The Ghosts of Kerfol Read online

  Contents

  Hunger Moon

  These Heads Would Speak

  The Figure Under the Sheet

  When I Love You Best

  The Red of Berries

  WHEN THE COACH SET ME DOWN before that avenue of trees — straight and stern with cicadas screaming in the tall branches — I saw no welcome for a starved brat missing her mama.

  At the end of the avenue, past a clearing where many lanes met, past an iron gate and two vast gardens where all manner of herbs and flowers hunkered, still and sweet-smelling in the sloping shadows, stood the gray mass of the château, flanked by towers. A moat circled it, gleaming darkly. A wide sweep of steps led up to the entrance.

  My oldest cousin, Étienne, who later became a trapper in the New World, had once been a potboy in a château like this. Serfs were sent each night, he said, to stamp on the bullfrogs in the moat so the master could sleep. Drawing near, I imagined the wet crunch of small bodies, torches reflecting in rank water, and I prayed to the Virgin that I would not be called upon to smash frogs.

  The front door was high like a church’s. I longed for the hearth light within, for soup and a bit of crust, but the meaty, sullen maid would not open it.

  “Milady’s asleep,” she scolded through a crack, “and I have no instructions for you. The stable’s in the courtyard out back. Don’t blunder into the men’s quarters next door; it’s the stone building you want. You’ll find straw in the empty stall.” She slapped shut the door and then opened it again. “Come to the kitchen at sunup.”

  I ventured out back and ducked under the low arched doorway of the stable, feeling my way through the dark as snuffling horses reached out to me. Gripped by the profound silence of the manor, I slept the fitful sleep of a criminal that night, my stomach hollow as a hive when all but one angry wasp has left it. I might have known then that Kerfol was a neglectful house, preoccupied with its woes.

  The dull prongs of a pitchfork woke me.

  “Look here,” a voice teased. “I’ve found a leg in the straw. A fine-looking one, too. And a shoulder. What else?”

  “Ack!” I complained. “Don’t!”

  Up I rolled onto my knees to find a lanky boy. I saw at once with grave alarm that his lashes were a bleached shade of copper, like snow where the hawk has hunted, and his hair was a bolder shade of the same. Grand-mère, who had devoted herself to scaring children witless, fancied tales of the loup-garou, an unfortunate human who’d lapped water from the left paw print of a wolf. When the moon swelled, he turned savage, though he had no wolf’s tail because, the priests said, God did not permit the Devil or his instruments right form. Sometimes, too, the curse traveled in the blood. A beast in human form inherited hairy palms, a third finger longer than the second, and, yes, red hair. Here stood the very creature from my oldest nightmare, and I hadn’t the sense to feel frightened. Not really. If this Red Boy was a werewolf, he was a pretty one.

  “You’ll be the new waiting woman, then.” He spoke with a smiling accent, hazel eyes slipping to my breasts on the count of “woman” as if to prove the claim.

  I crossed my arms.

  He leaned back against the stall, and we regarded one another awhile.

  At length, he set aside the pitchfork and reached down.

  “First, promise you were not born on Christmas Eve,” I said. According to Grand-mère, all werewolves were.

  “I promise,” he said solemnly.

  “Whose promise is it?” I went on boldly. “Who offers his hand?”

  “Youen, mademoiselle.” He bowed, and I took the hand and let him heave me up. “The stable boy. The horses will speak for me.” He let go almost clumsily, sweetly, stroking a mare in the stall beyond, which whinnied in answer. “There,” he said. “You see?”

  The clatter of hooves sounded on the gravel outside, and we both rallied, he to greet the rider and I to grope, blushing, in the hay for my clogs and hemp sack.

  In the kitchen, the maid from the night before, whose name was Maria, informed me that it would be my domain only temporarily. Cook had hired me, but in the end, the château had more need in the bedchambers and laundry. “Tomorrow an upstairs woman named Guillemette will see to you,” said Maria, who seemed less sullen in daylight. “But today we’re all needed here.”

  The entire staff of Kerfol, it appeared, had been summoned to stage a feast for a Norman noble and his son. The horseman that morning had been the noble’s servant, arrived to announce his master. The riding party would reach Kerfol by evening, he said, so the baron had set off at once to the hunt and sent his servants scurrying to shore and market for fish and produce.

  Cook oversaw the excavation of dusty jars of vinegar, mustard, cinnamon, cloves, saffron, and ginger. She fetched from who knew where olive oil and pomegranates, oranges, lemons, figs, and plums. By noontide, pots were full and spits were turning, and I was henceforth tormented by smells.

  I quick grew fond of the kitchen, and disappointment that I would be exiled from it, assigned elsewhere, must have shown on my face. Everything did in those days. Maria beat a round of dough, her bright eyes crinkling like an old woman’s, though she couldn’t have had more than three years over my sixteen, and said, “We’re merry today, it’s true, but we’re always so before the public.”

  And?

  “Never mind, now.” She brushed flour off her hands. “Here, take over the bread making. I’ve too much else to do.”

  She showed me how to tend the great hearth and slip spongy loaves into the brick wells with a long-handled shovel. She drew out a golden loaf and flicked it with a fingernail, as if I’d never before baked bread. “Hear that? Nice and crisp. Stack them in that oak cupboard, and whatever you do, don’t let the fire go out, or we’ll have to send to the farmer’s wife for coals. No time for that today.”

  Soon I’d exceeded my order of twenty loaves, swept up the flour, and resorted to thumbing through copies of A New Booke of Cookery and The Accomplished Lady’s Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery, though I learned their titles only a good deal later. The books’ black type swam in my brain like minnows when the tide turns, but the pictures pleased me, almost as much as the smells that day.

  My nose became a hound’s, heroic in its efforts to identify and classify. Whenever someone with a friendly face went by with a pot or platter, my eyes begged, What’s in there? One pock-faced runt even took pity, barking like a harassed innkeeper when he passed: “Shoulder of mutton with oysters,” or “Venison pasty with cherries and crème.”

  Once the family and guests were served and the plates cleared, more and more sweet things passed and plagued me in my idleness: countess cakes and egg pie, apple cream and orange pudding. How could all this be, I thought stubbornly, and not be mine?

  How indeed.

  “You are thin enough,” Maria said as if reading my mind, striding past with gingerbread and a pitcher of clotted cream. “But you’ll get thinner.”

  “You’re not so thin,” I teased when she returned from the main dining room empty-handed.

  “I take a lion’s share of pride in the fact that I keep a woman’s figure,” she boasted, “on the scraps I’m fed.” She thrust out her not insubstantial chest just as Youen entered with a cider cask on his shoulder. Once he’d passed, stony-faced, we covered our mouths, stooping, and laughed uproariously into our palms.

  “I’m glad you’ve come,” Maria said then, smoothing her apron, and for the first time since my parents had sold me into service, I was glad, too. I let my mind wander out after Youen and his copper-colored hair. I’d never seen such hair before, only heard about it in Grand-mère’s stories.

  Not ten minutes later, Maria’s slap stung my knuckles. Worse yet, it ma
de me drop the macaroon I’d filched from a passing tray. The treat lay steaming an instant in the kitchen hay before a hen rushed out to peck at it. My mouth watered, and I looked away before my eyes did, too, thinking, Wasn’t it a puzzle? I’d grown up among peasants, yet it took a great house to teach me hunger.

  “Where are your wits?” she accused.

  “I thought just a taste—” My voice sounded small in the bustle, a very different bustle from the one back home. Here all were quiet as they went about their chores, and they were skin and bones except Maria, every one. “There’s so . . . much.”

  “So much?” Maria’s brows arched. “And every crumb’s accounted for. You risk worse than a whipping, stealing from the baron’s pantry.”

  They were foolish words but rolled out of my mouth before I could stop them: “It was nothing.”

  Maria was our mother hen, our gossip in that house of horrors, our good captain, though I didn’t know it then. On that day, my first at Kerfol, I thought her a scold. She peered close, astonished or nearsighted or both. “Here we call it stealing, Mooncalf. We take our meals when he wills it.”

  I looked down at my dusty clogs, picturing the flawless new pair Papa had crafted for me, the gift that came with his parting smile. For you, Chicken. Lest you shame me in the baron’s chapel on Sundays. “Yes, I’ll grant I’m distracted today.” The shoes were safe in my hemp sack, together with spare bonnets and a feather from the little bird Grand-mère had stolen from its mother’s nest in spring: Percy, who sang in his cage of sticks and twine. Missing them, all of them, would be another sort of hunger. “Though I hope to grow wise soon,” I added dutifully.

  “Hear me, then.” Maria leaned closer still, too close for my liking, and for the first time that day I really looked into her eyes. What I saw there surprised me, concealed in her otherwise brisk aspect. Was it terror? Sadness? I know not, but it cowed me. “Keep your hands to yourself,” she warned, “and your eyes on me. Do as I do.”

  I held my breath, ashamed of my ignorance.

  “Do only that.”

  I nodded, exhaling as she moved away.

  Maria opened the pantry door and spat through it into the dust. “A taste,” she mimicked. “Ha.” She shut the door, and to soothe the mood between us, I opened it again, spat in my turn, and shrugged.

  “You said to do as you do.”

  A smile bloomed on her stern face. “Good girl,” Maria said, and tweaked my chin.

  My first sight of Milady should have confirmed all.

  She wasn’t slight so much as wasted, over-lean and luminous like the nymph of a young beech tree with a head of crow’s gloss. The black hair was pulled back severely from her face, pinned with elaborate lacquered combs for an exotic look. All told, she looked at the edge of health somehow — balanced, I would learn, on the blade of her own hunger.

  When the mistress came into the kitchen, fanning herself with silk, Maria did a little mincing curtsey and dragged me over by the hand. “Here’s Perrette, Milady, your new chambermaid. She arrived last evening, but too late to greet you.”

  The lady surveyed me, took my chin almost roughly — there was more strength in those slender hands than I might have guessed — moved my face this way and that, and her cool expression warmed. She set loose my jaw and held out her ringed hand. I stared in grateful, bovine fashion at the creamy knuckles.

  “Kiss it,” Maria hissed close to my ear, then straightened up to plead, “She’s had no practice, Milady. Today is her first in service.”

  The mistress revoked the hand with a bemused smile, reaching out to brush stray hair from my eyes. “Pretty thing.” Her voice was thin and absent, and she lowered it in a thrilling way, as if we had a secret. “Take your ease. I am happy today.”

  She turned to Maria. “Sire would have more cider for the table. Send Perrette. You and Cook may feed the others.”

  My stomach pitched as the lady glided away in a rustle of satin and Maria thrust a jug of cider at me, urging, “Don’t put your arm over their plates while you pour.”

  Youen and several others were already gathering at the servants’ table as I passed. Oddly, there were no dogs beneath in the straw, ready for what morsels might come. What French table had no dog under it? I wondered as that little group eyed me.

  I was a spectacle, it would seem, poised at what felt to be the edge of fate on that threshold, frozen ridiculously to the floor. But I had to wait till my hand stopped shaking lest I spill. I peeked round and glimpsed the huge chimneypiece strung with firearms, bows, hunting horns, and antlers hooked with whips and leashes.

  Sire had shouted orders from his horse that morning, so I recognized in the low, manly murmur out there my new master’s voice, lamenting. With the harvest near, the women in his manor and village were waging a constant war on moles. You are one of those women now, I told myself. Breathing deep, I ducked in and was dazzled — as one who dives into fast-moving water is dazzled — by the roaring hearth fire reflected in pewter and green glass, copper and leather gilding. Every shelf was lined with fine things that glimmered. The sideboard groaned under cold heaps of lamb pie and homemade sausage, roast carp, plover, and wood pigeon: the greasy remains of the array that had crisscrossed under my nose all day.

  I inched my way around the long table, pausing at each indifferent elbow as Sire and the visiting noble compared apple-planting methods. They spoke of manure, of scraping moss and cutting suckers, of whether ants were better repelled by pepper or by sand. They spoke of their pleasure in the ripening crop.

  The party reclined in large cushioned oak chairs, with Sire at the head, and the only items left on the table were the saltcellar, spoons, wineglasses, and cider mugs. I poured carefully and well, my hand trembling only just.

  “Now to mend the barrels, yes, Yves?” said the visiting noble, who went on to boast that he was a high priest of the Norman apple cult. It mustn’t be so easy, he hinted, nor profitable, to plant the beauties in Brittany when Norman soil suited them better.

  Even I knew the two patriarchs were sparring, and the others at the table held vague faces, sipping and smiling. Then a voice I hadn’t heard before sounded. Strong, yet youthful, this voice had the gravity of an angel’s. Not some silly cupid, I thought, but the sort that steps from behind a tree to cast its shadow o’er you while you toil in the fields, one of the fearsome archangels from Grand-mère’s Bible tellings. What left his lips rang with prophecy, tender and merciful, but also fiercely irrefutable. The words themselves were playful, of little consequence — spoken with the air of one roused from boredom — but each left an echo.

  He told how he had grown up hanging like a monkey from his father’s apple trees. “I’ve traveled the world,” he boasted, “but have loved no place better than my father’s orchard in moonlight.”

  I stole a look at him in the shadows down the table and had to catch my breath, for he was staring straight at the mistress of the house while he spoke these sentimental words. “The trees,” he said, “look like dancing girls then, their silvery hair thrown forward.” It was the noble’s son, I realized, Hervé de Lanrivain. It had to be. Besides Milady, there were no others under thirty-count in the room.

  The silence fast grew oppressive, so I hastened to fill every mug as the noble cleared his throat, jesting that his impudent son would sooner soldier or spout poetry than govern or grow so much as a weed.

  A strange new mood had seized the party, I realized, with Milady at its center. Blameless, yet blamed somehow, her eyes fixed firmly on ringed hands lying flat as submissive dogs on the table. The silence said so. “Why not walk your guests out among the apple trees then, husband?” she soothed. “Show them your pride.”

  Sire grunted in assent, and, following her suit, the gentlemen rose as one.

  I think I did not take in air till I rounded the corner, and then with such incredulous gasping that every servant at the long kitchen table must have heard.

  Mercy.

  I’ll never
know what transpired in the orchard. Maria took me by the shoulders, guided me to a free chair, and the roiling energy at that crowded table absorbed me. “Now,” she said, “you may eat.”

  Cook spooned pottage with turnips into my bowl, grinning beneficently, and some two dozen servants mastered a smile at my expense.

  Only this?

  They did not linger long on my misfortune, and in spite of it, I ate gratefully. Everyone spoke at once, conspiring to educate me. “First, she’ll try to make you her own handmaiden,” one upstairs girl advised, “but he won’t have it, and you’ll end up in the laundry till she no longer pines for you. Then Sire will let you back in to change the beds again. But by this time, your hands are already ruined from the lye.” The party laughed, and my face colored, though I didn’t mind their attentions overmuch. There was comfort in the teasing, a hint of home.

  Youen, who’d cleared his bowl and leaned back easily with an arm on his neighbor’s chair, winked at me across the table. It was a brotherly wink as much as to say, This will all make sense in time, but it reminded me of our morning encounter in the barn. This time I winked back.

  With a swift, secret smile, he stood and walked his plate to the washbasin.

  The others continued to gossip over wooden bowls with Youen at the door keeping watch, and I learned that the baron and his wife were childless and without personal attendants. Sire trusted no one enough to be his laquais, Cook said. His cross-eyed farmer, Symonette, was the closest he had to an attendant, and he’d suffer no cultured hands but his own to touch his wife, even a handmaiden’s. Only unsmiling peasants like Guillemette were permitted to attend her, though the lady would have given much for a companion to sing and sketch with by the fireside.

  Later, as we scrubbed the meat grease off the iron pots with sand, Maria said, “He’s less given to gloomy silences since she came.”

  “Who?” My mind had strayed back to the Red Boy, Youen.