Part 2: The Sparrow Hawk

1764

Lucien shivered and glanced up at the lowering dark grey clouds. The wind was gusting, whipping the tops of the brown marsh grasses. It was chill and raw, an abrasive reminder of coming winter. They should be getting back, but in spite of his discomfort, he was content to sit here for as long as he could bear it.

He held the Grey Ghost in his lap, feeding her tit-bits from his glove. The hawk had hunted well that morning, taking a hare and a marsh hen in three stoops. But then a sparrow hawk had appeared, and in spite of his efforts to call her away, the Ghost had battled fiercely with the smaller bird, making the kill in the end, but at the cost of a badly broken wingtip. He could repair the damage, but she would not fly again this season.

Beside him, Imogene had spread her cloak upon the ground. On it she had arranged the body of the sparrow hawk breast up, its wings pulled out to their full span, and she knelt there, fully absorbed in sketching the bird in detail. The sharpened stick of charcoal she used made little rasping sounds on the rough paper, and Lucien was amazed at her skill, at the exquisite rendering she was able to produce with so crude an implement.

Imogene seemed not even to feel the cold. It astonished him, for she was so small, so insubstantial, he imagined the chill wind might pass directly through her body. He had a heavy blanket wrapped around his shoulders, his hawking glove on one hand, and a thick woolen mitt on the other. He wore a moth eaten old hat of otter skin, pulled down over his ears. But beneath her cloak the girl had worn only the shapeless nun's habit of white wool. She wore no gloves, and as always, her head was uncovered. Her tangle of hair, black as a rook's wing, fell forward to cover her face as she bent over her work.

She was still tiny, and as slender as a little boy, and yet he began to see a curious change in her. The folds of her habit outlined a subtle curving of hip and thigh, and high on her chest, interesting little points had begun to push out against the fabric. He had been able to look down the neck of her gown once, when she had been bending to pick wild herbs for her collection, and he had seen then the slight swelling buds with their dainty pink tips, so soft–looking, so fragile and sweet, he had wanted to touch them, had wished he could hold them in his hands and kiss each one in turn.

As he watched her now, she lifted her hand to absently push the fall of hair back over her shoulder, and as she did, her hand brushed her face, leaving a black smudge of charcoal on her cheek. Her skin was as white and as unblemished as parchment, he thought, with a luminous sheen to it that made him think of moonlight or pearls.

"Pearls are unlucky," his maman had told him once. "Pearls are nothing but tears." She had once owned a magnificent necklace of pearls, and Lucien had seen it, six strands of them, perfectly matched, of the purest color and quality, given to her by the Marquis on the birth of the heir, Armand. But that necklace was long gone, sold along with every other thing of beauty or value the Marquis had ever owned. Yet still there were times when his father would ask her to wear the pearls, as if he had forgotten, and when maman would tell him, gently, that they were lost, he would weep in her arms, remembering.

Like a pearl, like a lustrous pearl, smooth and hard and glowing from within with layer upon layer of mysterious depth and shifting color. Looking at Imogene, his own Imogene, Lucien could never think her unlucky. She was best thing in his life. She was the only friend he had ever known. He had learned that in Latin her name meant, "the image", and Lucien thought it was but the truth, for he believed that God had made her for him, in Lucien's own image, with her black hair and her glass-green eyes so like his own. In her eyes he could see his own soul. Almost from the moment he had first seen her, standing before him like a white apparition in the dim light of the falcon mews, he had known her to belong to him, had known that they would always be together.

Lucien pulled the woolen mitt from his hand and slowly he reached out towards her, wanting to brush the smudge of charcoal from that smooth white cheek. His fingertips tingled with the anticipation of it. It would feel soft as lamb leather, he thought, and cool, like soft, white butter.

Before he could touch her, she started, suddenly sitting upright. Instinctively, he snatched his hand away.

"Oh, la, Lucien!" she exclaimed. "Give my your knife!"

He shook his head, not understanding. "What?"

"Oh, look! The heart still beats! I want to see it!" She whipped her head around to look at him, her eyes glittering with excitement. "Oh, quickly!"

Confused, he obeyed, pulling his hunting knife from his belt. He removed it from its leather sheath and handed it to her. The well-honed blade gleamed softly in the grey light.

A slight shudder traveled along his spine as he saw her hold the blade upright, running one slender white finger along its length, testing its edge.

"The heart is so strong. It tries to live on," She was speaking softly; almost as if to herself as she knelt over the bird, stroking the feathers of its speckled breast. "If I am quick," she said, "And if the blade is sharp, there will not be much blood and it will not die right away."

He closed his eyes. He heard a sound he could hardly describe, the quiet sound of a swift and deliberate motion, and a slight crunching, he imagined, of delicate bone; her excited whisper.

"Lucien! Oh, look, see! The most beautiful thing!"

He saw the tiny heart of the bird, wet and glistening and purplish red, quivering and shaking in its bed of soft, slithering organs, and Imogene's white fingers, long and slender and tipped with blood, gently parting the black and white feathered breast. He sucked in his breath.

"This is the life, Lucien, do you see it?" she whispered, turning her face to his. He was shocked by her beauty in that moment, by the ferocity in her eyes, the vivid color, the impossible delicacy of her red mouth.

She looked down again at the sparrow hawk. "This little life," she said, tilting her head to one side," This is all it is."

He watched her place one finger on the trembling little heart, pressing down gently, ever so gently. After a moment she took it away and sat up, her bloody little hands coming to rest upturned in her lap. "There," she said." No more."

 She sighed. She closed her eyes, and her long, sooty lashes cast deep crescent shadows onto her pale cheeks.

"That is all it is."

*****


Lucien settled the Ghost into a large wooden box that he had constructed and filled with a bedding of dried grass and placed at a safe distance from the fire. He had mended the broken wing, splinting it carefully, and painstakingly replacing the broken feathers by imping in, with needle and sinew, the feathers he had carefully collected and saved from the last molt, specifically for this purpose. Now he just needed to keep her quiet and still. He should, perhaps, have carried her back out to the mews, but the night was cold and raining, with a wicked lashing wind, and he was hesitant to leave the fire. He watched the flickering reflection of the flames in her golden eyes, as she looked about her, watchful but calm. He knew she was a wild thing, and she felt no kinship or love for him, and yet her tranquil and fearless presence was a comfort to him, and her beauty a distraction from his shabby surroundings.

The chateau was large, with numerous salons and bedchambers, a library, a chapel, a great hall. But all of these rooms were bare and empty,  but for dust and cobwebs. The roofs leaked, and even when it was not raining, the empty rooms echoed with the steady drip of moisture into an inadequate number of buckets. The flagstone floors oozed, and the windows let in the wind. Chickens wandered where they would, and what furniture remained was invariably gouged with chicken scratches and daubed with chicken shit. Lucien had rounded them all up this night and shut them in the buttery, so they would not disturb his falcon.

The family now lived in just two rooms that would normally have been the domain of servants. This room, with its large hearth and rush-covered floor stayed reasonably warm and dry, but even so, Lucien would often take his blankets and climb to the south turret, where the stones held the heat of the day's sun. He would sleep, or sometimes he would sit awake all night, listening, thinking. Once he thought he heard the sound of a wolf's howl, although he knew the wolves were gone. Wolves were in the mountains, in places like the Auvergne and l'Alsace, and in the Alps to the east where the deep snows fell. He imagined the beauty of such places. He dreamed of Paris and Versailles, of Rouen and Chartres. He might as well dream of Africa, or the Japannes, or America, for all the hope he had of ever leaving this place.

He pulled his blanket close around him, hugging his knees to his chest. A few feet away, Armand was fast asleep on his pallet pulled close to the fire. He had been working on a carving, an elaborate candelabra of apple wood. It was quite remarkably good, and Lucien recognized the pattern of a silver piece that had once graced the long dining table in the great hall. How like his brother, Lucien thought, to try to create beauty in imitation of what might have been, to be happy in spite of disappointment and misery and hopelessness. To make a beautiful thing that would only end covered in drippings of cheap, stinking tallow and chicken shit.

Lucien swept up a handful of wood shavings from the hearth and tossed them onto the fire, which sparked and flared for a brief, satisfactory instant. He thought about throwing the candelabra on as well, it angered him so. Armand stirred and rolled onto his side. His ruddy, handsome face was flushed with sleep, his dark curling hair falling across his slack open mouth. Lucien thought him weak, and possessed of a kind of guileless innocence that may as well have been stupidity. It grated on Lucien, and made him angry, but he could never hate his brother. He loved him.

And he loved his father. Loved him even now that there was little left to recognize of the smiling, dark-eyed man he had worshipped as a little boy. He remembered his father kneeling behind him on the sun-warmed flags of the courtyard, showing him how to hold a sword that was twice as long as he was tall. Teaching him to ride a horse, to read in Latin and French and English, and to recite his noble ancestry, to tame a wild hawk and to understand its nature.

Lucien took his blanket and crawled over to the pallet and gave Armand a little nudge to move him over. He lay down beside his brother and pulled his blanket over them both. He raised himself on one elbow and looked across the room to where a threadbare tapestry hung over a doorway formed a partition between this room and the smaller room beyond, where his parents slept. A faint ribbon of candlelight glowed from beneath the curtain, and he could hear their voices. He was weeping, as he sometimes did for days and nights on end, and maman was speaking to him gently. Lucien could not tell what she was saying, but her voice was soothing and soft. He saw things that were not there. Lucien imagined it must be like living in a frightening dream and never being able to wake up.  The weeping was not so bad. It was pitiful and exhausting, but at least he was not flying about the house in a rage, screaming hideous profanities and trying to do himself harm. Few servants remained at the chateau, but those that did, whether out of loyalty or because they were too old or otherwise useless to go elsewhere, refused to sleep in the house. The marquis was mad, they said, or possessed. The Moncoutants were cursed.  Mad, possessed or cursed, it mattered not, thought Lucien. The priest could do nothing for him, nor the physician.

Anger and sadness, frustration and despair; it was like a taste of metal in his mouth that would not go away. Lucien lay back down. He wrapped his arms around Armand's waist and pressed his face against his brother's warm back, willing sleep to come before tears.

*****


"They're all dead," said Madame Faure, as she put the soup on the table, "He killed them with a rusty old sword, then he slashed his own throat with a hunting knife." She brought the bread. "Only the younger boy is still alive, or maybe he is dead now, too." She put down the cheese, and laid the knife beside it. "The nuns have him. He is not expected to live." She brought the wine, a bowl of fruit. "He was cut from here…" she drew a line with one fat red forefinger from just below her breastbone across to the base of her throat."…to here."

Gil Faure stared at his soup. Fat white chunks of potatoes floated in the milky broth, along with little pieces of leek and shreds of ham and flecks of yellow butter. He swallowed hard. He looked out the window. There had been a storm last night, but now you would never know it. Brilliant sunlight flowed in through the muntined window, filling the cozy little rooms where they lived above his father's shop.

"Some are saying," she went on, taking her seat across from him. "That it wasn't a suicide. That it was the boy killed his own father." She tore a huge hunk of bread from the loaf and soaked it in her soup. "Who really knows? Maybe he killed them all!" She raised the sopping piece of bread to her lips.

Gil watched her chew. He felt sick. He didn't think he would be able to eat anything.

"Good riddance to bad rubbish," his mother said. "That family is cursed."

******

                                                            
Monsieur Francois-Adolphe Rigaud d'Agniers snapped open the canvas window shade and gazed balefully at the nondescript landscape through which his coach traveled. It was flat and nearly treeless, and winter brown. The air, at least, smelled decent. He was unused to fresh air, living so near to Paris. So unused, he mused, that he did not even know it anymore, until he smelled the difference.

He shifted on the slippery horsehair upholstery of his seat. He was uncomfortable and inconvenienced. He had been traveling by coach for three days and he would be another three returning, perhaps more, depending on how fit the boy was for travel.

Rigaud owned the estate and chateau of Agniers near Paris, and held the lucrative posts of receiver of taxes of both St. Denis and Argentueil. His wealth had enabled him to win the hand of the widowed Comtesse de Lugeac, daughter of an ancient noble line. The Moncoutants too, though reduced in circumstances by bad debt and, as his wife termed it, a certain "noirceur de fortune", represented four hundred years of flawless lineage, and so, he thought, becoming the guardian of his wife's nephew, the orphaned Marquis de Muzillac, could not hurt him in his petition for noble status. There was a bit of property, he understood, which might be disposed of conveniently, and to some little profit. He would see the boy into the army, and have done with him with little fuss.

Anne-Louise would have to accept his authority in this matter. Childless after two marriages, she was far too animated in anticipation of the arrival of this boy, her sister's child. He would need a mother's attentions, a mother's love, poor child, she kept saying. What he must have seen!

But to Rigaud, a thirteen-year-old was not a child, but nearly a man. Certainly he had not had a mother at that age. Further, he opined that his wife's childlessness was entirely of her own engineering. He could not know about le Comte de Lugeac, but she certainly did her best to keep Rigaud out of her bed. If she so desired to be a mother, let her perform as God and the law decreed.

He closed the window shade once more and leaned back against the seat, closing his eyes. Sleep was impossible in this rattletrap of a conveyance. Yes, he thought, he would see to this matter with the utmost expediency and to his own best advantage, the way he always did.

*****

At L'Ecole Militaire the young officers-in-training occupied a stifling barracks above the stables. The other boys, many of whom were years younger than he, subjected Lucien to their most imaginative and disgusting initiations. They made him drink piss from a wine bottle. They fed him worms, and one time, somehting they later told him was dog. They made him sit naked in a tub of freezing water and ice until his balls turned blue. He was beaten up daily and hardly allowed to sleep.

Lucien accepted the torture in the best of spirits. He made a game of it. He would pour the piss into a glass, swirl it and sniff it appreciatively, swish it about his mouth and pronounce it an excellent vintage. He ate whatever was set before him, then he would belch and pat his mouth with the edge of his napkin and ask if there was any more. He never threw up until he was out of the room. He never wept until he was alone in his bed, the sheets pulled up over his head. Pain was a good thing. Pain would make him a soldier. They laughed, and he laughed harder. They thought he was tough as old boots. After awhile, Jean-Xavier Lucien Gondrin de Moncoutant, Marquis de Muzillac, came to be regarded by the entire school as one of the finest fellows they had ever known.

Between terms he would go to the Chateau d'Agniers, where his Tante Anne-Louise would do her best to smother him, and his Oncle Rigaud would do his best to ignore him, and if he could not manage that, to find reasons to chastise him. The chateau was like nothing he had ever seen. It was built of dove-colored stone, with a drawbridge, a moat full of goldfish, an aviary with peacocks and pheasants and parakeets. There were rooms filled with gilded mirrors and polished tables on handsome parquet floors. There was a white and gold salon, and sumptuous beds hung with draperies of silver damask. There were paintings and statuary and ticking clocks. There were hot water taps and flushing water closets of the latest design. He could never have imagined such luxury.

At fourteen he lost his virginity to a girl called Agathe, who was one of many who haunted the Palais-Royal gardens of Paris. Girls loved him, it seemed. They loved his smooth, perfect skin, his small, elegant hands, his soft, long black hair and his unusual eyes. They said his jeanchouart was of the most perfect size, not too big, not too small, and it stayed so wonderfully hard, like a rolling pin of marble. They did things for him that they would not do for just anyone, they said, and when he told them he was in love, that he already knew whom he was to marry, they showed him things he could do, all the secret things that women love. His wife would be a lucky girl.

He never thought about the circumstances that had brought him here. He would have everything he had ever wanted. He would become an officer. He would fight the enemies of France, and find favor with his king. He would bring honor to his name.

Had he not always known that he would be the one?


Go to Part Three