Thief of Souls

by Ann Benson

  “He was your superior officer,” I offered gently. “What else were you supposed to do?”

  “He had a superior officer too—I could have made a report. But I had little kids and a wife to support and I couldn’t afford to lose my job.”

  “You can’t blame yourself,” I told him. “Things like this are never within our control, no matter how much we’d like them to be.”

  The train showed up just about then. “I’ll call you next Monday morning,” I said.

  “Whatever.”

  The landscape flashed by in a blur. I wanted to work on my notes, but there was too much motion. Instead, I lowered the seat and tried to think through all the new information I’d gotten.

  Uncle Sean had diddled Wilbur—I would bet my badge on it. Wilbur had started to diddle little boys himself when he got old enough and big enough. One of them had probably threatened to talk, and he had killed him. He liked what it did for him, all that power. Michael Gallagher’s murder, so carefully planned and precisely executed, was probably his first, and the catalyst for all that followed. Erkinnen was going to love this.

  The only love Wilbur Durand got as a child was labeled “bloody” by a powerful authority figure. Bloody love was what he knew, what he would try to re-create. Over and over and over again.

  But he wasn’t going to do it anymore.

  twenty-one

  It was a stout ride to Champtocé, a full day—longer if the trip was made in a muddy season—along the precarious edge of the river, where bare tree roots were all that held the cliff in place. It made no sense that this road should have developed in such proximity to the river and not farther into the forest, where the ground was firmer—that is, until one stopped and looked southeast on a clear day. The beauty of the view over the Loire could take the breath away. I knew from journeys between Champtocé and Machecoul in my younger days that there was always a danger of the road sliding along this route after a hard rain, but today the weather was fine.

  We traveled intently and made good progress, but even the most stalwart journeyer must stop now and then. As Frère Demien tended to his own requirements at the edge of the vista, I slipped into the woods so I might discreetly see to my own. As I moved away from the road, the twigs cracked under my feet; insects buzzed and birds called out their warnings to one another of my approach. A shaft of sunlight angled through the canopy; it was all too familiar, and I found myself quite unexpectedly flooded with memories of my life before the veil. Sensations and images of previous times in these woods overwhelmed me with stunning swiftness and power. I could not hold myself upright but slumped to my knees.

  His hand on mine, pulling me, coaxing, all smiles and laughter and mischief . . .

  Come, Guillemette, my pretty bride, and I will show you a new trick, one you are sure to enjoy. We were so young, Etienne and I, just newly wed and so sweetly captivated by our mutual desire. Willingly I had complied with this bold request, but not until after a moment of blushing pretense at resistance. I swear it was on that occasion, in these very woods, on moss so soft as to put a feather bed to shame, that his seed entered my womb and became Jean, our first son.

  I smile now to think of our excesses.

  Alas, that ever love was sin. . . . My Wife of Bath knew too well how sweet it could be.

  Most often we would go to Machecoul in those days, but sometimes we journeyed to l’Hôtel de la Suze, on the other side of Nantes. It was as comfortable as any of Milord’s estates, more so in winter; it was, in defiance of explanation, a good deal less drafty than most of his other holdings in the short frigid days of January.

  The journey back to Champtocé, however, was always far more pleasing because Etienne and I came to view it as our home. My greatest joys and most terrible sorrows had all been visited upon me there. What folly it was for me to have let the place make such a claim on me, when I had no such claim on the place itself.

  Just after noon Frère Demien and I passed through the village of Champtoceaux. There was a tavern there, where I had often stopped with my husband, who would listen to any musician, no matter how awful, for hours on end. Often he would grasp me at the waist and twirl me around to the rhythm of the drumming; my skirts would fly out behind me in a most vulgar manner, but he never seemed to care—he loved the revelry and would lose himself in it.

  I had a sudden ache to be inside the place again. “There might be stories here,” I said aloud.

  “There are stories everywhere.”

  “Brother, let us take some refreshment.”

  He made no objection. We tethered our mounts outside the venerable establishment, whose wooden sign, saying simply TAVERN, hung slightly askew on a wrought-iron standard, as it had the first time I walked under it.

  The moment we walked in the door, I saw that nothing had changed, not the landlord nor his plump wife, who still strutted about the place as if she were the mistress of the finest hotel. Their girth had increased—by some two beings, to be plain.

  We removed our cloaks and settled at benches on opposite sides of a long table. The landlord came round to serve us; he looked me squarely in the eye but did not recognize me, though I could hardly have been called a regular since I did not live in Champtoceaux itself. Still, there was a pang of regret within me and a brief moment of wonder at whether we ought to have stopped here at all.

  “God’s blessings on you, Mother,” he said, bowing slightly in my direction. “And on you too, Brother,” he said, acknowledging Frère Demien. “How can I serve you today?”

  “A flagon,” Frère Demien said.

  I added, “And then a word.”

  “What word would you be seeking, now?”

  “What passes in these parts,” I said. “I have not come through this way in a good long time, where once I did more often.”

  The man smiled mischievously and then left us for a moment. I looked around at the other guests; in one corner, there was an elderly man whose full face I could not see. There was something familiar about him, but I could not place him in my mind’s history. The man himself was large and shockingly white-haired, but what struck me most intensely was the size of his hands, which dwarfed the knife he held to whittle at a small block of wood. His fingers moved with expert delicacy, and I was inordinately curious about what he might be shaping. A pile of chips and shavings lay on the board before him. Every now and then as she passed, the mistress would swoop in with one hand and banish the offending chips to the dirt floor, where they would serve to sop up any spilled ale.

  Her husband returned with a large flagon of ale and two mugs, which he placed beneath our noses.

  We drank; he spoke. “Let me see now, what has transpired . . .” He rattled off a short list of banal events: the birth of a cow, the purchase of a loom, a blight on a cherry crop, a bit of gossip about a corpulent wife pounding her fists on a scrawny husband in a fit of pique over some imagined infidelity. And then he looked me in the eye again and said, “But of course there is no need to tell you that more of our children have disappeared.”

  I was filled with inexplicable joy that he knew me, though it stung somewhat to realize that it was by reputation for my inquiries rather than a fondly recalled visitor from older times.

  To my momentary speechlessness he said, “Are you not the Mother Abbess?”

  “I am,” I admitted.

  He seemed to be expecting something from me. I tried not to disappoint.

  “Well, then, how many have gone missing here?”

  He shook his head and said softly, “We have lost count.”

  When Frère Demien tried to pay the bill, he would not accept our money. For a few moments after he left us, I could do little more than stare at the wood boards of the table. When I looked up again, my eyes sought out the white-haired old man. He had slipped away.

  By the time we reached Ancenis—the last real town we would encounter before crossing into the bounds of Champtocé—I had worked myself into a nearly feverish state of
anticipation. So many memories dwelled there for me. Why I felt so compelled to tear the scab from a wound that was as healed as it would ever be was something I had tried but failed to understand. Jean de Malestroit, the one person in this world who might have dissuaded me, had not been up to the task.

  We approached the fortress along the main road, which cut through a wide, flat meadow. Anyone standing watch along the heights of the fortress walls would see us—we were as helpless and exposed as a mouse to an owl. But we heard no warnings, no shouts to identify ourselves. I suppose the warrior on the wall felt completely uncowed by the sight of a nun and a priest, one of whom was riding a donkey. One after the next, the familiar details came into view. First I saw the row of narrow archer’s windows that encircled the south tower just below the parapet. Then I saw the standard waving in the breeze—it would not be Milord’s at present. God alone knew who owned the place at the moment, so often had it changed hands of late, although we had been told that René de la Suze had managed to wrestle the title back from his brother’s mortgager, whoever that fool might be. There was perhaps more greenery around the base of the wall than there had been the last time I was there; in general the grounds outside the moat looked overgrown and untended, a predictable ill effect of mutable ownership. A number of stones were missing or misaligned in the massive outer wall, and the whole place looked sadly neglected.

  But it was no less magnificent for its flaws. Finally, one of the sentries signaled to us; we waved back to indicate our friendliness. The portcullis began to rise as we neared the drawbridge. How well I remembered each creak of the pulley wheel as the ropes heaved the massive door upward. My heart was flooded with elation, terror, uncertainty, hope, and many more emotions, most of which I would never be able to name.

  Would I find what I hoped to find?

  It seemed so unlikely after so much time.

  Frère Demien saw my anxiety. “Do not fret so, Sister,” he reassured me. “He will still be there.”

  On what basis other than his own optimism he made this questionable claim I cannot say, but I tried to let myself feel comforted. “I covet your confidence, Brother.”

  “This man was a fine castellan, or so you have said.”

  “But unrelated to any member of the nobility and therefore at risk for uprooting, as I well know.”

  “What fool of a lord would get rid of an exceptional castellan to install someone who knows nothing of the property’s intricacies, merely for the sake of employing one of his allies?”

  “There are many lords who are complete fools, mon frère, and allegiance is a powerful force.”

  “Not so powerful as it once was, ma soeur, nor will it ever be as attractive as wisdom for which one does not have to pay.”

  The mantles worn by the gatesmen bore the coat of arms of René de la Suze, as had been rumored. And the influence of wisdom had prevailed in his tenancy of Champtocé, at least in part, because the castellan Marcel still resided on the premises.

  “I should have made a wager with you,” Frère Demien said with a smile.

  “You would not have won decisively,” I said.

  “But the result would have merited some payment, you must admit.”

  “But not full payment. We were neither of us fully right.”

  Marcel was indeed still in residence, though his official duties had been assigned to a younger man of René de la Suze’s choosing. But Gilles de Rais’s sensible younger brother had appointed the older man to a permanent post as an adviser to his inexperienced ally, who would benefit greatly from the advocacy. At the same time, the elder castellan was rewarded for his loyal service, which was only fitting and right.

  The vibrant man of middle years that Guy Marcel had been while I resided in Champtocé was still quite visible in the old man he had become. His eyes still shone with joie de vivre; his stride was still purposeful, if abbreviated. There was the same pride in his carriage that I remembered so fondly. Still present, too, were his courteous mannerisms, especially to travelers.

  “Bonjour, mon frère,” he said to Frère Demien when he approached us. “À votre service.”

  “Merci bien, but it is my sister in Christ who seeks you, not I,” the young monk said.

  Guy Marcel turned toward me and regarded my face without recognition. He did not stare rudely, as a less polite man might have done. Instead, he said, “I am pleased to meet you, Sister.”

  I laughed quietly. “Ah, Monsieur, has it been that much time?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You once called me Madame la Drappiere,” I said.

  He nearly gasped. “Mon Dieu, Madame, you have returned!”

  I knew he might not have been told of what had been done with me after Etienne died. The women would likely have known, for the same fate might have happened to any one of them. But I had not been friendly with the man’s wife while we both resided here—she was a sorry shrew and always ornery, so I had avoided her, as I suspect he often did himself. I wondered if she was still alive.

  He came closer to me, his arms outstretched in welcome. “Madame,” he said warmly, “it is truly wonderful to see you here again after so many years.”

  I introduced Frère Demien and then inquired politely after the disagreeable wife. He told me she had gone to her eternal rest some years before. All this chatter took place before we had even dismounted. “Let me summon a steward for your—uh, animals,” Marcel said. He offered me a helping hand, which eased what would have been an otherwise ungainly descent. As our beasts were led away, we two-legged beings were shown to the same quarters near the outer gate that Monsieur Marcel had occupied in those earlier days. The new castellan had chosen to live deeper within the fortress, perhaps for safety’s sake, which was understandable; the first edifice to be attacked in an assault would be that one, so close and vulnerable, the white underbelly in any castle, or so Etienne had said. But the old man was probably accustomed to that danger and might have missed it had he been moved.

  He made us comfortable at a long table and offered refreshments, which we heartily accepted. We faced one another over glasses of hippocras and a plate of blushing ripe pears, freshly plucked from the tree. Frère Demien turned one over in his hands and sighed out his admiration. “Très belle,” he cooed at the fruit. “Magnifique!”

  Guy Marcel smiled pleasantly. “I take no credit for their perfection. We have an excellent gardener who sees to all our trees. I know nothing of these things save how to enjoy the fruits of another’s wisdom and labor. But I am told that the soil here is by some miracle ideal for pears, and therein lies the secret.”

  “I should like to see the orchard and sample the soil, if I might,” Frère Demien said.

  “I shall arrange it,” Marcel said. Then he turned to me. “And, Madame, what of you these days?” He gestured toward the cross that hung on my chest. “You are in service to God, I see. . . .”

  I told the old gentleman of my life since I had departed Champtocé, which telling sadly required only three or four breaths to complete. He was kind enough to show interest and congratulated me on my apparent good fortune.

  “It is a fine thing to have the confidence of one’s master, I think.”

  “You would know this well, if anyone.”

  “And what of your son, Madame? If God had not taken so much of my memory, I would recall his name. . . .”

  “Jean,” I said. “He serves his Holiness in Avignon. I am forced to do constant penance for my excessive pride over the matter.”

  We all laughed for a moment. Then there was no further reason to delay.

  “I would ask you some questions, Monsieur, about my other son. Michel.”

  When I spoke my son’s name, Guy Marcel seemed to shrink back a bit. “Madame,” he protested, “it was so many years ago that the tragedy happened . . .”

  “I myself am subject to the whims of memory these days. I will not fault you for an incomplete recollection.”

  “You are far too y
outhful yet to be having such difficulties,” he said with a kind smile. “Let us speak of other things.”

  His compliments did not lessen my resolve, nor did his sweet attempt to change the subject deter me from my chosen path. But I did not wish to make him uncomfortable, so we sat in silence for a moment or two; the pause in the discourse seemed somehow to honor my long-gone son. I waited patiently until the time seemed right to press him again.

  “I simply want to ask you to recall as much as you can of what happened.”

  The poor man squirmed. “Madame, what more is there to be known? The boy simply disappeared—we know not why. Perhaps it was a result of the boar’s villainy, as Milord Gilles told us. But no one can say.” He glanced back and forth between me and my young brother and then took a long pull on his glass of hippocras. “It is my sincere wish that God cradles your boy in His arms, as I hope for myself one day. Not too long from now, I suspect.”

  “When Milord came back here that day, what was it exactly that he said to you?”

  “Madame, please—I cannot recall such details after so many years.”

  Though it had been more than a decade since Etienne had died, I could recall the sight of his festering leg with such clarity that I longed to cast it out of my mind, if only such a miraculous thing could be done. I had tried desperately over the years to relieve myself of the image of his blackened limb, which rotted progressively until it took his life. No matter how sincere my efforts, I failed: It persists in my memory like a stone of such weight that it cannot be hefted and thrown. Buried in Guy Marcel’s mind somewhere was the remembrance of what Gilles de Rais had said on his return from the outing that took my son from me. I would have those words drawn out again.

  I told him so, unequivocally. “Monsieur, such things as you heard said that day cannot be erased from one’s memory. You need only give a moment to thought, and it will come clear to you. I am certain of it.”