BOOK ONE
The Witch of Vieux Chenes
I.
At the Louvre in Paris, Philippe Armand Saint-Simon de Beauferjeac sprawled naked in a room furnished only with a narrow bed, a sputtering lamp, and his lovely cousin, Celestine.
He watched the cold air mist with their breaths as she whispered, "Thank you, pretty demon."
"Handsome," he said, "and a full-grown devil. Mind your tongue as to how you thank me."
Celestine studied his remarkable nudity ... beautiful skin, big hands and big feet, strapping limbs, all sleek muscularity. On his hard chest, nature had wasted a set of flat brown nipples with areolas. But that alluring mouth, his elegant jaw and high, exquisite cheekbones, were no waste of divine handiwork. Nor the wealth of raven hair that so thoroughly exhibited his Basque blood. Great dark eyes, heavy-lashed beneath wicked black eyebrows, were the color of moonlit seas, the whites intensely white. Though younger than she, he was taller than some full-grown devils; a lissome, black swan among the plump, paler birds at Court; his father's spawn. Fresh. Unblemished. But innocence lay dead on those features unmistakably.
She laughed, flowing into his arms, still throbbing inside with pain and the memory of him. "Deflower me further, handsome devil. It was lovely."
Philippe groaned in refusal, remembering only blood and shrieks for mercy as he'd pierced her with slow, strenuous difficulty, after licking her to squeals of arousal. She was the only virgin he'd ever had, and he never wanted another one.
Though married a month, Celestine had been pure before tonight, disgraced by her husband's neglect. It was her husband, Valentin le Puiset, they'd vanquished on this narrow bed, in this cold chamber--her purity gone now, slain on the altar of revenge.
Kissing her forehead, he put her from him and fell back, his sweat cold. "Go, before your bridegroom hears of this and murders us where we lie."
"As if he cared. Perhaps now, he will." She struggled into voluminous garments, kissed Philippe's lips and stroked him sweepingly from neck to thigh, whirled in a joyous pirouette and crept alone from the tiny room.
Shivering, he arose and dressed in under-breeches of thin lawn, breeches of gold-studded green velvet and a shirt of white silk, the froth of lace at the cuffs spilling to his big knuckles. The month was May, but the nights remained stubbornly cold. This room felt like a crypt. Formless sorrow pulsed in the walls, stretched itself upon the stained, rumpled bed.
It was midmorning of an Age, these times in which Philippe the boy came of age at the Sun King's Court in seventeenth-century France. England's Bonny Prince Charley, no longer a fugitive under King Louis' protection, had been restored to his throne two years previously. For Philippe, it would soon be the end of an unimportant era. Celestine, playmate from an era lost, would be the unlikely cause of it all.
And Valentin, her husband?--a profligate peacock, with more male lovers than his bride would know in a lifetime. Philippe gave the cuckold a final thought and then dismissed him. In low spirits, he buckled on his sword, stepping into the corridor where moonlight cast silvery pools through archways open to the sky. Quickly, he made for the stairs that led to his room, where his cousins, Victor and Marcel, were doubtless tucked in for the night.
Hanging lamps cast wavering light amid shadows on the winding stair above. Fear pricked his scalp ... an internal warning, one he'd trusted all his life. Philippe ducked backward against the wall. Dread formed a bubble in his chest as he stood motionless.
He winced as a figure emerged into the light. Golden-haired, resplendent in black-and-silver, handsome as the profligate peacock he was: Valentin le Puiset, husband of the erstwhile virgin Celestine ... flanked by a pair of lesser villains who joined him from the shadows. The three were masked. Valentine, older than Philippe, was more than twice the swordsman.
The peacock lifted his blade to needle Philippe's neck rudely with the point. "Account for yourself, de Beauferjeac."
Philippe smirked daringly into hot green eyes.
"Speak up! No one is permitted past this barrier tonight without a thorough accounting."
It was a game, Palace Barriers; like many games at Court, forbidden, but much indulged in all the same. Philippe assessed Valentin's comrades. One, a fop in pink satin from mask to shoes, was unknown to him. The other, despite a feathered green mask, Philippe recognized too well as Alphonse Racine--the inscrutable stare, rouged lips and spilling lace, small frame sedately blocked the stairs. Philippe eyed him uneasily. Red heels and rouge did not a harmless fellow make. He knew Racine to be a matchless swordsman, merciless in a fight and always spoiling for one.
"I'm just on my way to bed," he accounted for the direction he wished to take, and made as though to breeze up the stairs.
Le Puiset restrained him at sword point. "But you've just been to bed, not so? Studding the pasture must be exhausting work."
The pink-clad stranger emitted a tinkle of mirth.
And Philippe's low spirits plummeted. He had hoped no one would know until tomorrow, by which time he'd have friends at his back, Marcel and a deadly host of others, until Valentin saw fit to make trouble elsewhere, which would not have been long. "Have you harmed Celestine?" he inquired.
"Not I," her spouse of one month vowed, flicking his sword at Philippe's open shirt in wasted search of hidden knives. "She passed this barrier safely tonight. You, however, are not excused to pass."
Philippe stood still long enough to embrace doom, though flight remained foremost on his mind even as mortal fear evaporated. He could be slaughtered here and now, disposed of easily, despite his rank as sixth Marquis de Beauferjeac, Peer of the Realm. But this was not to be. The fickle gift of Sight he possessed foretold triumph. Triumph was not victory, but something was much simpler. Triumph was escaping with his life.
In truth, a ludicrous sense of excitement heated his blood, teasing his nostrils like a scent. He would stand a moment, as if prepared to fight and die, then win the night by fleeing in the thick of it!
Still poised like cornered prey, he reconsidered the pink fop, disliking everything about him, his simpering involvement in this private matter most of all. Celestine had come pleading tonight. Philippe had relieved her of disgrace, that was all ... and not because he'd wanted to. He'd used every argument at his command to dissuade her, point her elsewhere in her quest. But whom could she trust better than a bygone playmate from her childhood? He'd been honor-bound to deflower his cousine when she, married a month and still pure, begged it of him! Only a villain would refuse.
His foot shot out, striking the fop's shin a blow that broke the skin and tore a hole in the pink stocking. The fop screamed, grabbing his leg, hopping on one foot in breathless pain.
Valentin laughed as Philippe had bargained he would. Racine's inscrutability altered by a hair as he almost smiled. Le Puiset then swirled his cloak from his shoulders, casting it to Racine who gave a wild whoop, wheeling it overhead. And the fop began to howl and clap.
Philippe, his blood duly chilled by this burst of awful regalery, stepped back, drawing his sword. Valentin advanced with playful thrusts.
"You tended my bride for me--now I'll tend you for her!"
Philippe treated life with carelessness, as he felt it treated him. Thus far, youth had been a buffer between him and convention ... but, in Valentin's left hand was a wicked dagger, the hilt ringed with glinting, hooked prongs ... a grown man's hideous, messy death.
Parrying with his sword, he lapsed into sullen reflection on the loathsomeness of life at Court, and longed again for home. Was early demise his only hope of escape? Tonight, childhood was an ancient memory--as was home, Villa Beauferjeac in the mountain stillness of Gascony where he'd been born. The warmth of southern France altered in the Pyranees where his forebears had driven back the Moors three centuries ago. He remembered the howl of wolves on winter nights. His mother hurrying across the snow to her carriage, cloaked in white fur. Neighboring cousins, Gascon lords on horseback, hardship mixed with sweet wine and laughter.
Liveried footmen, barefoot maids and their rag-tag children; he yearned for them all. Draped beds providing warm nests in sumptuous, firelit chambers ... and in summer, the verdant majesty everywhere. Fox in the forest, boar and elk, thrushes and rooks and hawks in the air, geese in the courtyard, hounds by the hearth. Teeming life! Philippe recalled not the deadening gloom, the isolation from 'life,' his mother had so despised.
Recollections of Armand, his father, were less bountiful. On his rare visits home, the fifth Marquis had been a man of presence and allure, but unmelting coldness. Though now four years in the grave, he'd been a beloved figure to the child-king Louis, but mired in politics, a man with enemies. Armand de Beauferjeac hadn't permitted his wife, whom he rarely saw at all, to reside at Court. Lady Claudia, in turn, relegated the upbringing of their son to those entrusted with her husband's other affairs in his absence--until Armand died, freeing her to uproot her young son's world.
A beautiful young, superficial and ecstatically widowed Claudia, and her husband's fabulous boy-heir, arrived at Court in style when Philippe was twelve. The callow Sun King required France's nobles to flock to him, forsake their lands for the honor of queuing in his sleeping chamber to pass him his nightshirt! They filled his halls with perfumed courtiers, glittering courtesans, as he, yawning, promenaded to early Mass. Frivolity by Royal Decree, thought Philippe, acidly. But a political masterstroke, the writers of history would say of Louis XIV: reducing the power of the nobility, breaking up the far-off border kingdoms, drawing all allegiance to the Crown.
At Paris, Fontainebleau, wherever the Court moved, children were brittle small adults who rushed smiling-blind into debauchery, where the whole Peerage of France resided under one opulent roof. Quarters were as miserable as Gypsy camps but the life was all grandeur and light; masked balls, games and intrigues, a cycle of sin and absolution. Horses and hounds served as trappings. Hunts took place in parks stocked with tame, exotic animals. Posts at Court were bought with family fortunes and held dearer than honor. Lords and ladies of rank vied for contrived, absurdly-named positions of importance. Untitled cousins functioned as servile companions to those of rank, impoverishing themselves to be maintained in such style. To be sent away, ordered back to one's province, was considered not deliverance, but disgrace.
Philippe leapt back from the feints and thrusts of his advancing foe, whose 'honor' he had, unquestionably, offended in the freezing, lamplit room tonight. Celestine had known the risk her cousin took. She'd chosen him only to spare her heart, knowing Philippe gave himself more faithfully to moods than affection. It was to be no sobbing affair between lovers, or opportunity for blackmail. With her unconventional, reluctant kinsman, that had been assured. But he was caught. And a nobleman's 'honor' in these times was everything. Honor was challenged in every crosswise glance or imagined sneer, every unintended insult whispered and supposedly overheard. Every failure to nod, bow, step aside in time, or faithfully employ the eyes on the back of one's head. True honor, old honor, went undefended. The bickering of roosters prevailed on the Field of the New Honor.
Racine followed the duelists as clashing blades made a discordant song in the airy promenade below the wide, shadowy stone stairs.
Philippe was a swordsman of poor skill, though schooled by the same weapons master who had trained his father. The fifth Marquis had died in a duel with swords, inspiring the son to neglect fencing skills in favor of less noble methods for settling armed disputes. The advantage of a cleverly concealed, extra dagger for instance, or a pistol, with which he was a crack shot at ninety paces. He was retreating--but more than that, inching toward a secret route to sure escape--when his sword flew from his hand, smashed away by Valentin's weapon.
Smiling, le Puiset toyed his blade in the long ends of his youthful victim's hair. "Aha," he laughed, and sheathed the pronged dagger. "Now de Beauferjeac, prepare to be impaled?"
Philippe ducked, unprepared to stand and be skewered, or slowly cut apart during lengthy rape, by these three. Dagger slipping from his sleeve into his sweating palm, he sprang up and slashed, brutally wounding Valentin's sword hand.
"Knave," his foe spat, flinging aside his rapier in disgust. "Alphonse--kill him."
Steel blade singing from its sheath as the words fell from Valentin's lips, his slender accomplice swung, carving a thin, crooked line in blood on Philippe's face from eye to chin. The extra dagger clattered to the floor as the same blade pierced between his ribs, a shallow wound, precise.
A blossom of wet crimson appeared on Philippe's white shirt. Racine stood ready to deliver a second, measured poke, but hesitated, staring at the ruinous facial cut.
"Utter sin," he breathed, "to spoil that face. Where, de Beauferjeac, is the glory in so hideous a dueling scar at your tender age?" He barely glanced at le Puiset, his hard gaze lingering on the prey. "I was cautious, Valentin, because ... we don't want him dead yet."
"Yes we do," corrected le Puiset, holding his bleeding hand as he loped away, rejoined the pink dainty by the stairs. "Cease drooling, Alphonse! Make him dead!"
Racine snatched off his mask, no longer inscrutable. "You have received your sentence, Philippe. Earned it, to my regret."
Philippe smiled, blood dripping along his jaw as he measured the strange rapture in his killer's stare. "Don't make me dead, Alphonse. Kiss me."
Racine smirked hatefully, not fooled. "No, lover. Your days are done. Prepare."
Valentin watched, eager to see Racine handle the trouble in his inimitable style: slowly, like pinning a spider to a sheet of cork and making it die leg by plucked-off leg.
"Slowly, Alphonse!" he sang out.
Philippe's knees weakened, the long, open cut blurring his sight in one eye. Better to suffer for a spell, he decided, than die with suddenness and dignity that would only assist them in getting away with murder. Better than either--was to run.
He backed up to the pale, moonlit statuary that camouflaged his exit. Racine followed. "I'll kiss you as you die, Philippe. I'll suck out your breath as you bleed your last droplet."
Blood bathed Philippe's neck as he rested his hand on the head of a stone cherub. He rocked the statue--a pillar of climbing cherubim--experimentally. Behind it lay a secret stairway, probably one of countless-many, most known to a few, none of them known to all. This one, concealed by an innocent panel in the wall, led to Lady Claudia's apartments.
Racine attacked like a bolt from Hell, swinging his sword in a blurred arc that slashed Philippe's sodden shirt, laying his chest bare.
Dodging the blade's murderous path, Philippe gave the cherub's head a mighty shove that sent the pillar toppling. Racine fell, pinned beneath the statuary, but not for long.
Philippe slid aside the panel, hurtled into a narrow passage and up the stairs.
His legs flew, never missing a beat in the total dark. Three steep flights--then it would be finished, the battle won.
He heard them on the stairs behind him, six clattering feet that also did not miss a beat in the dark. But Philippe was a running lad, born to leg-speed. He made the final landing and emerged in frail lamplight. Breath tearing through his lungs, he charged to his mother's door, twisted and pulled and shook the latch. Locked!
"Shit and all the bleeding saints," he prayed blasphemously, twisting harder.
The latch gave and the door flew open.
He bolted inside. As he slammed and locked it, his pursuers made the landing and chased straight to the door where they knew very well their bird had flown. They flung themselves against it, kicked and pounded on it. Giving it a final, savage blow they shuffled away, cursing bitterly, swearing retaliation against the de Beauferjeac who'd crashed their barrier.
"You know what barrier I mean, de Beauferjeac," shouted Valentin. "The reckoning comes when next we meet!"
Racine called in a receding voice: "Run to Maman, Philippe!"
Philippe kicked the door as savagely from his side, yelling back: "Your mother's hole, Alphonse! I'd have run there, but feared I would be running straight to you!" Their footsteps halted and he laughed, guessing Racine had received that fine taunt and not liked it.
They shambled on.
He slumped against the door, licked blood off his lips and spat it on the rug, trying to see through whorls of eddying candlelight, steady his shivering legs. His shirt hung in swaths, sliced in half. Blood spilled from the wound in his side. His hands were gored to the wrists from clutching it to stanch the flow. "Your mother's wrinkled tit, Alphonse," he muttered thickly. "Your father's shrunken cock and your sister's great, gaping..."
His head light, Philippe dismissed Racine and all his kin and grinned into the face of triumph. The voice--no voice in truth, but the gift of Sight--was sometimes maddeningly silent. But when it spoke, it never erred. He had not died tonight.
He was roundly congratulating himself for his fantastic cunning, the narrowness of his escape, when the floor came up to meet his face and a warm, sticky blackness swallowed him whole.
* * * *
A nagging awareness of his mother, and her maid who stood sobbing as if he'd fallen dead, inspired Philippe to make a nonchalant show of things.
He rolled over on his belly, pushed to all fours and reached up for the door grasp, pulled himself to his feet. Ah. A moment on the floor seemed to have been enough. Though sick to his stomach, he was shivering much less. He still could see nothing out of one eye, but only because the bottom lid had swelled and pain made him want to close it. Salt tears streaming from it leaked like acid into the long, defacing cut.
"You appear mortally beaten this time," Claudia assessed his condition. "And with your dying breath, spitting every profanity in your repertoire to see yourself through the Gates of Hell!"
I fought this battle for Celestine, he worded his explanation in his mind, poorly accustomed to conversation with her. That pus-sore she married has never bedded her, for the love of Judas. She wanted rid of her maidenhead and I scarce blame her. God knows ... I took no joy in it. She was too tight for her pleasure or mine. She shrieked as if I were killing her, and the room was damned cold! Christ, I thought--I had killed her. I warned her I was a poor chase in that respect. But she ... she wept for it. She begged me for only a swift taste of love, once, and only once, for all her life. Celestine desires children. She deserves them. She'll get none for years from Valentin. She raised my ire against him tonight. She tore her hair, rent her clothes, spilled her tears in my shirt, and before I could think very long on it, I'd helped her off with her raiment, and avenged her thoroughly.
Saying none of it, Philippe sagged against the door.
"Look at you. Coming to me to drip blood after a fight!"
"But Mother, you see, they?"
She cut in icily: "Never again, from this day forth, call me 'Mother.' You're worse than a dog. You reek. Of fresh blood, of dripping sweat and--of worse," she coughed out, covering her mouth as if she would retch.
"Yes, Madame. Of course. But they?"
"They, they! What slavering dogs did you lead through my secret passage to my very door? If not for that unholy Sight of yours, you'd not know of its existence."
"It was Alphonse, Valentin, and one other. My sword was taken. My honor lies in tatters; I spent it defending myself against three blackguards who pounced unprovoked. I only escaped with my life. And my virtue, for you well know what sorts they are."
She tapped her shoe in a bristling, dissatisfied rhythm--then threw back her head and screamed. Philippe winced, bleeding sluggishly, no longer profusely. Claudia's maid helped him onto a cream satin settee, its thick bolsters hung with black tassels; a speck of blood would ruin it. Efficiently, the girl spread a lamb's wool scarf beneath his head as he lay back.
Collapsing in almost every muscle, he pulled her on top of him. "You dear creature ... may I call you Mother?"
Smitten to pity, she kissed his cold brow then jumped up, her head hung just-so to discourage a thrashing: Madame de Beauferjeac looked thunderous as she paced among her clothing chests and kicked at the long velvet drapes of her bed.
The wide skirt of her strawberry-colored gown swayed like a tolling bell with her strides. "Odette, wash his face," she ordered. "Let's have a look at the latest wanton destruction. Philippe," she told her son, "you have finally come to me with a face I do not recognize. From what I already see, you are permanently disfigured. A face such as yours should be spared the marks of dueling, as anyone will tell you. Scar your body which can be hidden--but preserve your visage, at least until you're older."
The maid brought a soft cloth dipped in strong spirits. Taking it, Philippe mopped at the devastating facial cut.
His mother studied him thoughtfully. He was a man, to all intents and purposes, stupid and careless and capable of laying others low. In a year, he would be old enough to soldier. Two years and he would ride at the head of troops, commanding men twice his age. Claudia knew the prospect appealed to him, had heard him discuss it endlessly with Marcel. Once packed off to some distant war, Philippe would be in his element and content.
Turning to a tall mirror she powdered her neck, then the upper halves of her round breasts, below the extravagant necklace of ruby pendants she wore--then powdered her coiffeur, whitening dark-blonde hair that she routinely soaked to a flattering, pastel shade with vinegar and lemons. Let Philippe defile his face with scars. She still had her own looks, and thank God for it.
Her glance flickered to his reflection behind her, and Claudia sighed. His beauty had been her pride since he was born. Armand's excessive good-looks made round and sweet, untouched, a perception of her husband that was hers alone. Or should have been, she reflected bitterly. Philippe's father, grandfather and great uncles, had seeded the continent with children in that beautiful image, bastards all. The magnificent, dark lustrous eyes and flying black mane, the soul-stirring features, were pure de Beauferjeac, and unmistakable wherever they appeared. Yet Armand had looked at his one legitimate son, and called him the whelp of a footman, in order to lay his wife low.
Philippe was now his father's image, no longer sweet or untouched; Lord over his House and bearer of the seed. He would marry, without doubt extremely well, and with luck sire an heir before untimely death took him to join his reckless forebears. The late Marquis had made a beauteous corpse at forty, like a dark angel of twenty-five lying waxen in his burial casket, raven locks unmarred by a single strand of gray.
Claudia pasted a black satin, heart-shaped patch above her right breast, aware that she was widely envied, even feared by some. Her prospects for remarriage tantalized. She'd spent a fortune refurbishing the Paris house, creating a palace in which to bear a second husband's progeny without retiring from Court! Although ... lying with a man, suffering what must be suffered ... that prospect repelled her as it always had. Claudia's blood was as cool as her artificial pallor. That Philippe was a product of rape between man and wife proved his father's brooding violence--but also, his mother's snow heart.
"Philippe, I need that unholy Sight of yours." She faced him with a honeyed smile. "Tell me what cards to play the rest of the night. I've been at it for hours, and losing badly. I'd thought to escape, but since you're here, I shall return and win a hat-full!"
"I can't," he managed weakly, though he tried. "I can't see just now."
She turned back to the mirror, scowling, jewels flashing, as she reinspected her appearance from all angles. "I notice you're fit enough when you feel like winning a hat-full. Very well, I'll simply go back and finish losing." Picking up a tall, solitary candle in a long pewter sconce, she strolled to a door that opened on a wide gallery. "Odette, wake Victor or Marcel. It's they who attend his Lordship, not us." The maid ceased caressing his hair, dodged a slap as she hurried out the door Madame was holding wide.
Claudia slipped out quietly too, as though tiptoeing from the nursery and a fussy child who had finally gone to sleep.
Left alone, Philippe called her everything but 'Mother' under his breath. He raised himself from the settee, stood reeling, clutching the edge.
Vertigo landed him on his knees. He slumped onto his hands, falling sideways like an ox sliding into a roadside ditch. Feeling the rug against his stinging cheek, smelling dust, he tried once more to rise. The door receded before his wavering stare. And then the room went truly, awfully dark.
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