft, and it had proved impossible to deal with all the witches that had been arrested, many of them from the convents, where monotony and ennui drove the in-mates to a despairing search of anything that could relieve their unutterable boredom. The world had grown saner since then; if there were to be a revival of this sort of superstitious persecution, it would revive superstition, and set back the whole of civilization and humanity.

  “But witchcraft amounted to more than mummery,” declared one Mr. Calthrop. “On my own estate in my father’s time a stone was thrown at an old woman’s dog and the mark was found on her body.”

  Monsieur Voltaire waved this aside. He had heard many such instances and did not deny that there was foundation for them. Such people as believed themselves to be witches were certainly abnormal, and they, and the animals they used as their ministers, might well have abnormal powers. But he was certain that the world did not yet fully realize the powers of thought and belief. He considered it possible that future ages would place such instances of unnatural sympathy between a witch and her familiars together with miracles such as the stigmata on the hands and feet of saints, and attribute all these unnatural phenomena to an unnatural state of mind and body. He addressed his remarks chiefly to me, but I did not answer them.

  In spite of the fact that as I am now approaching my thirty-first year, middle age is hard upon me, I have still to find a wife to carry on my family.

  Mistletoe

  “Well, George, my boy, so you’ve got here in spite of the weather, and was there ever such a damned witches” brew and not even seasonable! Snow at Christmas is natural enough, but all this blinding rain, thunder and lightning, damme, it might be midsummer—”

  “Or Macbeth,” said a muffled voice blown back into the storm, as a cloaked figure staggered in on a flurry of wind and rain through the hall doors that the servants were tugging back.

  Squire Pettigrew’s hobbling advance, while still shouting his welcome—“Come in quick, George, and get those doors shut’—stopped dead. “God blast my eyes! It’s not George.”

  “No, sir, it’s Tom.”

  “Might ha” known it when you said “Macbeth.” What the devil are you doing here, you rascal? It was the eldest brother I asked to dine and sleep—not the youngest.”

  “I know, sir, and my father and mother are plaguey sorry and so is George—”

  “And so are you, I suppose, you puppy?”

  “No, sir. I should never be sorry for a chance to pay my respects to you and—and your family—”

  “And especially young miss. D’you think I don’t know it, but none of that now, you’ll not get a word with her, I tell you, she’s well tucked away upstairs this very moment making herself fine for your eldest brother. So you’ve come to say he’ll be late and I knew it—told him not to go to the Farthing Green cockfight through all this mire. Well, we’ll not stay dinner for him, and you can stay as you’re here, but you’ll not sit by Nell, I’ll not have any sole-to-sole play under the table, you young dog.”

  Why did a young dog sound less offensive than a puppy? Tom wondered, as he pulled off his drenched riding cloak and braced himself against the reception of his next piece of news.

  “George didn’t go to the cockfight, sir, and won’t be able to come at all today. He is taken ill on the sudden. Dr. Sloppit calls it “The Influence.” ”

  “Of drink, hey?”

  “No, sir, ’tis the new fangled disease—a high fever and a heavy rheum; he’s sneezing like fireworks in a bonfire and shivering with ague and cannot leave his bed. So as my other brother, Billy, is away, I came to tell you.”

  “To take George’s place, you mean. Well, I’ll not have you ride all the way back on Christmas Eve and say Squire P. wouldn’t give you a dinner and a bed. A dinner, but not a daughter, mark ye. A plague on George!”

  “He has that already,” murmured Tom, who seemed no whit put out by his unwilling welcome.

  The squire, he noticed, was in an unusual fuss which he was covering with rather more than his usual bluster. He told Tom to warm himself at the fire with a cup of sherry sack before going to change his wet clothes; for his own part he must go see to the wines for dinner, for old John was the biggest booby of a butler in the county and young James couldn’t be trusted in the cellar without swilling himself tipsy, and the maids such raw-boned sluts they could never learn which was the best silver, and his poor sister, God help her, got so flurried and flustered she was no more use than an old hen when an important visitor was coming.

  “No, you dog, not you!” he called back to Tom. “I’ve yet to learn that you’re a famous traveller and courtier, like the young man we’re expecting today, the son of the finest lady in the land—or out of it, as she is now.”

  So another guest was expected—which accounted for all this extra fuss and excitement.

  And that’s why he took it as well as he did about George, Tom reflected as he drank his sherry.

  Squire Pettigrew had wealth and was of a good old county family, but he had caught up with the times sufficiently to like the sound of a title. It was what he liked best about Tom’s eldest brother, George, who would be an impoverished peer when his father died, while Tom would never be anything but the Hon. Mr. Fanshawe, the youngest son of three, with no fortune and no prospect but that of going into the Church and the family living, where-as the eldest, George, had gone into the Army, and the second, Billy, into the Navy.

  It was the unfailing formula which only Tom failed to consider inevitable. He had other, and strange, ideas.

  No sooner had the squire bustled off than the young man, lounging in a somnolent attitude, his long legs out-stretched to the fire, his long chin sunk on his chest, jerked up like a jack-in-the-box, took a quick look over his shoulder and up the great stairs, then slid as quiet as a shadow through the double doors into the library. It was empty. Not even the fire was lit.

  He pushed open the window a f
ew inches, put his head out into the downpour, gave two long low whistles like the hoot of an owl, then shut the window again and shook the rain from the small bag-wig tied with a black ribbon at the back of his neck.

  He stepped softly to the little door at the other end of the library, listened at it a moment, swung back to the end near the hall, and stopped short on hearing a door bang. Steps came pattering loose-shod down the bare boards of the back staircase, the little door was flung open and a small dishevelled figure in a yellow petticoat pranced into the room, kicking off one of her shoes as she came.

  “There it goes! I did not even wait to tie it.”

  Tom had caught the shoe and kissed it. “Clitter clatter, pitter patter! What the plague are you about to make so much noise?”

  “Who’s to notice? Aunt is in the powdering closet, the maids are all clattering themselves, and Dad shouting at the men, “Stap my vitals, split my garters, perish my periwig!’—you never heard such a to-do, and all for one young man, for all he may be famous.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Oh, a Mr. Worthy—no, a Mr. Mountaindew or some such, I never heeded the name.”

  “You’ll heed him though, I swear, before the evening’s out. Nell you jilt, promise you won’t heed him.” He was brandishing her shoe high over her head while she leaped up for it like a puppy; he would not give it her until she had kissed him.