Thief of Souls

by Ann Benson

  His face took on the familiar expression of disapproval, in which I found strange comfort. “We shall not speak of that now, Sister; there will be plenty of time later to discuss such things. For the moment, I am glad that he did. God alone knows what you might have done in a few more seconds. For a woman of your station to act in such a—”

  “My station be damned! Why must I always live by the laws of my station?”

  “Because those are the laws we live by, and it is proper that we do so, to ward off the dark chaos that comes from lawlessness.” He paused briefly, then said, “I daresay we have seen what happens when someone tries to live outside the law—in the case of Milord, beyond it. But I think that any merciful judge would acquit you of killing him in view of the circumstances.”

  “As they did the woman who killed her husband, though he beat her nearly to death himself?”

  “That was quite a different matter. What you have been through is far more injurious.”

  “You do not know the half of what I have been through.”

  “Au contraire,” he said. There was great tenderness in his voice. “I know the whole of it.”

  “You cannot. Unless Jean told you.”

  “I do not need Jean or anyone else to know what your suspicions were. I know that you have suspected Milord of killing your son for some months. And now you know without doubt that he did kill him.”

  “Why did you not speak of this before?”

  “Because, just as yourself, in my heart I was not sure that he had done it until now and because he had committed so many other murders that Michel’s was not needed to convict him. For some time I have believed that it could not have been any other way. I wanted to spare you this, if it was within my power to do so.”

  I had wanted the same for myself, desperately, to the point where my own mind arranged it for me to be spared by simply refusing to believe it all. Somewhere along the path of discovery, the staggering truth had come upon me like rain in winter, cold to the bone. For as long as I could, I wrapped myself in a cloak of oilcloth so the horrible drops would roll off. And they did—I managed to set it all aside for a time after Gilles swore that he could never do such a thing. Why had I believed him? For the same reasons why he had killed—he had wanted to kill, and it was there to be done. I had wanted to believe, and belief was there for me.

  We were quiet as we descended the stairs. When we reached the courtyard, I said, “Thank you for trying to protect me, but in knowing the truth I am somehow relieved of its weight. I have carried the uncertainty of what happened to Michel for so many years that I think perhaps I shall miss it when it no longer burdens me. There will be a void in me, where once there was hope.”

  “You will find things to fill that void,” he said. With great tenderness, he tucked stray hairs under the white headpiece that held my veil in place. “We shall keep you very busy here, you can be sure of it.”

  Jean must have recovered sufficiently to rejoin his group, for when we reached my chamber, he was no longer there.

  “I have no idea what the hour is,” I said as I slumped onto my bed. “I have never known such complete exhaustion as I do right now. Perhaps I shall sleep for a very long time. But before I do, I beg you, please tell me, what did you say to Milord while you were in there?”

  “Now is not the time for such things to be discussed.”

  “Please, Eminence, there can be no better time than now.”

  With one hand, he reached out and closed the door, then lowered himself carefully into my small chair. He eyed the blue dress momentarily, but said nothing of it. “I made an agreement with him. Milord will give a deeper confession tomorrow. He will confess to having commenced his crimes in the beginning of his youth, and not in the year when his Grandpère died.”

  It was Gilles de Rais’s right to say whatever he wanted on the morrow; it had already been granted to him and could not be rescinded. This would be his last chance to speak to the representatives of God in justification of his deeds.

  “He will not speak of killing Michel, then.”

  “No. I can require it of him if you wish.”

  “No,” I said quietly. “It would be agony to hear it all again. But you were there for some time; there must have been more that you spoke of.”

  “Other arrangements were made, but they are of no consequence just yet and you need not concern yourself.” He stood rather abruptly. “I will leave you to your dreams, then. Good night.”

  “Good night, my bishop.”

  I was alone with the bitter truth.

  I removed everything I wore before slipping into bed—my robe, my shift, the gold chain that hung around my neck. I wanted to be as unadorned and pure as on the day of my birth. In doing so, I hoped I might imagine myself untouched by the burdens of a lifetime. But it was not to be. My mind would not allow it.

  My dreams were indescribably dark. I woke up several times, all in a sweat, prompted by gruesome images of my headless son. Sometimes he would call to me and give chase, and I would try to escape, and then in the next dream it would be me pursuing him. Sometimes his entrails were visible, glistening with blood, but then he would trip on them and lose his footing and tumble down the embankment of the stream at the base of the oak grove, there to lie, writhing in agony. In one episode, I held his head in my arms, but the rest of him was not there. We were standing over a gravestone, perhaps Etienne’s, and his lifeless eyes were weeping. Mine as well. I awoke with my face wet and my eyes crusted.

  Again Milord confessed all, but in this telling he remedied the flaws of the confession he made in his private apartments. He did not mention my son Michel by name, though other children were recalled specifically and in detail—in particular, the boy in Vannes whose headless body somehow had the wherewithal to resist disposal and was finally pushed into the latrine by Poitou.

  As promised, he was more specific about the time when he had begun his terrible reign. But he could not seem to resist blaming someone for the wayward path he had chosen.

  “. . . since the beginning of my youth, and that I have sinned against God and His commandments and offended our Savior on account of the bad management I had received in my childhood, when, unbridled, I applied myself to whatever pleased me and pleased myself with every illicit act.

  “. . . that I have sinned against nature in ways not fully detailed in the articles, and let it be published in the vernacular for all men, the better part of whom do not know Latin, to read and to take to heart. Let this record be set forth for my own shame, for it is through this exposure of my sins that I shall more easily attain God’s forgiveness and absolution. It was due to my delicate nature as a child—”

  Frère Jean la Drappiere sat on one side of me, Frère Demien DeLisle on the other. Together they managed to restrain me when I tried to rise up in anger.

  My voice was quiet but my words were deliberate. “He was never delicate.”

  “—that I engaged in pleasures and did according to my will whatever evil I could. Please, all you fathers and mothers and neighbors of all young boys, I exhort you to raise them with good manners, by good examples and doctrines, to instruct them in these things and correct them lest they fall into the same trap wherein I have fallen. Because of these passions, and to satisfy my sensual desires with delights, I took and had others take many children, so many that I can not determine the number exactly. I had them all killed, but not until I had vice of sodomy by ejaculating sperm on their bellies, as much after their deaths as before it. De Sille and de Briqueville were there with me, as well as Poitou and Henriet, Rossignol and petit Robin. We inflicted various forms of torment on them, including slitting them up the belly and taking their heads with dirks, daggers, and knives. Sometimes we struck them on the head with a cudgel or some other instrument. There were times when we tied them up and hung them from a peg or a hook, and while they languished I had my pleasures on them. And sometimes while they were dying, I sat on their bellies and watched them d
ie, and Henriet and Poitou and I would laugh at them.

  “I embraced these dead children and admired their heads and members, so I might contemplate which among them were the most beautiful. I kept these heads, until the time came when I was forced to give up the most part of them. . . .”

  He exhorted parents to guard their children against the downfall he had known by raising them to avoid it.

  “Those of you present who have children, I urge you to instruct them in good doctrines and instill in them the habit of virtue during their early years. . . . Watch over your children, who ought not to be too finely dressed or live in laziness. Keep them from developing a desire for delicacies and hippocras, for those desires led me to a constant state of excitement, during which I perpetrated most of my crimes.”

  And finally, he asked for the forgiveness of those he had wronged.

  “I implore the parents and friends of those children I have so cruelly massacred, for the blessing of forgiveness and their assistance in praying for the repose of my soul.”

  And when he was through, there was absolute silence, until Chapeillon rose up from his seat. “Let a day be fixed for definitive sentences,” he said.

  “Yes,” Jean de Malestroit said. His voice reflected the same deep desire that I felt for all of this to be concluded. “We shall reconvene on the morrow to that end.” He sounded the gavel and then rose up himself. Court was adjourned.

  That was the last of Milord Gilles’s confessions.

  “I had not thought I could be more disturbed by these admissions of his,” I said to Jean. “But each telling drives it deeper into my heart.”

  “Our hearts are easily wounded just now, in view of what has been revealed. That he killed my brother is the worst kind of wound he could inflict upon me.”

  “I think perhaps the first wound he inflicted upon you was equally great,” I said. “To be pursued so, and threatened, and forced to touch . . . to . . . submit—”

  I was weeping inside, though I had no more tears left to fall. I could barely say the word; it came out in the thinnest whisper. “To do sodomy. Dear God, Jean, I would give anything to have that time back, to have it to do over again. We might have left that evil place and gone somewhere else.”

  “To do what, Mère? To farm? Father was no farmer or herdsman. He was a soldier, and soldiers unattached become highwaymen to feed their families. I could not have that happen to us. All of our hopes and dreams, my education, Michel’s hope for soldiery himself, it would all have been forfeit.”

  He was right, of course. He had protected everyone he loved and everything he cherished. But he should not have had to do so. That he lived as a man with as much grace as he had was miraculous after what had been done to him.

  “Come,” I said. I forsook the hard stone bench on which we had been sitting, inside the courtyard. The late October wind had freshened and everything about me was cold—my fingers, my toes, my nose. “Let us abandon our sorrows in pursuit of joy.”

  To that end, we went in search of Frère Demien. The arborist–priest had left us immediately after court’s session to see to the sorting of apples. The most perfect would be sent to the cold cellar for winter consumption. Those with the misfortune to have been bruised would be sent to the press for the removal of their juice, which would harden in oak barrels for a time, until fermented. Would that I had a glass or two of that delight to soften my memory of the day’s events.

  The harvest house smelled wonderful when we entered, the air much warmer than that outside, which bore the chill of high autumn and the promise of a cold winter. Barrels and bushels of apples were everywhere. Frère Demien had selected out a number of perfect red ones and set them aside. I picked one up and admired it.

  “For his Eminence’s morning tray?” I said.

  “And Duke Jean’s cellar,” he said.

  He looked around the harvest house, surveying the progress. “It goes quite well,” he said, “though there have been distractions this year.” He idly removed an apple from one barrel and placed it in another. “I have not paid as much attention to it as I ought. Of course, the brothers and sisters proceed without me and do a commendable job of it, but my eye would make the task even more successful.”

  In other words, if he had been here to supervise, he would not have to move apples from one barrel to another.

  “This has been an unusual harvest,” I said. “An unusual year.”

  “And may we have no more such years,” Frère Demien said. He crossed himself, to enhance the likelihood. “But I daresay that it will become even more memorable, and soon.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “I have word that Milord Gilles will speak again with his Eminence and l’Hôpital. He wishes to bargain.”

  “What bargain could possibly be made now?”

  “His death.”

  “But of course he shall be put to death. His Eminence would not entertain the notion of mere imprisonment.”

  “Of course,” Frère Demien said. “That is unquestionable. But what I am told he wishes to amend is the manner of his death.”

  Anger filled my soul; I hoped it did not show. I am certain that it did, for both young priests, my son and Frère Demien, fixed their eyes upon me immediately.

  I pulled my hood up over my veil again and, without a word, turned toward the door. I was out and running toward the castle before Jean could even speak.

  My son, on his younger legs, did catch me, of course. But I would not allow him to accompany me on my visit to Jean de Malestroit. In reaction, he behaved in a most unsuitable manner for a priest, with abrupt and unholy curses, the actions of an angry son trying to influence his mother. But I would not yield to his persistent attempts at persuasion.

  I found his Eminence with a supper tray before him. Parchments were everywhere on the table; the food seemed untouched. The troubled look melted from his face when I entered, and his welcome was quite sincere.

  “I had thought you would dine with your son, else I would have invited you to join me.”

  “I have no appetite today.” I pointed to his untouched tray. “Nor, it appears, do you.”

  “My stomach is turning and does not want food.”

  “That is understandable, in view of what I have just been told. Is it true that he will bargain for leniency?”

  “Yes.”

  “And will you render it to him?”

  “Only if I am sufficiently compelled by circumstances, which I cannot imagine. Unless something terribly rare develops between now and tomorrow, I shall sentence him to be burned at the stake until he is nothing more than ashes. And then I shall make sure his ashes are scattered into the wind.”

  It was a terrible, unthinkable fate for one who believed in an afterlife to know that his corporeal remains would forever be blown about like so much unworthy dust. But nothing less would do.

  “I am not the only one whose rest would eternally be disturbed if he were to be shown mercy. He had no mercy for my son, or for legions of other lost sons.”

  “And you are not the only person with such sentiments in this,” he said quietly. “But I am bound to hear this request, both as a judge and a man of God.”

  “When shall you see him?”

  “The verdict and sentences will be delivered tomorrow. So it must be tonight.”

  “I would give you the same advice that I think you would give me were I to ascend to his den of evil.”

  “Which would be . . .”

  “Take care not to allow him to beguile you. The devil is a liar and takes many forms, one of which is upstairs.”

  I returned to my son, and we pretended to dine. We pushed the food around on our plates; our fingertips grew greasy but our knives went virtually unused. Finally, the young sister who had brought us our food came and took it away again, mostly uneaten.

  We went to the evening service together, and when the time came for each of us to pray according to our own intent and desire, I prayed for swift a
nd sure punishment of Gilles de Rais. “Tomorrow the verdict will be given,” I said as I came up off my knees. “We shall be there, in memory of your brother and my son, and of all those children who have been taken from us.”

  “Amen,” Jean said.

  Outside the chapel, we went our separate ways, he to rejoin his entourage, and I to the convent. As I came through the courtyard a young sister approached me with the message that his Eminence wished to speak with me.

  I headed directly for his chambers, without a moment’s hesitation.

  He bade me sit, which I did, but as soon as I had settled in I began questioning him. “What of your encounter?”

  By the pained and drawn look on his face, it was plain that he had acquiesced.

  “He will be buried in hallowed ground,” he said quietly. “We will hang him first, then burn him, but his corpse shall be removed from the flames before it is destroyed.” He looked into my eyes, waiting for a response.

  I deliberately gave myself time to think before speaking. “A symbolic immolation.” I was bitterly unhappy but could not find a way to express it adequately. “What of the others?”

  “He has requested that they be allowed to die after him, so they might witness his execution and know with certainty that he has not escaped punishment; he feels they deserve this treatment in view of his having been the cause of their waywardness, as they were in his service. He believes that without his influence, neither Poitou nor Henriet would have led such a despicable life as they did while his retainers. I agreed that it should happen thus.”

  It seemed a fitting dispensation for the pages. “And he will die thereafter, as you have described?”

  “He will.”

  I made no attempt to hide my bitter disappointment. “You have made a devil’s bargain, Eminence.” Disgusted and angry, I stood and faced him directly. “What has he offered? The key to a strongbox full of gold to be delivered to Duke Jean? A formula for transmogrification of metals that is truly successful? The Eucharist cup of Christ?”