Diane reaches out and prods the child, who bows and says, “Happy birthday,” in a high-pitched little whisper.
“It has been baptized,” says Diane cautiously, suddenly not sure of the success of her gift.
No one says anything, and the child looks around the room and begins to whimper.
It is a cry of profound loneliness, and it spurs Henri out of his trance.
“Amazing,” he says. “Take it to…” he says, pausing. The kennels? The servants’ quarters? A barber? A priest? For certainly the poor child is cursed, baptism or not.
“My tailor,” he says at last. “And have proper clothes made for him.”
That animal cry that pierced Henri’s royal heart was, I believe, my father’s one and only lapse in dignity. In his every word, gesture and action, my father strove to be utterly and unmistakably human, as if any and all animal instincts that lay within him had been pushed out through his skin, leaving nothing beneath but noble Catholic soul. All who met him believed him punished by God, but my father never showed himself to be guilty, merely gracefully accepting of his burden.
My father was given a room on the top floor of the palace, under the eaves, which he shared with a dwarf named Coco. He was not unhappy at the French court, even though he was the king’s property, with exactly the same status as the paintings and chairs and draperies that filled the king’s palaces, and the birds and beasts that stocked his private zoo. He had been sold to a ship captain at age two, and then sold by the ship captain to an exotic animal dealer. My father did not remember his parents or anything about his early childhood, though he remembered the animal dealer’s cruelty, and the peacocks and leopards he was caged alongside. He also remembered having rocks thrown at him.
He always told those who asked that he was born on Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands belonging to Spain off the coast of Morocco, though I suspect that that may have been a fiction created by the animal dealer because Gran Canary has been known since ancient times as the “Island of the Dogs.” It is written that there was an Egyptian cult of Anubis, the jackal-faced god, on the island, but such things were not mentioned with regard to my father, as he had been duly baptized and regularly took communion.
My father was not one to rail against his strange fate; he knew that things could have been much worse for him: quite likely, he could have met his destiny in a pit with a lion or a bear, or had his eyes clawed out by falcons. At the court of the King of France, he did not lack for food or clothing, and it appeared not to trouble him that Catherine de Medici asked that he wear a handkerchief over his face as he roamed the palace.
Henri would occasionally demand that my father be brought into his presence. He would make my father recite poetry in Latin, then ask him to remove his coat and doublet, and stand naked atop a thin-legged table. Henri would walk around my father, staring in amazement and shaking his head.
“Your mother lay with a dog, you think?” King Henri would ask my father. My father would shrug. “Or a wolf. Or perhaps there is a curse on your family for some reason?”
This question was never answered to anyone’s satisfaction. There were people, and there were animals, that was how God made the world, but no matter how much he strove to stay on one side of that line my father seemed to bridge the gap in a way that made everyone uncomfortable. For what if there were no line at all?
* * *
The breeze ruffles my fur, making my skin tingle. In my whole life, this is the longest I have ever been naked. I have been taught in church that it’s a sin to admire your own body, to take pleasure in it. I have been taught at home to keep as much of my body as possible hidden at all times. When my mother saw my breasts emerging from my girlish chest last year, she shook her head, told me I looked like the archduke’s spaniel, and laced my dress more tightly. Now I rub the hair where it has been compressed by the dress and the hose, and feel it spring up under my touch. My mother is wrong. My hair is not coarse like a dog’s – it’s more like petting a rabbit.
I run along the banks of a river, staying in the darkness, not making a sound. My dark fur conceals me, allows me to slip through the shadows.
I venture across the fields to a place where my instinct tells me to wait.
I sit in silence, feeling my breath quiet, hearing my heart beat in my ears. What I am doing is madness – no one knows I am out here, and no one will come to my rescue. I am a fourteen-year-old girl, alone, hunting a wolf. Children have been disappearing; the villagers are frightened. Large tracks in the soft earth, body parts gnawed, white bones splintered. Normally a pack of men would set out lighthearted on this chase, with packs of dogs and brazen horns, singing songs of the chase. The archduke himself might join them, offering a cask of wine to the man whose arrow brought the beast down. But the local people do not believe that a normal wolf is the cause of these deaths. They believe that a werewolf is on the loose.
Naturally, my family has fallen under suspicion.
* * *
When my father was fourteen, King Henri studied his genitals intently, using a walking stick with a golden lion on the top to move the penis from side to side to see what lay underneath. “I have a lovely terrier bitch I think you would enjoy,” he said at last. “I am very curious what the puppies will look like.”
My father politely thanked him for the offer, but said that he would prefer a wife he could converse with.
“So you think now,” said Henri with a lifted eyebrow and a little laugh. He reached out and petted the hair on my father’s forehead, which had to be kept trimmed and combed back with pomades so as not to obscure his vision. “Very well, I will find you a wife,” he said, and left the room.
A couple of weeks later, my father was once again summoned to the king’s chamber. There he found a young girl of five holding her mother’s hand.
“Now we shall both have wives named Catherine,” said the king.
The girl shrieked and my father saw the mother’s face pale. “When she has come of age, she is yours,” said the king grandly.
I was not born until twenty-three years later. My mother did not speak of such things, but I can only assume it took her some time to accept the king’s choice of husband for her, and I would guess that my grandmother was slow to announce the arrival of her daughter’s womanhood as well. But if it was the king’s will, it was God’s will.
I know that during her pregnancy my mother prayed every day, but that was nothing unusual for her. Many times I saw her lips move even while she was asleep. Despite her prayers, I was born with a light brown downy fur over my entire body. My father, the midwife, and my mother all crossed themselves at the sight of me.
“At least no one can claim you’ve cuckolded me,” said my father to my mother grimly.
By the time I came along, my mother and father were quite fond of each other, and she would patiently sit and with an ivory comb remove the lice and fleas that often plagued him. Henri had died from wounds sustained during a joust in 1559, and when I was born my parents were living in Munich, the capital of the Kingdom of Bavaria and part of the Holy Roman Empire, Catherine de Medici having given my father away to her cousin by marriage Margaret of Parma after Henri’s death, and the ingrate Margaret having re-gifted my father to a German nobleman who was apparently quite the swordsman. The nobleman seemed frankly a little offended by the unusual cadeau, and locked my father in the basement of his castle, leaving him to feed himself on any rats he could catch with his bare hands. My father preferred to starve, and was soon on the verge of death. My mother’s appeals to the local priest fell on deaf ears, but she continued to appeal to God on an hourly basis. My parents rarely spoke of those days, and I sensed that even more terrible things had happened. But then the nobleman died suddenly, and apparently in debt, and my father became the property of a Bavarian hatmaker who set up our family in a room above his shop, where he charged people to climb up and stare at us.
It was an unusual way to grow up – with an audience, and
often unpleasant to be interrupted in one’s daily tasks by a steady stream of visitors, though far better than being locked in a dungeon, my mother pointed out whenever I complained. The shopkeeper would charge extra to let the gawkers touch my father.
“They are merely expressing their true awe,” said my father. “If it is the truth, it should not pain us.”
And yet, when visitors offered large sums to touch me, he always refused them.
My father was, as I have said, a man of great dignity, always dressed in a clean robe and with his hair neatly combed. He could read and write Latin, and would bow upon the arrival of visitors and introduce himself as Petrus Gonsalvus. He would offer to discuss Aristotle or recite Bible passages from memory while they stared, dumbstruck, then he would slowly, very slowly incline his head and let it be petted by farmwives smelling of the pigs they had brought to market, or by sticky-fingered boys who stole coins to gain entrance, and who tried to pluck out my father’s hairs to sell as potion ingredients to local witches.
At first I was unaware of my difference, and would toddle forward smiling, to the gasps and shrieks of the paying customers. But that time of blissful innocence ended, and I became shy, hiding behind the curtains when I heard footsteps on the stairs.
As I grew older, it was harder to hide.
One day a fat man in tall black boots and a purple peaked hat nodded at me and asked, “How much to kiss it?”
My mother sewed a hood for me out of the tablecloth. In the summer it was unbearably hot underneath, and I felt faint with my own scent.
* * *
I sniff the breeze, watch the shadows in the trees. My heart is still beating quickly, and I am afraid, but I also feel more alive than I ever have. There is a part of me that does not want this night to end. But I must not forget my purpose, my family. I am out here to prove their innocence by losing mine. To save their lives, I am willing to risk mine. Or am I deluding myself? Is there another, darker reason I am here?
The longer I stare into the gloom, the more I can see, and hear. It is as if I am becoming my true self. I am a hunter, but of what? I am certain that what I will find is a normal hungry wolf, but I am holding wolfsbane from the castle garden just in case, and a silver dagger I lifted from the display of arms in the hallway. The archduke’s books were not clear on how to kill a werewolf.
My father did not wish to have more children. When I asked my mother why she had become pregnant again, she obliquely cursed her “animal urges.” I had never thought of my mother as an animal and was confused. Father and Mother educated me and my siblings, two more of whom shared my father’s hirsutism, to emulate his calm and dignified ways, to be charming and polite, hold our heads up, to speak well and wittily of the matters of the day, to be nicely scented and groomed at all times. We were vegetarians so that no one need ever see us tearing flesh with our teeth and draw conclusions. My mother even arranged through Margaret of Parma to have my portrait painted by Lavinia Fontana, a lovely young Bolognese artist of great skill. I am wearing full court dress, complete with stiff white ruff, pearl headdress, and necklace with omnipresent cross, and my expression is that of distant serenity, as if my fur only heightens my holiness. Though my name is painted into the corner, I have heard that the painting is displayed under a card that reads “Monkey Child.”
When I was six and very angry over a seed cake stolen from me by my little brother, I snarled and barked, and it was the only time my father struck me. “Never,” he said, returning to his calm demeanor. “Never,” he whispered.
I believe my father felt his life, all of our lives, depended on this maintenance of humanity in the face of constant insult and indignity. Witch trials were all the rage those days. All anyone could speak of in the terrible summer of 1587 was Walpurga Hausmannin’s confession under torture that she had drunk the blood of more than forty babies at the behest of the devil. She was paraded through the packed streets of Dillingen an der Donau, where one by one her breasts and hands were torn off until at last she was burned to death to the raucous cheers of thousands.
I was twelve years old that summer, and my parents were already talking about whether I might be safer in a convent. We were still the property of the Bavarian hatmaker, and he was making noises about spinning us children off into a satellite act that would tour Europe in a wagon. My father was not an idiot, and was trying to work with the man to ensure a protected future for us all, together, rather than rebelling. How could he rebel? He was the hatmaker’s property, and so were we. We could run, but there was nowhere to escape to. Our hair could be trimmed, razored even, but it would always grow back. We required the protection of powerful, educated people who thought of us as scientific curiosities, something to collect and marvel at like narwhal horns and two-headed calves and delicate coral figurines. Superstitious, ignorant country folk saw only the devil’s hand on our flesh, and wolf’s blood in our veins.
Word of our family’s extraordinary charms reached the ears of Archduke Ferdinand II of Tyrol. The canny hatmaker asked an astronomical price for all of us, and Ferdinand paid. My mother said her prayers were answered, though I would guess that was only partly true.
I vomited many times on the narrow winding road to Schloss Ambras. Our whole family was filled with fear. We kept the drapes on the carriage closed so as not to attract attention in the villages we passed through. When we did have to descend, to stretch our legs and answer nature’s call, we did so in remote areas, keeping our faces hidden even from curious livestock so as not to be blamed for causing them to abort their young.
Ambras, to our enormous relief, was a marvelous place. High stone walls and iron gates concealed a huge castle with red and white striped shutters and crenellated towers, surrounded by low buildings to store the archduke’s collections. I set out to explore every inch of the castle and quickly found a secret passageway that I told no one in my family about – a secret is a kind of treasure, isn’t it? There was a grotto, and a labyrinth, and a hunting preserve. We met a man shaped like a shrimp who lived in the castle, and a giant named Salvatore, and too many dwarves to count.
The archduke, it turned out, was an eccentric collector with a large wunderkammer, and beside his corals and his jewels and his paintings and clocks and sculptures, he had jars of babies with one eye in the middle of their foreheads, and conjoined twins dead in their mother’s womb. I tried not to stare.
We were surprised to learn that the archduke did not plan to display us for the public – he measured us, studied us, made notations in his notebooks. He seemed fascinated by us, but always treated us with dignity. I found him kind, despite his many questions and his habit of collecting our bodily effluvia. His second wife prepared medicines for us from herbs she grew in her garden, and prayed for us all the time. They say his first wife, who died not long ago, was a good witch, and that she planted the herbs.
Though my parents pressed me to practice my dancing, gossip, games, and music, I preferred to hide myself away in the archduke’s library, which he allowed me to investigate. I was supposed to be reading poetry, and learning to tat lace, so that I might in my turn entertain and unnerve the nobility in their drawing rooms and palaces as my monstrous father had, but I was more interested in the archduke’s stash of alchemical tomes.
Reading those heavy leatherbound books with their pages of symbols and strange drawings, I learned about antisyzygy, the union of opposites. That is what alchemy seemed to me to be focused on, the marriage of sun and moon, man and woman, God and the devil, in a great alchemical wedding in which truth is revealed. Was I, I wondered, the result of someone’s spell, an attempt to unite animal and human?
The books were filled with potions and incantations and rites to call out the angels and also demons. In his laboratory at the top of the castle I discovered the archduke had many strange powders and tinctures in tiny, labeled jars: bezoars, unicorn horn, dragon scales. I examined the jars for boiling, and a small oven, and many vials and vessels for purification a
nd distillation.
From the archduke’s books I also learned about Anubis and his connection to the Island of the Dogs where my father was assumed to have been born. Anubis, also called Hermanubis by the Greeks, who merged his legend with that of their own Hermes, was an ancient Egyptian god of the dead, specifically of the passage to the afterlife. The archduke, whispers in the castle said, was trying to bridge that gap, to speak to his late first wife. The job of Anubis, I read, was to remove your heart and weigh it against a feather to see which contained more truth. If it was your heart, you went on to a happy afterlife. If it was the feather…
Anything seemed possible at Ambras, a place of experimentation and curiosity and acceptance.
It felt like we had landed in Eden.
But then we heard the howling.
* * *
Tonight, as the moon passed behind a cloud, I crawled out my window onto a small ledge and made my way into the adjacent chamber, and then through a tiny door behind a tapestry into the secret passageway, down a small flight of stairs, and out into the garden. I quickly slipped away past the topiaries and the maze and the grotto into the hunting preserve below. As I removed my clothing and hid it under the lilac bush, I could hear the drums, and the chanting for blood. I could not see the anxious faces of the archduke’s guards, but I imagined them as sweat- and soot-streaked, wild-eyed, and at the breaking point.
Now the night is still. I do not even hear an owl, or a nightingale. It is as if the whole world is holding its breath, as I am.
I wonder if I am indeed a daughter not of my father, but of Anubis. For several months now, I have had the urge to to bite something. I want to feel my animal self, not hide it. I have dreams, dark dreams of flesh and fire and pleasure.
Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History Page 24
