by Dan Davis
“He is twelve, you say?” I prompted, looking at Stephen.
“Twelve years, yes, my lord, or perhaps eleven. Thereabouts.”
It was the most common age, Stephen had found, when collating the many witness statements. Almost all of those lost were boys aged between eight and fourteen and most of them were aged twelve.
“It seems,” Stephen had said, “that even demons have preferential tastes.”
“Thank you,” I said to the exhausted young man. “For bringing this to us so swiftly. You must rest. The good innkeeper here will take care of you until you have strength enough to return home. We shall do everything we can to find young Jean.”
“Believe him, then?” Walt asked a little while later as we made for the stables.
“Don’t you?” Rob asked, hoisting his arrow bag onto his shoulder.
Walt shrugged. “I suppose he’s too simple-minded to make a good liar.”
Rob grinned at him. “Takes one to know one, eh?”
Despite himself, Walt laughed. “A truer word never was spoken, sir.”
I laughed also but then shook myself. “We shall have fewer jests and more alacrity,” I reminded them. “A boy’s life is in peril.”
All of us together, along with Stephen and the valets, hurriedly rode south, beyond the immediate environs of Castle Tiffauges, toward the village of Saint-Georges from where the boy had vanished. Something about the abduction had brought the reality of it into sharp relief that morning and I was filled with emotion. He had been taken the day before, perhaps only half a day since he was a happy young lad going about his business. And I knew that he might be suffering even as we rushed to his aid. Suffering by having his blood drained from his body and who knew what other horrors being inflicted at the same time. Baron Gilles de Rais had created those horrors, he had made his servants into blood-mad revenants and the whole nest of the bastards had been growing fat on the children of the lands he was supposed to be protecting.
“I will kill him,” I said to myself as I rode, twisting the reins in my hands. “I will damned well murder him and every bloody one of them.”
It took half the day to get to Saint-Georges-Montaigu. By the calendar it was the height of summer but it had never really begun on the ground. The crops were stunted and the best that could be hoped for was a miserable harvest and at the worst, the rain and damp would continue and there would be no harvest at all. If that happened, and they could not import grain from elsewhere, people would starve.
And while the crops remained stunted, the weeds grew amongst them as wild as ever, winding their way between the stalks of wheat to choke them until they were torn out by hoe and by hand. People laboured in the fields as hard as they ever did but their hearts were sick with the thought that their efforts might be for nought.
Saint-Georges-Montaigu was a decent-looking village on the side of a small, low valley, with buildings of stone and a fine, if small church.
The people there were out in the street as we rode up and many recognised us from our traipsing back and forth collecting witness statements. Some, I thought, had even been in the church when I had promised them justice and two of them I recognised as they had provided sworn statements about their own stolen children.
I had expected that these people would be anxious and afraid. In fact, they were furious.
The men and women gathered outside the church swarmed us even before we could dismount. Our valets were frightened. And not just the valets.
Walt muttered a warning. “How about we ride right through them?”
I did not want to hurt them in an effort to get away but it certainly seemed that they wished to inflict harm on us.
“You promised us!” the blacksmith swore as he stomped toward me, waving a wide-bladed short sword over his head. “You stood before us and gave your word. And now this!”
“Aye, Richard,” Rob said. “Let’s ride on through.”
“It would be sensible to do so,” Stephen said.
The crowd called out curses and named me as a betrayer.
“False!” a woman cried. “He is false!”
Mobs are perhaps the most dangerous thing in the world and it is always prudent to flee from them as you would flee from a bear or a rabid dog. Instead, while my men hissed and swore at me, I dismounted and went to the blacksmith with my hands spread wide. I hoped he would not behead me.
“I came to you,” I said. “I came as soon as I heard. I came to help. Help you, I say, help to find Little Jean.”
“Help?” the boy’s father said, eyes bulging. A tall man, and lean, he seemed half skeleton in his anguish. “It is too late for your help, sir. You must go, before I do something I regret.”
“When did they take him?” I asked them.
“Yesterday,” a woman said beside me. “In the full light of day.”
“What happened?” I asked the crowd. “Where was he?” I asked the blacksmith. “The rider who came to us said your boy’s name is Jean? What happened to Little Jean?”
The man seemed to suddenly deflate and his shoulders slumped. “I cannot keep him in my sight every hour. I cannot. I have business. He was sent to fetch the charcoal in the morning. And he…”
When he could not find the words, the women clinging to him filled in the details.
“He never returned with the charcoal, sir.”
“But he was seen, he was.”
“Seen with them.”
I grabbed the woman who had spoken. “His servants? The ones they call Henriet, Poitou? Sillé? Roger de Briqueville?”
They replied all in a jumble, half speaking over each other.
“No, no. No, sir.”
“It was her.”
“Her and her familiar.”
“The old woman and the young.”
“La Meffraye and her girl.”
“La Meffraye’s granddaughter, a little demon spawn.”
“She teases the boys in, so she does, with smiles and sweets and promises.”
“We told them not to listen but…”
“They was seen, leading him away by the hand towards his place.”
I turned to the one who had spoken last. “To Castle Tiffauges?”
They crossed themselves as they nodded in confirmation.
“Why did these witnesses not stop them?” I asked.
“It was from far away,” one woman said.
“They was children themselves, sir,” another said. “They was afraid.”
I could certainly understand that. “You say that Jean was taken by La Meffraye and this young girl who assists her and they led him away by hand. You mean they travelled on foot from here to Tiffauges? No horses or carts?”
“They walk always, La Meffraye and her familiar,” a woman said, to much nodding from the others. “Horses and other beasts will not allow them near.”
“Smell the demon blood,” another confirmed.
I had to hold up my hands and raise my voice to speak over their peasant nonsense.
“I shall go to Tiffauges at once,” I said. “If Jean lives, I shall bring him back.”
They stared at me like I was mad, silence settling over the crowd at last.
“You?” the Jean the blacksmith said, breaking the spell. “You alone?”
“Me and my men,” I said, jerking my finger over my shoulder. “It will not be the first time we have stormed a castle.”
Shaking their heads, they wept and cried, for they knew then that I had lost my mind and that there was no hope for Little Jean le Fevre.
“Leave, leave,” the women said, pushing me. “Be gone.”
“Not only will I find your boy,” I said. “But I shall kill Gilles de Rais and his hellish servants when I do it.”
It only made them wail louder and heave against me. I stepped back toward my men as the crowd surged forward.
“You are a liar,” his father said, his face contorted in anguish and his voice breaking and raising to a wail as he ranted. “A
liar and a deceiver. You gave us hope and then you snatched it away. Go! Never show your face here again or I swear I shall murder you myself and the law be damned.”
Swinging myself into the saddle and turning my frightened horse around, I looked back at the crowd.
“I will return. With your boy or with his murderer’s head.”
We rode away, with their angry shouts and curses ringing in my ears.
***
Gilles de Rais was not at Castle Tiffauges.
For the first time since he had arrived there, his banner was not hanging over the battlements of the tallest tower.
We took our usual position a mile away across the plain in our rocks by the hillock.
“Gates are shut,” Rob said, unnecessarily nodding at the castle. “Portcullis down. No banner. That’s that, then.”
“Doesn’t mean he’s gone,” Walt pointed out. “Could just be pretending. Skulking inside.”
I still thought that was not the Marshal’s way of doing things but then I had been recently outwitted to such an extent that it had almost cost us our lives. So I said nothing about that.
“Ride to the village,” I said to Rob, jerking my finger northward. “Find out if they saw him leave. Saw his person, that is.”
While we waited for his return, the rest of us sat in our saddles and watched the great mass of the castle, squatting like a great stone beast upon its rock.
“If the Baron has fled,” Stephen asked, “surely the boy is not within.”
“Perhaps Jean was taken for the benefit of revenant servants who yet remain. See, the smoke rises from that tower.”
Stephen covered his eyes with his hand and slumped against the rocks. “You promised those poor people that you would bring back their boy. You swore you would storm that fortress, Richard.”
“I did,” I said. “And I stand by it.”
Stephen scoffed and for once, Walt seemed to agree with him.
“Come on, sir. Can’t fight our way into that, anyway, can we,” Walt said, chewing on a piece of sausage. “Not a hope.”
“Some of the walls are old.” I gestured. “See, on the northwest tower? And on the eastern wall.”
Walt stopped chewing. “Was hoping you hadn’t noticed.”
“How could I not? The mortar is crumbling and lichen growing on them. They may not have been repaired in all the years since they were built.”
“Probably still younger than you, though.”
I grunted. “Probably.”
Stephen glanced between us. “Surely, you do not intend to scale those walls? But you would need ladders. Or ropes and iron stakes, at the very least, hammered into the gaps between the stones and the rope wrapped around them.”
Walt snorted a laugh. “That’d be nice.”
“If we are to save the boy, we cannot delay.”
Stephen’s expression plainly suggested that he considered the boy long dead. But he had sense enough to not say so aloud in my hearing.
After some time, Rob came galloping back and came running forward, hunched over at the waist. “He is gone. East, on the road to Machecoul. Yesterday at dawn, he left with his army, flying his banner aloft.”
“Dawn yesterday,” I said. “Before Little Jean was taken by La Meffraye and her girl. Perhaps there is hope after all. See for yourselves, it is as I said. Smoke from more than one fire rises from within the walls. There is life there. If it is as the last time I was there, it could be fifty or a hundred men within. One or more of them requiring blood.”
Stephen rubbed his eyes and summoned courage enough to confront me. “Surely, Richard, you know there is no hope. If Gilles de Rais has indeed gone, I will agree that perhaps his servants are still within. But if that is true then they would have had the boy all last night and all the hours so far today. If they use boys for the purposes which we suspect, the poor lad is surely drained white and long dead by now.”
“All the same,” I said, speaking slowly and keeping my voice as low and steady as I could. “I am going to find him. If he died within, his murderers are still there. And it is they who will be drained white and dead before long. You stay here, Stephen. Hold the horses.”
“I will send the servants home,” he said, jerking his head to them.
“No. They stay with you at this position. We may need them.”
He realised I meant that we may need their blood if we are injured in the attempt on the castle. “Very well. God be with you all.”
“Fortune favours the bold, Stephen,” I said.
As I spoke it, I thought of the disasters at Orléans and the lost battles afterwards. Joan the Maiden had been bold and she had been so favoured by fate. But had it ever truly been Joan or was it Gilles de Rais who had been the bold one? Inspiring the French with his cunning employment of a prophecy about the Maiden saving France.
“I believe those were Pliny the Elder’s last words,” Stephen said.
“Truly?” I asked. “I take it he was a great knight?”
“Well, Stephen began, furrowing his brow. “I believe he was a soldier in his youth.”
“Fine words,” I said.
“Load of nonsense,” Walt said. “Boldness gets you killed. Fortune favours the cautious, more like.”
“And will those be your final words, Walt?” I said.
Walt wiped his mouth. “I’m going to live forever, Richard. You ain’t never going to shut me up.”
We laughed together and Stephen stared at us, confused. He did not understand that soldiers must make jests at such times. We were about to risk our lives in a perilous stratagem and a man either laughs at fate or is crushed by the fear of what may come. Indeed, I have come to understand in centuries since that the ancient aphorism should mean that fortune favours the bold in spirit, not necessarily in deed. Although, if you have one, you tend to find yourself risking the other.
“It is not too late to return to the inn,” Stephen said. “Or even to Nantes, to reconsider our strategy. You promised the villagers, the blacksmith, yes. But you need not abide by it in these circumstances.”
“Stephen, I am disappointed in you. We must go. We are knights, we three, and we have sworn to protect the innocent.”
We stripped ourselves of whatever we did not need and walked through the wind-blasted clumps of sedge and scrub toward the castle. It was late in the day and the shadows were long. Night would soon fall but in the meantime if anyone was keeping a close watch of the approach, we would be seen.
But none came and we closed with the castle without any warning cry or trumpet or bell sounding and without soldiers coming to stop us. I almost hoped for it, and prayed a group of horsemen would ride us down. For we could kill them and take their horses and ride in through the gates instead of risking our necks in a mad climb.
And it was mad. The closer we got, the more absurd it seemed. The lowest wall, on the east, was atop a thirty feet high rockface and the wall itself was another forty feet above that. A fall of such a height was not survivable by a mortal man and would perhaps even be enough to dash one of us to pieces.
With a chill, I recalled the story about Joan the Maiden. When she had been captured and held by the Burgundians in Castle Beaurevoir in the north, she leapt from a tower and fell seventy feet. Somehow, she did not die. It was one of the key pieces of evidence that led me to believe Gilles de Rais had made the girl into a revenant by forcing her to ingest his own blood, for how could a mortal girl survive such a height?
I looked up at the wall, impossibly high overhead, and imagined the fall from the top. They said Joan lay crippled at the bottom and was unable to walk but then somehow she recovered in a few days and was soon as fit as she ever was.
And so it was impossible to avoid concluding that she had either been a revenant or she had truly been blessed by God’s own hand. And if it was the latter then what did that mean for God’s judgement of England?
Walt nudged me. “Come on, don’t just stand there gawking. It ain’t goin
g to get any lower.”
And we climbed.
Hand over hand, clinging to the crumbling facing stones. The blocks were almost half a man’s height and so it was a stretch each time to reach up a hand and drag up a foot. Searching always for a secure hold, enough to bear my weight.
My hands were soon raw and my knees scraped bloody.
Joan was ever on my mind. Surely, she had been given blood after her fall. Or perhaps she had taken it from someone against their will. But I could not imagine such a thing would not have been reported at the time. Joan of Arc, savaging the neck of one of her gaolers?
They said that she had landed on the muddy ground of the drained moat but even so, it was not possible to fall the height of seven floors and make a swift recovery. If I were to fall from the wall, I thought, I would have no moat, drained or otherwise, but a steep ravine with hard stones and a rock floor. A fall onto a stone would crack my skull open like an egg and my brains would be dashed out.
My foot slipped and I grasped a handhold, missed it and my fingers slid down the side of a block before I could arrest my fall. I lost the nails from both middle fingers of my left hand and I had to stop and clutch at the wall, shaking, with tears running down my face from the pain. I have been stabbed, sliced, and shot with arrows and balls and bullets more times than I can recall, and I have even been set on fire, but there is a particular agony to losing one’s fingernails. Especially when dangling on the side of a castle wall.
Rob was far above me and Walt, much closer, looked down and cried out, alarmed. I hissed at him to keep going and forced myself up. It would not do to be so outdone by my men and I hurried up and up, being driven by the pain and the blood and the anger that Gilles de Rais had defeated me, had defeated England. His old castle wall would not defeat me.
I pulled myself up over the battlements at the top soon after Rob and ahead of Walt. We sat on the other side, breathing deeply. It was almost completely dark in the shadow of the battlements and the sky above was dark blue on its way to black.
“We should have tried,” Walt said, “knocking on the front door.”
“Come,” I said, pointing to the doorway that led from the covered parapet walk along the wall into the nearest tower. “Let us go down.”
