Part 1: Imogene

Muzillac, 1795

"Give me the torch!" Moncoutant hissed, snatching the light from his adjutant. The young man was petrified. He did not know what he was doing here, in this churchyard, in the middle of the night, alone with his Colonel. It was dark, and eerily silent, and he felt he was in danger. The townsfolk were hostile, to say the very least. The Republicans could be lurking anywhere. And after what he had seen in the village square this day, he felt none too safe in the company of the Marquis.

He hardly recognized the man he had served these past two years, the bluff, jovial Marquis who was a little over fond of good brandy and bad jokes. The guillotine had been one such joke. It had been a gift from le Comte de Boisfailly, one of the chief financiers of their expedition. The boy thought that bringing it all the way to France with them might be taking the joke a little too far, but the Marquis had said that he might make use of it in his kitchen garden. One always had use for a good sharp blade for slicing the tomates and the pommes de terre.

This man he did not know. The boy had noted in recent weeks that the Colonel almost never slept, and when he did, his rest was fitful and seemed to be troubled by fearsome dreams. On several occasions the boy had come upon him seemingly engaged in conversation with himself. His temper was volatile. This afternoon when Faure, the mayor of Muzillac, had stood against him when the troops had entered the town, he had killed the man with ruthless dispatch, and, it seemed, an utter lack of conscience. Then, later on, at dinner, he had been very much his usual self, putting on a rather amusing display for the benefit of that gullible young British naval officer.

The Marquis was walking rapidly ahead of him. The ground was uneven, littered with dead tree limbs, and pieces of broken gravestones. The boy feared he would trip and fall and the Marquis would not stop, and he would be left alone in the darkness.

"Mon Colonel!" he protested breathlessly. " I fear this is unwise…"

Moncoutant stopped, wheeled on him, sweeping the torch across his face so the boy leaped back away from it.

"Go, then!" he said. "Leave me alone!" He turned on his heel and strode off, not waiting to see if the boy was following.

The adjutant was too terrified to return to the Marquis' house on his own. He hurried after.

The seigneurial  crypt of the Moncoutants rose out of the darkness ahead, an enormous tomb built of white stone that seemed to glow even in the absence of moonlight. The  façade was plain, but imposing, with the family name, along with a Latin motto that the boy did not understand, carved into the vaulted pediment.

Colonel Moncoutant was ascending the steps. The boy followed. On either side of a door that appeared to be made entirely of forged iron were two pedestals upon which had stood what the boy supposed were statues of eagles, or some other bird of prey. It was difficult to tell, for the statues were headless now. But he had seen the same birds on the Marquis' family crest, on his banner and his seal.

"They have not been here," he heard the Marquis say, meaning, he supposed, that the crypt seemed not to have been opened. Moncoutant must have feared that the graves of his noble family would have been sacked by the Republicans, or perhaps by vengeful townfolk.

Without looking at the boy, Moncoutant held the torch out behind him, meaning for him to take it. He obeyed, and saw Moncoutant produce a massive iron key and place it in the lock. With his whole weight, the man fell upon the heavy door.

And when it opened, the adjutant gasped, for all at once he felt the indescribable chill of the air in the tomb, and the smell---though not the same horrid rotten stench of death that he had known on the field of battle---was undeniably the smell of mortality, of countless years of dust and decay.

The Marquis disappeared into the tomb. The boy hesitated. Then he realized it was he who held the torch and he must follow.

He found his Colonel on his knees before a vault. There was a niche carved into the wall and within the niche, was a stone effigy, old fashioned, the boy thought, like the ones he had seen in the oldest churches, only this one stood upright, as if alive, rather than in repose, as in death. It was the figure of a young woman in a simple cloak and gown, her hair streaming loose over narrow shoulders. It was impossible to tell what she might have looked like in life, only that she was small and delicate, with an angular, fine boned face. One arm she held out in front of her, and on it she wore a heavy glove, and on her fist sat a magnificent bird of prey, a hawk, carved in such minute and perfect detail the boy half expected it to flap its wings and fly away, out the door of the dank and airless tomb, into the starless night.

He stepped a little closer. He raised the torch so as to read the inscription on the wall of the tomb:

"Imogene-Marie de Chantonnay de Moncoutant, Marquise.
Honored wife and Mother
1751- 1779

La nuit brille comme le jour,
L'obscurité et la lumière
Est les deux semblable à vous

The night shineth as the day,
The darkness and the light,
Are both alike to thee."

*****

Brittany, 1762

"Come on, after her!" Lucien, mounted behind his brother, Armand-Louis, bounced impatiently and flapped his thin legs against the horse's sides. "We'll lose her!" he cried in frustration, unable to provoke a reaction from the heavy, elderly, flea-bitten grey dray horse they rode together.

"Where?" drawled Armand disinterestedly. " I don't see her."

"There!" Lucien screamed, his arm shooting out past his brother's face, pointing to the speck, drifting in a clear, pale sky, that was the falcon. Le Fantome Gris, he had named her, The Grey Ghost. He had taken her from the nest, had raised her himself, and she was newly trained. This was only the second time she had flown free and he was desperate with worry that he might lose her. She had screamed and bated when he removed the hood, flying up against the jesses, flapping and falling forward, bells jangling discordantly as he struggled to loose the tethers from his leather gauntlet. Then, when at last he had tossed her into the air, she had shot straight up, like an arrow from a well-drawn bow, and then outward, sweeping over the marsh towards the riverbank.

"Armand!" Lucien yelled, smacking the older boy on the shoulder. Armand dug his bony, bare heels into the old horse's barrel and at last they began to move, picking their way at a plodding pace over the boggy ground.

Lucien stared at the sky. The light stabbed at his eyes, and yet he dared not blink lest he should lose sight of the hawk. She was a sliver of black, floating in lazy circles over the river, soaring, drifting, lower, lower.

"She sees something!" he whispered. They were closer now, not one hundred yards from the river's edge. Where was the prey, Lucien wondered? A rook cawed from a copse not far away. A swift swooped low over the river, feeding on the wing. Then, he saw it. A plover rose from the reeds along the riverbank, alerted to the danger hovering above. It flew frantically, darting from side to side to avoid the killer now moving almost leisurely on its tail.

Lucien shaded his eyes and squinted upward, holding his breath, his heart pounding in his chest as he watched her, his Ghost, his beautiful killing machine. She seemed to tease the plover, hovering over it, shadowing it with her magnificent wingspan before dipping lazily toward the little bird. The plover flew upward in response, but could not maintain its height. It flew down again, heading for the copse of trees. The falcon plummeted with the force and accuracy of a arrow, her curved beak caught in a weak ray of sun. The plover was snatched from the air, taken in her vicious curling talons, as quickly, as naturally as the taking of a breath. Lucien exhaled.

Ghost remained in the air, wheeling and hovering with her prey. "Come, my love, my beauty," Lucien prayed silently as he fished in the pouch tied at his waist, searching for his bone whistle, his eyes never leaving the hawk. Would she return to him, to take the meat from his glove as she had learned to do unfailingly when she was flown to the lure? Or would she head to the copse where, wild bird that she truly was, she could devour her well-earned feast in peace?

Finding the whistle, he raised it to his lips and blew. The high, thin call sounded weak, wavering, lost in the empty air. But Lucien saw her turn. She arced and flew towards him, flying with leisurely flaps of her wings. He raised his gauntleted wrist to receive her.

"Brav!" he cooed to her as she settled onto her perch, fluffed her feathers, and docilely yielded up her prey to Lucien's fingers. He dropped it into the game bag that was tied around Armand's waist, and quietly refastened the jesses.  He could scarcely contain his sense of pride. His blood sang with the excitement of the kill. The Ghost regarded him with her cold, unkind eye, golden and hard and gleaming like a heartless jewel. He smiled. "We are two of a kind, my beloved," he thought to himself, for he had seen his own eyes in his mother's mirror and they too were hard, green-gold, as clear as glass.

"That won't make much of a supper," Armand observed of the little dead plover. "We'd better check my snares on the way home. Or will you fly her again?" He turned and looked at Lucien.

Armand's eyes were brown, soft as a deer's; their father's eyes, only pure and untroubled by the frightful waking dreams that plagued the Marquis now.

"No," answered Lucien, feeding The Ghost a scrap of sheep's liver. Her razor sharp beak struck the thumbnail of his ungloved right hand and he realized his foolishness at not wearing a second glove. He would not pull his hand away, though, not while she was feeding. "Papa says only one or two flights a day at first, as she is being so good."

Slowly, carefully, Lucien moved to replace the hood. He could not resist stroking the silken feathers covering the round, hard dome of her skull. She allowed it, remaining calm as he fastened the hood of soft, ancient leather, decorated with its fanciful crown of plumage.

No one hunted with raptors anymore. It was a thing of the past. No more the bird of prey, the lance and the bow. Now men hunted with dogs and with guns. But falconry was the sport of kings, his father would say, and we are the blood of kings. Blood of Bourbon and Valois are we. Valois. Lucien had heard the tale of his ancestor, Charles the Sixth, "Charles the Mad" he was called, who once slew four of his own courtiers in a fit of madness. Who had thin rods of iron sewn into his clothing because he believed he was made of glass, and feared that one day he would simply…break.

They rode home in silence, heading inland, the smell of the sea and the marshy stench of the river's mouth growing fainter, replaced by the piquant fragrance of the scrub pine trees that grew in this sandy, acid soil. This flat, open country was perfect for hawking, Lucien knew. The hawk could fly over the trappy ground where horses and men could not follow, and yet the huntsman could see the hunt unfold in the sky above his head, could thrill to the swiftness and glory of the kill.

Armand's snares yielded up a brace of fairly fat rabbits that would make a respectable contribution to the cook pot. Lucien knew that Armand was secretly gloating over his own success, thinking himself superior for having provided a veritable feast compared with Lucien's puny offering. The boys hunted not only for sport, but out of necessity. The Marquis de Muzillac owned nothing but his house and its farm and a few parcels of land that brought in the miserable sum of eight hundred livres a year. It would not be enough to equip his sons for the army when the time came. Indeed, it was already past the time when boys of their station would be sent to L'Ecole de Militaire de Versailles. In the absence of money to pay farm laborers, the Marquis would plough his own fields, his boots caked with mud, his face gaunt, hollow-cheeked, weather-beaten. Many of the peasants who paid him their seigneurial dues were better off than he was.

Armand was entirely too contented with this life, to Lucien's mind. At eleven years of age Jean-Xavier Lucien Gondrin de Moncoutant already had an unfailing sense of himself. He was not a peasant. Let Armand hunt with his slingshot and his crude snares. Sometimes Lucien would think that he would rather starve. Armand, with his soft, accepting way, his weak, gentle face, disgusted him sometimes. The genteel poverty in which his family lived disgusted him. Blood of kings. He was the younger son, and yet he knew that one day he, Lucien, would be the one who would restore his family, his home, to honor and glory.

" C'hwi hanv e an hini, ma babig," would say Riwanon, his old nurse, as she rocked him as a tiny child, her ancient clouded eyes staring into the darkness. She was a wise- woman, said some, a witch, said others. She had nursed his father, and she alone was waiting here in this backwater of a place when all else had been lost and his father brought his family here, to the ancestral home of the Marquis de Muzillac. Lucien had been born here. "You are the one, my babe," Riwanon would say in her Breton tongue that sounded harsh and strange to his ears. "You will be the one."

 The Chateau de Moncoutant squatted in the shadow of the high, crumbling walls of an ancient keep. From a distance the house appeared a fine, strong edifice, large and symmetrical, built of pale, honey-colored stone, with four fat, round towers, one at each corner, and a great many tall, arched windows. But as one approached one could see how many of the windows stared black and empty for want of glass, how lichen covered the golden stone and weeds choked the foundations and how dark trails of slime ran down the walls.

They rode through a gap in the decaying walls of the old castle keep. Here, at the back of the house was an assemblage of outbuildings, all in one stage or another of irrevocable disrepair. Stables, food cellars, pig sties. The falcon mews, however, as ancient as the castle walls, remained intact. A low, square building of stone, it had only the merest of shuttered slits for windows, for the birds needed the quiet and the dark. As they stopped before the entrance, Lucien could smell the dark, heavy air within. Musty, mingled with the acrid smell of bird droppings, the stink of centuries of dead things and blood.

"Who is that?" Armand-Louis asked. Lucien looked toward the house, into the courtyard with its ruined fountain and broken paving stones. He saw his father. A donkey. Three  figures robed in white.

"Nuns," he answered flatly. "Beggars."

It was not unusual for the Carmelite sisters of the Couvent de Sainte Marie de Magdala to come seeking alms and tithe for the Church. Uninterested, he slid off over the rear of the horse, careful not to disturb his falcon, resting quietly on his fist, her head tucked in to her cowl. Armand-Louis rode off on the direction of the house.

Lucien carried the Ghost into the mews. He could hear a ruffling of feathers in the darkness as the other birds shifted on their perches: two young eyasses, taken this spring, not yet ready to fly to the lure; and Haude, an old bird belonging to his father. In Breton, her name meant "noble".

Allowing a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, he stood there holding the bird, stroking the smooth, hard feathers of her back. He began to untie the jesses. Years later, he would remember how he had heard no sound, had felt merely the oddest prickling of the hairs on the back of his neck, a sense that he was not alone.

He turned to see the girl standing in the low, narrow doorway, her face crossed by a single slanting shaft of sunlight that filtered through one of the shuttered windows. Dust motes danced in that spear of light, tiny white sparks vibrating and spinning. She took a step and the light was behind her. He could see her now. A tiny, pale figure swathed in white, she looked as fragile as a sparrow. She was his own age, he thought, perhaps even younger. A tangle of black hair. Her face all bones and angles. A hawkish nose. A delicate, sharp point of a chin. He wanted to laugh, for her eyes were like his: green-gold, as clear as glass.

"Who are you?" he asked.

She took a step closer.

"I want to hold the bird," she said, and before he could speak, she laid her hand on his gauntlet, and the Ghost, though hooded and unable to see, simply stepped over, curling her feet around the tiny white wrist.

The girl loosened the hood laces and tugged at the topknot. Ghost shook her head as she was freed.

Lucien stared. He bit his lip and winced as he saw the beads of bright blood beginning to appear where the hawk's talons gripped the girl's wrist. He watched first one, then another and another turn to dark red ribbons and stream down over the curve of her arm, to fall in silent droplets onto the deep litter that covered the earthen floor.

"Beautiful," said the girl, and her lips parted, showing her little white teeth.

 She was called Imogene.

Go to Part Two