“And if he recovers and comes after us in Paris?”
“Then we’ll leave France.”
It was tempting. The brothers could flee for Italy, where they had allies, resources to draw on. Pay a bribe to Rome to get an official writ exonerating them of witchcraft and heresy. But what about Lucrezia? Smuggle her out, abandon her land, titles, and fortune. Yes, that was worth it.
But there were other things troubling Lorenzo. This pack of wolves—Lucrezia might be responsible. She couldn’t leave the wolves to terrorize Paris and the surrounding countryside—not if she had the knowledge and means to stop it. And he thought she did. Why else had she rushed out to see Giuseppe?
“Where are you going?” Marco asked as Lorenzo turned to go.
To question Lucrezia. To find out what else she knows.
But he didn’t voice this aloud. He didn’t want to share what she’d told him in confidence, and he knew that Marco would muscle in. Through jealousy, if nothing else. So he lied.
“I’m exhausted and need to lie down or I won’t be fit for the road. Can you find the steward or someone else who knows the roads and see what fortifications lie between here and Paris? If we can’t make it by nightfall, we need to know where we can find lodging and provisions. I’d rather not spend the night in a village inn with those wolves on our trail.”
“Yes, good idea.”
Lorenzo felt a twinge of guilt as he watched his brother leave the chapel.
You want her for yourself.
Of course he did. He wanted Lucrezia’s gentle touch on his skin, her confidence as she shared her awful story, trusting him and nobody else. In many ways, he was no competition for his brother, who was older, more handsome, and without the stigma of a judgment from the Inquisition marking him for life.
So what do you have to offer her?
✛
It took Lorenzo several minutes to find Lucrezia. She’d left her chambers, dressed in her cloak, and scaled the walls of the chatelet to look across the countryside. Lorenzo climbed the stone staircase and stood next to her.
“You should be resting,” she said.
“I feel better,” he said, not entirely truthfully.
“Is the prior still refusing to see me?”
“He thinks he can fight it off by himself. Without witchcraft, he says.”
“It’s not witchcraft, it’s the cure for witchcraft. Doesn’t he see the difference?”
“I’m not sure he can, my lady.”
“If he doesn’t let me help, he’s going to turn into one of them. He might anyway—it has been so long, but I’d like to try. Can we force him?”
“We could try,” Lorenzo said, “but if it fails and he turns anyway, you’ll be accused.”
“I’m accused already. Simon will give a report when he returns and the Inquisition will come to my door.”
“Yes, but with our testimony that you tried to help and he wouldn’t let you. Anyway, we’ll protect you, no matter what.”
“So do we force him or not?” she asked. “It would be the right thing to do to help him. Also—”
“Also, what?”
“If we save him, the prior could help us track down the wolves and finish them.”
“How would he do that?” Lorenzo asked.
“He has been hunting them. I don’t know where he gains his knowledge, but it is there. He knows things.” She nodded, seemingly more convinced of her own words. “As distasteful as the prior can be, it would be worth it to stop the killing. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Lorenzo wasn’t entirely certain, but it occurred to him that if Lucrezia could heal him, Montguillon might soften his opposition. Fighting the wolves was a challenge enough without facing opposition from the church at the same time.
He hesitated. “You didn’t finish your story.”
“And you want to hear the rest,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“It was late, and I was frightened. I shouldn’t have begun a story I couldn’t complete.”
“My lady, you can tell me. I want to help.”
Lucrezia gazed across the fields beyond the moat. In the daylight, the chatelet provided a commanding view of the surrounding countryside. Snow glistened across the fields, the drifts as high as a man’s waist. A forest curved to the north and east, while a road led to the northwest. A quarter-mile from the chatelet, the road branched to connect to the highway, with the right fork turning into a rutted cow path that continued into the village, another half-mile beyond that. The village was little more than a church and a score of timbered houses, huddled together for protection, surrounded by a stone wall that might deter bandits, but wouldn’t give pause to even the smallest army.
It certainly hadn’t kept out Courtaud’s hungry pack. According to the priest, the villagers had awakened last night to the sound of howling wolves. The people had barricaded doors and stoked the fires in their hearths.
At first light, several villagers came into the streets, wailing about children who had disappeared during the night. There were four missing in all, the youngest a baby, and the oldest a fourteen-year-old boy. Villagers with axes tracked a bloody trail to the edge of the forest, but didn’t dare enter.
Lorenzo looked closer at the chatelet walls and the scene of last night’s violence. The snow on the edge of the moat was stained with blood and trampled down by men going out to retrieve the dead wolf to burn. Wolf tracks cut across the snow toward the woods. More tracks cut in from the side to join, as if other members of the pack had been lurking outside the castle walls.
“How many are there?” he asked.
“A dozen? Maybe more—their number swells.”
“By scratching and biting their victims, is that it? Their spittle carries some sort of contamination, like a rabid dog? Only instead of killing them it turns them into new wolves for the pack?”
“That isn’t their intention. They’re out to kill. They suffer a hunger that can never be satisfied, bellies that will never fill. If they catch your scent in their nostrils, they cannot be satisfied until they’ve had you. If you’re wounded, but crawl away, you’ll eventually change into one of them. They may still kill you. The stronger ones join the pack.”
Lorenzo looked down at the scratch on his arm. It wasn’t as inflamed as before, but still looked red and angry. “And me?”
“Your fever passed. I think we drove it off in time.”
“By the saints, I hope you’re right.” He put his injured arm behind his back so he wouldn’t be tempted to scratch at it. “So what about the rituals, and the duke’s first wife? They were men practicing witchcraft and wearing wolf pelts. One of them was a man named Courtaud—he’s their leader now. Was he bit?”
She didn’t answer.
“My lady?” he tried again.
“If I tell you, you won’t like it. You’ll fear and hate me.”
She turned and looked him in the eyes, the intensity of her gaze making his heart pound.
“Lucrezia, you know that isn’t true.”
Lorenzo dropped the formal Italian you—Lei—for the familiar, intimate tu. And used her Christian name at the same time, instead of addressing her as an unattached gentleman should speak to a noblewoman. One of those lapses alone might be careless familiarity. Both, together—there could be no mistaking what he meant. A flush came to her cheeks and her sensual lips drew together.
“You are a handsome man,” Lucrezia said. “And you have a good heart.”
“However—?”
She looked like she was going to say something else. Then she shook her head. “Never mind. I’m getting cold up here. Are the horses ready?”
“Not yet. My brother and I didn’t settle the matter of the prior, so Marco is consulting with the steward about where we might spend the night if we can’t make Paris by dark.”
“In that case, let’s find somewhere warmer to talk. It’s time to tell you the rest of the story.”
He stared after her as she
gathered her cloak and skirts and picked her way down the staircase. In spite of his bold words moments earlier, he was afraid. What could it be, he wondered, that convinced her that his affection would turn to fear and hatred? Did she think him so shallow as that?
Or was the conclusion to her story so monstrous, so drenched in sorcery that it would prove Montguillon right? That she was a witch?
No, he decided. Impossible.
Chapter Sixteen
Lucrezia ordered Martin to stoke the fire, then sent her servant from the room and barricaded the door. Lorenzo remained inside with her, and she knew this would delight Lord Nemours’s men and foster the sort of talk that would follow her back to the city. But people talked about her already. A young widow always attracted malicious gossip.
Lorenzo still looked pale and sickly, so she pulled the biggest chair up to the fire, made it comfortable with pillows and insisted he sit down. Then she poured him wine.
“I haven’t broken fast yet—it will go to my head.”
“Drink a little,” she urged. “It will fortify your strength.”
And perhaps soften the blow of my awful tale, she thought to herself.
He obeyed.
Lucrezia took a seat near the fire. Tullia lay at her feet, a powerful, comforting presence.
“I am a good daughter,” she began. “I love my father, and seek to honor him and the family. I understood that they might arrange a marriage for reasons of influence and wealth, so I tamed the desires of my heart. But I didn’t want to leave my beloved Italy for a land where few men can read and a literate woman is a rarity. When I heard that they’d send me to Paris to marry Rigord Ducy, I locked myself in my room while my mother pleaded with me to come out.
“Do you know how they finally convinced me? My father sent me to Paris with a wagon filled with books. There must have been two hundred in all—Dante, Petrarch, Virgil, Cicero, Homer, Lucretius, Ovid, Seneca. Rare copies of Arabic geometers, and texts purporting to be Greek copies of Persian copies of Indian wisdom.”
“That must have cost a small fortune.”
“The duke gave my father a dowry of five thousand livres and two thousand acres in the Dordogne. Father could afford to be generous.”
Lorenzo’s eyes widened.
“Rigord called me the most beautiful woman in the world.” She was embarrassed to say it aloud and expected Lorenzo to heap on some flattery.
He only inclined his head and gave a typically Italian shrug, as if to say “I suppose so, but tastes vary.” This brought a smile to her lips.
“My new husband had his own library, several volumes in parchment between blackened leather. All in old French or Slavonic tongues. I couldn’t even read the French at first, but when I’d picked up more of the language, and had read and reread my own volumes, I revisited his library while Rigord was fighting next to the king in Rouen. It was a great disappointment.
“There was no poetry, no natural philosophy or classical mathematics. Not even theology. Instead, it was strange, superstitious nonsense. Alchemy, potions, spells. Incantations to call on the fairy folk or ward the evil eye. Someone had collected every bit of superstition and witchcraft from Ireland to Scythia and written it down. My husband had scrawled notes in the margins. This spell didn’t work, this one did, but not in the way it promised. This one should be investigated, but one must first acquire the fresh foreskin of a Saracen. Ridiculous, credulous notes, all written in the most appalling, spider-like hand.”
“I take it the pope will not be offering him a post in the Curia,” Lorenzo said, referring to the scribes who labored in the Vatican.
“My seven-year-old nephew has more skill with the pen.” Lucrezia shook her head. “I don’t know what disappointed me more, that my husband labored through these nonsensical books or that he defaced them by scribbling so artlessly in the margins. I had new locks put on the grilles in my own library. Fortunately, he never touched them. A year later, when I caught my husband and his friends with the succubus—or what I thought was the succubus—I remembered something I’d read in one of his books.”
The hard part of her story had come. The one that exposed her culpability. She poured herself some wine and took a long sip. Then she refilled Lorenzo’s goblet.
“Tell me the rest,” he urged.
“Two nights after the obscene gathering in the library, Lord Nemours and the king summoned my husband to the Louvre to press him for funds for the war against the English. I knew he’d be gone all night, so I sent away the servants I doubted, then had Martin watch the door while I looked through the tomes. I found what I was looking for about an hour later. It was a chapter entitled ‘Man and Wolf Entwined.’ A man who could change to a wolf in the moonlight, then return to the form of a man in daylight. He’d gain an unnatural lifespan, triple the biblically allotted three score and ten.
“Not only that, but these wolf men would possess great strength, would have the ability to seduce any woman, bend the will of any man. The procedure was long and arduous, with two monstrous consequences. First, a man must sacrifice a beautiful woman to his new pack. Enslave her mind, reverse the aging, and turn her body over for their abuse. Rigord chose his first wife. I believe if he failed, if she died in their attempt, he meant to use me as a substitute. That’s what they were doing that night.”
Lorenzo looked horrified at this. “The second consequence?”
“Once they gained wolf form, they must regularly feed on human flesh or die. I couldn’t let Rigord do it.”
“This is when you decided to poison him?”
Lucrezia sighed. “Almost. First, I wanted to understand. Rigord tried to change into a wolf—had he succeeded and hidden it? I didn’t think so. He kept sending for manuscripts and I saw him in the library late at night, reading and muttering incantations. I intercepted missives to and from Courtaud that indicated they were still making an attempt. Why did they fail?”
“You didn’t dismiss the entire endeavor as superstition?”
“How could I? I had seen his first wife, her body restored to youth, her mind given over. Yes, I realized she was no succubus, she was the victim of the devilry, not the cause of it,” she added. “But when I studied the book, it appeared that Rigord, Courtaud, and the others had done the other things required—the inverted pentagram, the wolf pelts, the chants. Then I read my husband’s notes. He’d committed an error.
“The problem was in the Latin. It wasn’t the Latin of Cicero, it was the vulgar spoken in Hispania near the end of the empire. The tongue that eventually turned to Castilian. My husband had translated it in the margins, because the incantation said it should be repeated in Latin and again in the Slavonic tongue. But it didn’t provide the translation into Slavonic.”
“So your husband incorrectly translated the vulgar?”
“Because he is illiterate, yes. Then someone else—perhaps this Courtaud—translated it again into Slavonic and the incantation failed. By now a plan was coming into my head.”
“The poison?”
She sighed. “Poison might be the wrong word. I could never have killed him, not intentionally. Instead, I decided to be helpful. I studied the text, made a correct translation into French. The next day I crossed the Seine to the Collége de Sorbonne to find someone at the university who could translate it into Slavonic. A regent directed me to the monastery of Saint-Jacques, where I was told a friar knew the oldest form of this tongue.”
Lorenzo stiffened. “Saint-Jacques? Where Henri Montguillon was the prior?”
“Yes, now you see.”
“So that’s how he became involved.”
“I wasn’t careless. I did it quietly, anonymously. I have a fine pen and I wrote in Latin as if I were a certain Lucretius del Piombo, a Franciscan inquisitor. I needed the prior’s help rooting out witchcraft. Could he translate this French into Slavonic at once and give it to my courier?”
Lorenzo smiled. “Lucretius? A clever pun on the famous Epicurean. If only Montguill
on were well-read enough to get the joke.” Then his smile faded. “Forging a letter from the Inquisition is a capital offense.”
“Yes, I know, but I was fighting witchcraft, or so I thought. I even invented a story about three witches and a pack of loup-garou, thinking if I changed enough details I would put them off the trail. I was too clever by half. Two innocent women have burned at the stake because of that lie. And now Montguillon is convinced that I’m the third witch.”
He looked away.
She continued quickly, before she could lose nerve. “I forged a second note, this one to my husband, purporting to be from his friend Courtaud. I found several of the man’s letters and had no problem copying his hand sufficient to fool Rigord. Courtaud had found the correct translation, I said, and he suggested attempting the transformation at once, rather than waiting for the others to arrive. To prove the concept.”
“Clever.”
“Too clever. Before I delivered Courtaud’s false note, I purchased two enormous mastiffs from Bordeaux. They are bred to attack wolves. For three weeks, I kept them hidden in my wing of the manor, training them to hate and fear the smell of a wolf pelt. Then I delivered the note, had Martin spy on the library for me and report when my husband began the incantation. Rigord did not disappoint.”
“And you planned for the dogs to kill him before he could change back?”
“Not kill him, no. I couldn’t do that.” Lucrezia licked her lips in memory of how things had gone so wrong.
“There was a warning at the end of the chapter in my husband’s book. While reciting the spells, all care should be taken not to touch silver of any kind. Rings, silver thread in one’s cloak, even silver candlesticks in the same room might do it. Once the transformation was complete, these things would be harmless, but should silver touch the skin at the wrong moment, one would turn into a wolf without the ability to change back into human form. Do you remember how I said they were drinking their own blood?”
“Yes, from a pewter chalice. To avoid silver, is that it?” Lorenzo looked down at his own wine, a look of distaste suddenly on his face. He set it aside.
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