The Orchid Shroud (30 page)

“Then why did you come?”

She decided to put her case simply. “I’m interested in lycanthropy. I want to know what it’s like to be a lycanthrope.”

He stepped back distrustfully. “You wouldn’t understand. It’s like nothing you’ve ever experienced. Or will experience.”

She toyed with the tiny heron. “Try me.”

Jules’s mouth shaped into something that Mara took to be a smile. “All right. If you really want to know. One enters an exalted state. Have you ever felt exalted, Mara Dunn from Canada?”

She told him truthfully, “No. Not in the way I think you mean.”

Her admission seemed to please him. “Of course you haven’t. Psychiatrists have their own name for it, but they understand nothing. Even the good Dr. Thibaud.” He leaned forward confidentially. “Do you know why they call us lycanthropes? Because they feel more comfortable, being able to label us. They fool themselves into thinking they’re in control that way, you see. But the truth is, they’re afraid to recognize us for what we are: wolves, powerful, mystic, and vengeful.”

“You consider yourself a wolf?”

The smile stretched painfully wide, exposing yellow teeth. “Oh yes.”

“Why vengeful?”

Jules’s mouth snapped back in a grimace of anger. “You can ask? After what your kind has done? You’ve shot us, trapped us, poisoned us. Driven us from the forests, cut us open, nailed our skins to walls. And you wonder that we seek revenge?”

He was speaking on behalf of real wolves, Mara realized, and at the same time of himself. If wolves in France had been hunted nearly to extinction, his existence was as drastically reduced.

His anger subsided as quickly as it had come. “But let me tell you something. For every wolf one of you kills, one of
me
emerges. The soul of a wolf takes on a human form. You can cage us, drug us, but you will never destroy us. Remember that. There are many more of my kind than you might think. Running free.” The smile again, stretched this time to hideous proportions. “Don’t rest easy in your bed, Mara Dunn.”

Was he telling her something that he truly believed, or was he simply trying to frighten her? Perhaps, Mara thought, it was the only thing he had left: the power to terrify.

“How does it come on you?” Mara asked, struggling to project an air of calm detachment. “This feeling of being a wolf?”

“I
am
a wolf. At all times.”

Mara knew this to be untrue. On the way to the cells, Nathalie Thibaud had told her that Jules Delage experienced long periods of abeyance, when he went into an almost somnolent state and no longer thought of his wolfish other self.

As if reading her mind, the lycanthrope went on, “Don’t believe what the doctor tells you. She means well, but she hopes to cure me by pumping me full of chemicals, giving me psychotherapy, without understanding that she can’t change what I am. That is the objective of their so-called treatment, you know. To keep me and others like me fragmented.”

“Fragmented? I don’t understand.”

“No.” He sneered. “You wouldn’t. You can’t. Integration is power. Wholeness is freedom. And that is what your kind lacks and
can never allow in others. Because your own fears keep you separated from yourselves, you seek to prevent
us
from becoming one with what we really are. You think as long as you can do that, you’re safe.” He shook his small head. “But no matter what you do, we will always roam the darkness of your minds, we will stalk you down the corridors of your own worst thoughts. You will never be safe.”

“I mean,” said Mara, her dogged line of inquiry a feeble counterpoint to his ominous assertion, “what brings your transformation on? Does the moon have an effect on you?”

Jules Delage stepped back and emitted a great, rusty, hacking laugh. His flesh shook. His sour breath rode out in gusts at her. “There is no transformation. I am at all times a wolf. As for the moon, use your eyes.” He gestured at the blank walls around him. “I can’t see it. But I can feel it.” Lightly, he touched his breast with his fingertips. “I know its phases like the beating of my own heart.”

Mara took a breath and asked, “Is it true your mother was also a lycanthrope?”

“She-wolf.” Anger flashed across his face again.

“Tell me about her. Please.”

He said bitterly, “There’s very little to tell. One day, my mother grew whole. In so doing, she became a powerful, beautiful wolf-woman. I was only a kid at the time, just turned twelve, but I remember her still, her dress in shreds because she’d tried to tear it off, her hair hanging down her back. Her only desire was to run free, to hunt to fill her need, to mate with her own kind. Instead, she was forced to slink in shadows like a dog for fear of what the villagers would do if they found out about her. They were steeped in the old superstitions, and they didn’t part lightly with their sheep, those damned herders. For the first few years, Papa tried to keep her locked in the cellar. Eventually, he left us. He was a coward. From then on it was up to me to take care of Maman. We hunted in the forest, ate what we could bring down. Fresh-killed meat was the only thing that satisfied her hunger.”

“But,” Mara objected, “how could you have kept something like that secret?” And for so long? Dr. Thibaud had told her that Jules’s mother had died when he was in his early twenties. That meant Jules’s father, and subsequently, Jules alone, had hidden her condition for possibly ten years, or even longer. “Surely people must have found out about you?”

Jules gave Mara a lingering look. “Just the one.” His gaze shifted to fix on a point far beyond her. “After Maman died …” His voice trailed off. Seeming to lose interest in their conversation, he made as if to move away.

“Wait,” Mara cried, clinging to the tenuous contact she had established with this enormous, frightening man. “Don’t go. What happened after your mother died?” The death of the mother, she remembered Dr. Thibaud saying, had triggered the onset of Jules’s own delusions.

He turned back, a sly expression slipping over his face. “Do you really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“Come nearer, and I’ll tell you.”

Involuntarily, Mara’s left hand closed down on the origami bird she still held. She felt its form crumple sharply against her palm. She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’m comfortable where I am.”

He regarded her scornfully. “For your kind, barriers are never strong enough. You ask questions, but you haven’t the courage to hear the answers. Look. How can I hurt you?” By way of demonstration, he thrust his fingers through the close-set bars as far as they would go. They jammed at the third knuckle, where they remained before her, clutching futilely at the air in a gesture that was as much beseeching as transfixing.

“Let me touch you,” said Jules Delage. “Just touch.”

Slowly, unwillingly, Mara put out her right hand.

“No,” he said, bargaining. “Your face.”

For the first time Mara looked the prisoner full in the eyes.
They were dark and small, buried in their fatty creases, the eyes of a caged animal, wary and extinguished of hope. She held his gaze as she took another step forward. At that proximity, she could smell the acrid odor rising from his body, see the labored rise and fall of his chest. Her heart was pounding somewhere in the region of her throat. Gently, with infinite care, he extended a forefinger and tremblingly stroked her cheek. The touch lasted no more than a few seconds before Mara pulled back.

“What happened after your mother died, Jules?” she asked.

He put his mouth to the bars and whispered three words. Suddenly, his features seemed to collapse. As if jerked by a string, Jules swung abruptly away from her. Stumbling back to the middle of his cell, the wolf threw back his head in a long, ringing howl of despair. His anguish awoke a responding cacophony of sounds down the length of the prison wing. A guard came running. Now Jules was circling about, as if following the spiraling flight of an enraged hornet. His body began to quiver. Horrified, Mara watched as he transformed before her view into a melee of flailing arms and legs and fell to the ground in an ecstasy of spittle and uncontrolled thrashing.

I
’m sorry,” said Dr. Thibaud. “It’s the first seizure he’s had in years. Not a pleasant sight for you, I’m afraid.”

“I’m really all right,” Mara insisted, although she was deeply shaken. “Is he?”

“Oh, he’ll recover. They’ve taken him to the infirmary. I’ll keep him under observation for a day or so. He probably needs his meds increased. Incidentally, what was it that set him off?”

Mara hesitated, thinking of Jules, drugged to a stupor, deprived of the only thing he had left—the ability to run free in his mind. She fingered the crumpled paper heron in her pocket.

“He said to ask the postmistress,” she said faintly.

FRIDAY NIGHT, 14 MAY

O
rtolan.”

“Garden bunting,” Julian translated for the benefit of Prudence, who had joined them for their usual Friday evening at Chez Nous.

“Little bird. Not much bigger than that.” Loulou measured a distance between thumb and forefinger. “Now, the only way to cook them, in my opinion, is to put half a dozen or so in a pan and roast them whole in their own dripping. It’s their fat, you see, that makes them so delicious. A little salt, a little pepper,
et voilà
.” He brought his fingertips to his lips. “Melts on the tongue like butter. In fact, a real gastronome covers his head with a cloth while eating ortolan, so as not to lose the wonderful aroma.”

“My god.” Prudence’s perfectly made-up face looked scandalized. “It’d be like having dinner with a spook.”

“A real gastronome,” said Julian, “covers his head because eating ortolans is messy and he doesn’t want people seeing him with grease running down his chin.”

“Balivernes!
Anyway, all this business of stuffing them with foie gras, smothering them with truffles, and flambéing them in Armagnac is so much flummery, as far as I’m concerned. Where ortolan is concerned, simplest is best, I say.”

Julian, Prudence, and Loulou sat at a table at the front of the bistro. They were already deep into their meal, which did not consist of ortolan, now a protected species in France, but the evening’s special, a fricassee of rabbit served with spring vegetables. Jazz,
Bismuth, and Edith hung about hopefully. At that point, the beaded curtain separating the dining area from the rest of the Brieux enterprise flew apart. Mara, who had phoned ahead to say she would be late, walked in. She sat down with them but ordered only sorrel soup. She looked rumpled. Her air of suppressed excitement, however, suggested that she had news. She saved it until the bistro had emptied of all other customers and Mado and Paul could join them. If Loulou could keep them dangling, so could she.

P
oor thing,” Prudence said after they had heard Mara’s conclusions on Cécile and the parentage of Baby Blue. “You think her brother Hugo was abusing her?”

Mara nodded. “And possibly doing the same thing to his other sister, Catherine. Which could explain why she wound up in a convent. At a guess, he might have tried it on with Eloïse, too, although she would probably have been a willing participant since she was looking to marry him. Of course, Eloïse went back to her family when Hugo married Henriette. But Cécile, being his youngest sister with nowhere to go, was probably his special victim.”

“Bastard,” cried Mado with feeling, tossing her red mane and crossing Rubenesque arms before a magnificent bosom. “I’d have cut off his
couilles
and fed them to the pigs.”

Loulou coughed. “Maybe she did. In a manner of speaking.”

“Eh?” Mado queried. Baby Eddie, in his carry cot behind the bar, gurgled. She jumped up to check on him. The dogs, ever hopeful of food, rushed after her. She shooed them away and returned with a bottle of local plum brandy and a clutch of glasses.

Loulou, who had been eyeing the ceiling thoughtfully, followed up. “After all, he came to a sorry end,
n’est-ce pas
?” He paused to watch Mado pour the dark liqueur into the glasses, took a sip from one, and smacked his lips. “Very good, this.” He nodded at Mara. “Didn’t you say Jean-Claude told you that Hugo died
from a fall from a horse when his saddle girth snapped? Maybe Cécile engineered it. She knew about horses.”

“Bigre!”
uttered Paul. “You think she did for him?”

Julian stirred restlessly and addressed Mara. “Was there nothing in the diary about orchids? No mention, say, of Cécile liking embroidery? Or ‘I was out riding the other day and saw an unusual flower’? Or even where the woman liked to ride?”

Mara shook her head. “I’m sorry, Julian. I was concentrating on other things, and I only read a small part of her diary. I saw nothing about Lady’s Slippers or flowers of any kind. I take it Vrac hasn’t been in touch?”

“No.”

“And nothing about
loups-garous
?” Paul put in slyly.

“In fact,” said Mara, and went on to tell them about her day.

L
et me get this straight.” Paul squinted at her skeptically. “According to you, Christophe isn’t a werewolf but a lycanthrope, and he gets it from his great-something-grandfather Xavier, who
was
a werewolf?”