Winter Trial

“And so the little girl, well-warned against the wolf and snug in her bright red cloak, skipped along into the woods to see her grandmother…”

Guilhaume Barthélémy wiped his balding pate in consternation as he listened, the nursemaid’s thick Germanic accent now lilting lightly over the words. Her new fluency hardly registered, however, in the face of the story’s sense. Whatever could Pernette be thinking, telling this to his daughter, his fevered Agnès? Now?

Not a month back, they had called him, the village doctor, to witness a babe savaged in its crib, soft limbs rent to gobbets. He had taken in the red-stained feathers of a ripped mattress that drank in the scarlet fluid, examining it for its claw marks. It had to be wolves. No famine had yet landed, despite these long glacial months following an early winter. At least, none he could compare to the one just before he left Dijon for Montpelier to study medicine with a full head of hair. Back then, the wild beasts had prowled not only the countryside but even into his town’s streets. Yet, if larders were still stocked, what else, what other ferocity, could explain the tiny organs strewn across the sheets? He certainty grew with every sign, up until he saw upon the infant’s chubby neck the traces of a strangling hand.

 A rampage followed, attack upon attack. Those who had seen the creature responsible described it loping, then walking upright in the snowbanks, into the forest closing over it.

“It lay its whole length in the snow” began Father Saulnier, but he was in his cups once again, the communion wine stinking on his breath.

“Belly to the ground, face against the earth, it crawled…” Legros, the thatcher, corroborated, disgust etched into his mouth. “--- then slunk off into the trees, before rising on its two hind legs,” added Farmer Trouère, hardly trusting his own eyes, shaking less from the harsh winds than from fear.

“And handprints too!” said Nicolas Huet, the poultryman, Barthélémy’s nearest neighbor. The sturdy young husband, wrapped his arm around his swollen-bellied Marguerite. Her time would soon be upon her. At the thought, the doctor saw again the traces of fingers on the first victim’s wobbling neck. He drew closer to the others.

Together they eyed the horizonn rising with mountain’s silhouette, the depth of evergreen branches overladen with clumps of white. Something hideous, the malebeste, the versipellis, took refuge behind them. The inevitable name came to their lips, whispered at first, then grumbled, then cried out: idiot Jehan.

 The boy had no family name, his father – or guardian at least, no one knew – a hermit that died of the last famine in his mountain hut, his body a feast for the furred predators. Since that time, the simple-minded orphan wandered the church graveyard, screeching by moonlight and moondark.

The doctor found him there once, as he went to visit his Anne, who lay there, blue eyes forever shut, since a fortnight and three days after Agnès’s birth. Dawn had hardly broken when he came upon his late wife’s tombstone, the boy sleeping hard by, his wide mouth dribbling. Did the youngster sense Anne’s nurture from beyond?

 The doctor put a gentle hand on the a slim, muscled shoulder.

“Jehan?”

Barthélémy jumped at the howling that followed. Gathering himself, he took the hardy, slight body in his arms, as Anne once might have. The baying slowly diminished into a small yelp.

Young as he was, the lad clearly suffered from exacerbated melancholy, inherited perhaps from his putative father. Black bile could flood the humoral balance, inducing a craving for solitude, a need to flee human company. Left untreated, it led to a specific kind of madness. Barthélémy recalled the images in his medical books recording the mutation, the frightful change of face and head, of form, from man to beast. He remembered the other symptoms of hirsute growth, dry breath, and scabbed legs.

The doctor tried taking the boy back home with him, but he ran off to into the wooded mountain heights. Yes, melancholy.

That yowling came back to him, as the depredations accumulated with the snows, bitterer still than winter’s teeth sinking in. Every few days the doctor examined a freshly sundered corpse, an abomination of bellies eaten out, thighs, and arms, the rest left aside, the runoff from the victims melted the blinding drifts into pink slush. Alongside the animal butchery, marks of a hand haunted the livid skin.

How, then, could this nursemaid, this Pernette as the villagers called her, merrily recite wolf stories while something hellish and frightful preyed on their children? He could not be certain how much his unconscious daughter heard, but the doctor had to ask himself how the stories could affect the child’s brains, imprinting her mind like tracks on the ground, like bruises.

Never robust, Agnès had always suffered her sicknesses patiently. Now, though, this humoral excess could so easily slip into the lethal. It took the girl just at her menarch, far too early for a child of barely nine winters. At first she refused so much as bouillon, now even bacon passed under her nose could not rouse her. All the fleshiness of childhood shrunk into nothing. Her concave belly, with its scarlet freckled birthmark inherited from her mother, pierced him, as did her hips’ jutting through her shift.

Barthélémy entered the dim room intending to rebuke the nursemaid. Hardly thicker than the candle flame, Pernette bent over his daughter’s mound of blankets. Rapt, the old woman breathed out in her low rumble of words, “Beautiful child...” Anne’s lovely features did still show through Agnès’s hollowed cheek, those gentian-blue eyes shone under their closed lids. The doctor in him, however, knew the child to be far from fetching in her emaciated state. Yet the devotion written in the nursemaid’s spare body stopped short any attempt to correct her. She leaned over and inhaled at the crook of the little girl’s neck. The doctor willed away his gooseflesh, putting it down to her foreign ways.

For, like himself, she came from elsewhere, hailing from well over and past the Jura, where they spoke their harsher tongue. Arriving unknown in the village, her name unpronounceable, her past a blank, she could not find work. Marguerite Huet, newly wed and fearing for what might soon quicken in her belly, refused to have the old woman in the house. The elder’s lazy, untrackable gaze, her rickety body and wrinkled face might imprint on any fertile womb, she warned other young wives.

He himself advised sternly against anything that might shock the eyes of mothers-to-be. He had thus counseled his wife. Yet late in her confinement, she came upon him at autumn’s slaughter, when Huet and Trouère had come to this town bred man to help. The blood spattered her dress. At the violence of the sheep turning to mutton before her eyes, her time came upon her eight months in. She collapsed.

He brought her to their bed. The spray of the mutton blood etched in her flesh, staining around navel, could not surprise him, so violent was the image’s impact. For days together the contractions came and went, and with them her consciousness. When the child finally arrived, the selfsame marks showed on its rounded little belly. The tiny thing had trouble latching, but snuggled against her mother for warmth and life. Not that there was much life to glean. Anne fared poorly.

“If you would but let me rid you of these unwholesome humors, you would soon mend.” The proud, frightened father spoke softly, his hand at his wife’s forehead.

She drew her arms up and folded them and fell again into sleep. In a spell of wakefulness, her eyes fell upon the spray of scarlet freckles on her child’s belly. Horror broke over her face.

“She is marred!

 “No, it is only a birthmark, just like your own’s recent appearance. See?.”

As she turned away, sinking back into her swoon, he ran his hand through his receding hairline, trying to think of what might draw her back. Soon after he prayed over her grave.

The lamb-like innocence of his daugther inspired the name of Agnès. Yet when it came to christening her, Barthélémy always found the priest was always too inebriated to say Mass. The doctor might have had to swear to his Catholic faith to pursue his studies but in truth, he had never had use for such vagaries. He understood concrete things: temperaments, the fluids, the hot the dry, the cold and the wet, and how seasons and stars affected them. Transsubstantiation he left to Father Saulnier; and its mystery drove him to drink. It didn’t stop the priest from believing that the child’s lack of baptism caused her frailty.

It was, he knew, Anne’s initial collapse at the slaughter that triggered what devoured the little girl ever after. In this final blow of her first blood, Agnès vanished, into a wordless, limbo, a twilight like that which fell on her mother before her death. Barthélémy could almost swear that the red freckles on her belly, took on a deeper hue. Imprints therefore worried the doctor. He would not recommend that any gestating babe be exposed to the stranger’s visual influence.

But even the elderly woman’s queer gaze, her skin hanging in folds over her old, bent bones, offended less than the halted, guttural speech that marked her for an eternal outsider. So she begged her bread from door to door, spending her nights in barns, with cow’s breath to keep her from the cold. If she received the occasional sou, as often as not it came from the doctor’s pocket. Barthélémy would ask her to sweep up the hearth or to bring the milk or eggs from the Huet place, around the bend. He had once asked her to cook for them. With the resulting pandemonium in the kitchen, the skill was clearly beyond her ken. Yet he gave to her, for he had had time enough to consider how this village at the foot of the mountains treated those not of their own.

Barthélémy had himself moved here for Anne. Niece to one of his first patients back in Dijon, her tender touch on her aunt’s departing form moved him. Soon, he asked her hand of her widowed uncle. After the joy of marriage, he awaited that of fatherhood, waited longer, and longer still. Five years later and still no child -- much less children -- he began to think the town noisome, especially living at the outskirts, near the butchers, with the rank smell of their handiwork poisoning the air. They moved some leagues away to a country side village in near the mountains, where he had heard of need for medical arts. In the purer air, Anne soon got with child. He recalled that it was nearing Carnaval, as they bid farewell to meat for the Lenten season that it had happened for them, finally.

 He got on well enough, as doctor, even learning their patois as best he could, until her death. After that, this decade past or nearly so as his hair disappeared and Agnès grew, the villagers shied away from him except in sickness. The Huets remained faithful but even so could not or would not help at Agnès’s most recent malady. Barthélémy sought and sought among the village for help as he could not manage alone. He received naught in turn but eyes that looked down and away from him and his plea. Their fear of whatever ate at Agnès ate at their hearts instead. He went about caring for his daughter as a medical man could, at least, letting her, feeding her the diet of wet aliments prescribed by Galen for such dry diseases.

One night, Agnès murmured, despite his razor’s fine edge. He hated slicing into her lean little elbow, but forced himself for her own good. The blood spilling over into the bowl contained the corruption that fed upon her. Yet for all this work to drain this pernicious imbalance, she only grew weaker. He watched her small lungs rise and fall, shallow, over and again, swelling and ebbing, ebbing further. She gasped, and seemed almost to say something just as a knock fell upon the door.

Under the moonless sky, a silhouette against the starlight declared his visitor to be this same stranger, this woman, thin as the blade he had just wiped of Agnès’s blood.

At first he reached in his pocket, a coin might help her along.

She shook her head.

“What then? Do you need help? Are you hurt?”

She shook her head again. “Save her.”

“Who is ill? Where must I go? Is it Marguerite Huet?”

“No. Save her. I know.”

“Save whom?”

“Girl. I know.”

So she knew how to save Agnès, or claimed to. He looked past the crow’s feet of her eyes with their split stare, into their compelling hazel glow, and opened the door.

Pernette – he called her as the villagers did-- set great store by Agnès from the first hour. The new addition to the household tenderly nursed her from daybreak till deep in the night, even as the weeks passed, soon referring to the little one as “her child.” He did not like it, perhaps her native land’s expression. She exclaimed in the same glottal stops over her beauty, a child whose dark under-eye dug nearly to her cheek, whose bones poked at her skin. The village was full – or had been – of hearty tots and growing striplings, their cheeks bright. One would think any of them more appealing than the withering Agnès. But dote Pernette did, perhaps from gratitude at finding a home after sleeping with kine.

“You must dine with me, Pernette,” he asked, at first.

She shook her head

“We have roast this evening, pork belly and carrots from the cellar.”

Clearly she preferred to take her meals elsewhere, wherever that might be. He sighed his relief when she left the house. For when she did speak, she prated of damnation. She spit out its description, as if personally acquainted, her left eye fiercely engaging him, her right pale and wandering. He grew to suspect her for a Calvinist, which did not concern the doctor, as his yet unchristened daughter attested. If she were a secret Protestant, Anabaptist or whatever, it did not signify.Only her devotion to Agnès mattered.

When a blizzard blew in, he insisted.

“Pernette, you cannot go abroad in this. This evening at least you must share my table.”