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.”
She hesitated, then nodded. As the flakes whorled at the rimed window, he prepared himself for tiresome gabble of imps in perdition
“In Hell….” she began. He let her harp on the hereafter, turning a deaf ear to the garble escaping a mouth running with fat. She gnawed the mutton shank, grinding at the naked bone. The poor thing had suffered from dire hunger. He looked away.
“In Hell, dance ….”
His attention reawakened when he began to better understand her words. As she described devils cavorting in the flames, he could almost hope for such braziers to thaw his muscles into joining them. He winced as she belched her meal’s end and retired to nurse Agnès.
A new flesh rounded out the gaunt angles of her shoulders. She looked back, her left eye at a spot over his shoulder. He turned, half expecting to see Anne hovering there — to say what, he wished he knew.
He poured himself another glass of apple eau-de-vie, hot on his tongue, reminiscent of a world where flowers grew and fruit, a taste almost forgotten in this eternity of icicle and hoarfrost. The snow might in the end rise to block the door. And then what? Perhaps the beast might freeze to death outside, delivering them. He would still be trapped with the strange house guest and an ailing daughter. He sipped again at the spirits and listened to Pernette through the half closed door.
“The wolf followed the little girl…”
How fluently she spoke the words, who could but grumble her throaty half-phrases. But this story, right now, could not bode any good for his little girl. Barthélémy entered the room to interrupt, finding Pernette hovering over Agnès, rubbing the girl’s neck and nape and lobes. She reached her wizened hand into a leather pouch, coating the little girl with its contents. He grabbed it from her.
“What on earth is that?”
“Recipe. Family. Potent.”
That rasping, gruff reply was the first he’d heard of a family. He took the stuff and inhaled, tentatively. The scent recalled the anatomy theater of his student days. Breathing it in more deeply, he coughed, heaving. Its noxious odor promised well. He dared not bleed Agnès any further when she would not take nourishment. Perhaps this would shock her senses out of this spiral deathward.
“Did you ever have children, Pernette?”
“Legion,” she replied.
Did she mean the mercenaries her land was known for? Had a son gone for a soldier or had some landsknecht fathered her a child? He declined to pursue that avenue, as it bore no weight. Her attentions to Agnès proved her maternal capacities. He leaned over and laid a gentle kiss on his daughter’s brow, burning his lips. That heat numbered her days. The tale and his objections to it slipped entirely from his mind. Returning to the fireside and the eau-de-vie, he heard Pernette pick up the thread of a flowing narrative: “She gathered bouquets and went off into the copses to find more wildflowers, surely their gay colors would bring her grandmother back to health.”
Harmless after all. He let it go.
He went to the church. Father Saulnier ushered in the judge come all the way from Besançon.
“You are the barber?”
“I am the physician.”
“A doctor.” In the notable’s mouth, the title was hardly better.
Before Barthélémy could reply, the authorities dragged in young Jehan. He examined the boy. How he’d changed since the day he found him at Anne’s grave, the strained muscles of his throat hearkening to a beast’s jaws, his long nose grown snoutish. His early stages of melancholy had worsened into this. Perhaps purges and restorative baths might help him now, along with a letting drastic enough to leave him unconscious, a last effort at saving him. When black bile overwhelmed the blood to this extent, little else offered hope. Could a child’s frame withstand it, though? For child he still was despite the manly hair covering his body. Jehan’s slaver did not help his case, although typically, lycanthropes had dry mouths.
The Judge peered down at the boy. In the following silence, Barthélémy wondered if the man intended to speak at all, or simply gaze at the prisoner. Jehan squirmed, shifting on the stool until the Judge addressed him.
“Are you or are you not a versipellis?” he intoned in Latin.
The boy looked up at the two men blankly, from face to face, his head a pendulum. The words meant nothing to him, even proper French would have been beyond his abilities. The doctor in his pity translated to the patois.
“A turnskin.”
Jehan yelped in reply. He did not understand.
“In other words, are you a werewolf?”
The Judge returned to the attack, “Did you or did you not in the night of Saturday last tear into and consume the living flesh of Denise Trouère, thirteen years old, of the Trouère farm as she herded her family’s sheep, despite her brave attempt to thwart your attack with her knife?”
Pernette had luckily been passing nearby, coming from one of her mysterious meals, and discovered him. He had bitten her, she said, as she tried to pry him away, her own hand bleeding. Barthélémy had dressed it with a honey poultice and lint bandage.
He examined Jehan’s pale, slight but sinewy body. The scabby thigh showed a malformed coloring, more tell-tale signs. At his pinprick, the boy bayed. Sometimes however, even so, lycanthropes did still feel sensation in the devil’s brand.
Father Saulnier took over.
Coat hung up and brushed of snow, his boots drying, Barthélémy settled by the hearth, poking the logs into life. Jehan had not seemed to possess the strength of mind to be afraid. His wide-eyed wonder, lost in the accusations, stayed with the doctor, the boy’s witless whine of denial. He shook his head loose of its echo and turned his attention to the apple spirits, and a second glass to follow the first, then a third to follow the second, the ghost of growth burning its way down his throat and into his cold veins, into his frozen marrow.
From the bedroom again, Pernette drove home her words, “The wolf asked the little girl….” Something frantic in her tone did not agree with a tale told to soothe a child into healing sleep. He meant to go in to ask her, again, to refrain from this story but a log falling set off a spark which boded ill for Jehan.
Pernette prattled. He did not listen. Barthélémy’s ears were still full of the boy’s screams as they put him to the question for his monstrous crimes. They had had to carry the small broken body to the stool, lifting his limp hand to placed a shaken and blurred “X” below a document. The doctor read it through.
Jehan had confessed all. He told of the dark man in the forest and his pitch-black mount, of the wolf cloak, the fur belt, the ointment that made him run with the pack in the mountains, and hunger for little ones, as their meat was tenderer under his tooth, fattier, juicier.
Could the questioning –however cruel — really have inspired such an abundance of evidence? The boy lacked the faculty to imagine such things, he could not have made up these horrors; he could barely speak. Yet his illness was punishment enough, poor melancholic sod, black bile engulfing him into beasthood. Barthélémy had watched, regretful, as they prepared the kindling, the rope to bind him to a stake, a small one.
A fortnight later, the doctor could not relight the hearth. The very embers revolted him. Barthélémy murmured – aloud, even– a prayer that the boy’s sufferings serve as purgation for whatever malady had afflicted him into committing such loathsome acts. He must have. First there was the confession, then the fact that Pernette had seen him with her own eyes feasting on the brave little shepherdess, before the elder chased him off.
The flames had licked at the screaming youngster, growing higher than he stood.
“May the fire devour you as you devoured your victims,” Father Saulnier had cried over the screeching. Thatcher Legros and Huet the poultryman held up Farmer Trouère, father of the mauled girl. The whole village stood witness.
Except for the nursemaid, who had stayed home to watch over Agnès. Happily she missed the reek of the boy’s viscera melting under his roasting hide. She did not see, as Barthélémy had, the snow turned water, then steam, revealing the hard, black, sterile ground waiting below to swallow the werewolf’s remains
How to cleanse that stench from his nose? Every time the doctor closed his eyes, the afterimage of a writhing silhouette against that fire, the evil-doer’s dark shape imprinted itself into his inner gaze. One thing might bring comfort. He threw back the eau-de-vie — again– and went to find Agnès.
In the twilit room he had to move Pernette away, push her even, if he were to hold his daughter. He embraced a sack of skin. Only that sickly, hot shivering induced him to return to the hearth and set the chimney to smoking again.
He turned his eyes away from its furnace to stare instead into the snow, refreezing in shadowy blue over the hardened ground beyond. In his reverie, he half caught Pernette’s words in the other room: “The wolf swallowed the grandmother whole as the little girl looked on…” He thought he heard her say “smiling” but before he could look in to be sure, a pounding at the door summoned him.
Nicolas Huet leaned his burly body, his arm a strut, against the door frame, heaving breath that hung as frozen mist in the air. “Marguerite” was all he could muster.
By midnight the young woman brought her newborn to her breast. Seeing fresh life and a mother’s love heartened Barthélémy even as it cut to his quick. He trudged homeward, still smelling the milk, along with the blood and excrement. Visions of an infant cuddling its mother both warmed and tormented him, leaving tracks on his mind as his boots in the snow drifts on the way home.
He knocked them loose of their icy clumps against the dying hearth, knocking the image from his head at the same time. As he moved to sit, he overheard her again.
“The malebeste invited the girl to the bed, and opened his mouth to –.”
He entered the low-lit room, the candle burning. Pernette was coating Agnès with that vile-smelling salve that brought with it a whiff of dissection. Her knuckles well-padded above the bandaged wound, she rubbed the ointment into the child’s flesh, into her hands, her nape, her forehead. The nursemaid turned to him a glance that in the dimness he could read no further, as her eyes could have been looking at him as much as over his shoulder to some wraith unseen, surely Anne again. She looked downward at the merest traces of ointment on her plump fingers.
“Restock.” she said, pointing to the pouch, then nodding to his daughter, “Soon need feed.” That poor fever-dwindled body — if only the girl were ever hungry. With nothing precise to reproach Pernette, Barthélémy returned to his applespirits. Behind his chair the door shut. He had turned in time to see her throw her worn old cloak over her shoulders, surely not much against the weather. What simples could she possibly cull in this snow? He nodded off in front of a fire that held but little solace.
By the time he retired to his bed he had not heard the door reopen. In his dreams, he was at the Trouère farm rendering fat for soap, when a woman’s scream shattered the icy dawn. He knew the scream, had listened to it for hours all through the afternoon and night. He jumped from into the bitter half-morning, threw on his boots, slipped into his coat not even bothering to take off his nightcap or change out of his night gown.
Marguerite Huet’s newborn, or what was left of it, lay in the bed, belly and thigh mangled. At the sight of it, Barthélémy ran from the house to retch. The parts gone confirmed Jehan’s confessed taste for the fattiest, juiciest morsels human flesh could offer, but Jehan was now puddle and ash.
He cursed he knew not what or whom, and returned to find the keening Marguerite tearing her own hair out by handfuls. He promised to return with something by which to forget, for a passing moment at least, what had befallen her babe.
His vomiting, even after his stomach emptied, halted his walk home so that by the time he opened his own door, Pernette looked up from grinding something, her hand scabbed over.
“The Huet wife?” she asked, stony-faced
Defeated, he told her of mincemeat of the infant’s guts. Her eye unfathomable in its leer, she licked her lips, and ground the mortar into its pestle, a fresh batch of the foul-smelling ointment. With none other to tell, he swore over the sacrifice of a young dullard, horrific and futile. He cursed the role he’d played.
Instead of decrying her own, Pernette scooped the ointment into her pouch with her once-knobby fingers.
“This set her up good.” she said, nodding toward the girl’s room.
He stared at her back as she left the kitchen.
His legs numb, he put his stockinged feet before the burning hearth where a melting Jehan shrieked at him. Barthélémy swallowed back his apple spirits in his empty belly, over and again, until his head spun.
Then he heard her again. Had drink turned his mind?
“The girl jumped into the bed, cozening up to the malebeste, running her little fingers greedily through his fur.”
The doctor ran into the room to ask what Pernette meant by repeating such things to his daughter. A fitful Agnès turned, murmured, her stomach miraculously growling. The room stood otherwise empty. No Pernette leaned over her, only her cast-off cloak on the floor.
He opened the armoire, looked behind curtains and under the beds, hers and his own, all to no avail. He even rounded out the back door, then raced to the front. Yet worried more than ever for Agnès, he abandoned the search and returned to the bedroom. He took up the cloak, expecting a flimsy single-layer wool. Any lining would have surprised him, even squirrel or rabbit, but with no possible doubt, this was wolf pelt.
He grabbed his daughter’s hands, cool now to to the touch. He pulled her to him, her body slick with salve, no longer trembling. From behind her ears, her nape, sprouted something rough and gray. She opened her lids to him, the orbs beneath a pale yellow glow.
About the Author
Long ago fleeing the sun of North Florida, Angelisa Fontaine-Wood (she/her) has lived over half a life devoted to champagne and arcana in France. She resides in a tumble-down garret under the shadow of a castle, with a husband and fourteen imaginary cats, but only rarely ghosts. Her work has appeared in khōréo, The Mythic Circle, Penumbric and elsewhere. Thoughts on cabbages and kings at https://angelisawood.blogspot.com/ @angelisawood.bsky.social