The Rainbow Bridge (23 page)

‘How will I be able to cut wood in the forest now?’ lamented the boy.

‘Your arm will have grown again by the morning,’ said the monster between mouthfuls. ‘But remember, from now on, your right arm is mine, my mark will be on it and no matter how much you wash you will never be able to wash it clean.’ Having finished his meal, the creature prepared to depart. ‘Remember, boy, if I find your door closed against me again I will not knock but will go to seek a fairer feast.’

Jacquot stopped his reading. The pale light of the candle lit his face; a dew of sweat hazed his forehead.

‘Go on,’ Louise willed, ‘how does it end?’ Her eyes followed his down to the place where his finger still lingered. From that point on the page was blank. Perhaps he didn’t know how to end it? Then, like a stab between the eyes, she realised why he had stopped. Hadn’t M. Morteau warned that the local people would often hide real happenings within their folk tales? This tale of Jacquot’s was about some real experience. The boy had not ended it for the simple reason that the tale had not run its course. A chill of real horror ran down her back. He didn’t know what the ending was because the monster would come again!

To begin with, all Louise could do was to extend to Jacquot a wordless aura of sympathy and understanding. When he was sufficiently recovered, she began to talk, as she had talked to Pierre, in a silent flow of words, until in the end he responded, and the flow became an exchange. Jacquot leant against the mantelpiece, his head on his arms, while Louise probed gently, testing doors that even his gruesome story had failed to open. When, however, she asked, ‘What does he do to you?’ and he responded, it was her own mind that closed in self protection.

‘Who is he, Jacquot?’

‘A monster!’ He said vehemently, ‘but he’s been like a father to me.’ He gathered up his implements and his book and was gone. Louise was left dumbfounded.

All through the following days and nights Louise teased at the problem. There was no doubt in her mind that Jacquot was the boy in the story, and that Marie was certainly the ‘young and fair’ maiden. But who was this monster who had been ‘like a father’ to Jacquot? Who could
command him ‘as if of royal right’ and leave him reluctant to utter his name. Then gradually she realised that she did know, and that she too had been reluctant to form his name. Dear God, how long had Jacquot been paying some dreadful price for Marie’s safety?

‘Jacquot,’ she said without preamble, when he came the following week. ‘The moon was new last week, so next week it will be full. You must finish your story before the next full moon. If you write what I tell you, I think we can stop this “monster” once and for all.’

‘But what about Marie?’ he asked.

‘Marie will be safe. The “monster”, as you call him, will come to me, not to her.’

‘But how? I can’t let you …’

‘Of course you can. What harm can he do to a picture?’ Louise was less confident than she sounded but pressed on relentlessly. ‘You have a good memory?’ The boy nodded. ‘Well listen to me …’ She told him what she thought he should say, drawing on the example of Gaston’s bravery as he faced down the conspirators in this very chateau. As she went on she felt him engaging with her, nodding and then even making suggestions of his own. When he left her he seemed to be a different boy. She, on the other hand, wondered what she had done!

As he set out for the woodcutter’s hut, the Count reminded himself, as he always did on these occasions, how good he had been to Jacquot. He had arranged that the boy had an education far above his station as a woodcutter; he had seen him clothed and fed in the chateau kitchens. The boy owed him. Surely it was a small price to ask for a little pleasure in return? He even felt justified in what he was about to do; in fact it was an act of love, he argued.

He stepped silently across the cobbles of the yard, feeling the familiar euphoria that elevated him to some awful height between the chateau and the moon. It was as though he were a tightrope walker. For him, love was a balance between desire and fear that his own desire might consume him.

He was surprised, and a little pleased, to see that the boy had lit a lamp; there was a yellow glow in his window, homely in the steel bright glare of the moon.

‘Jacquot, it is I,’ he called, trying to keep the hunger from his voice. In one sudden movement the door was snatched open and there stood Jacquot, a gleaming axe cradled on his arm. Lord, how the boy had grown, the Count thought in surprise, but it was the axe that held his gaze, the head had been polished till it shone … if the boy had polished the head, what had he done to the blade? Jacquot raised the
axe an inch. What was this? The boy wasn’t supposed to behave like this; he had always been submissive before. The Count’s mouth had gone dry. Despite himself, he took a step backwards, and in doing so betrayed his cowardice to both Jacquot and himself. Rank and position meant nothing when standing alone in the face of cold steel. His legs felt weak and his hunger of a moment before turned to the nausea of fear.

‘All right, Jacquot, all right. Not tonight then?’ He was horrified to hear himself gibbering. ‘What … what do you want?’

‘Monsieur le Comte, you are to read this.’ To his amazement, the boy thrust a sheaf of paper at him. He took it. ‘Now Monsieur, if you please, turn about. En avant, marchez!’

‘You can’t order …’

‘I can and I will. Now, walk towards the kitchen, and remember, I am one step behind you.’

Jacquot stood over the Count while he lit a kitchen candle from the tiny wick that was left floating in oil so that the chateau would never be without a flame. The Count sat at the table and pressed down hard on the pages to prevent his hand from shaking.

‘Now, read!’ Jacquot commanded. He waited until the Count had scanned the first page, and then he stepped back.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I am going to stand watch outside Marie’s door. I will not leave her unprotected.’ The Count winced, but he turned the page and read on.

It had been Louise’s idea that Jacquot should guard Marie,
not so much because she thought the girl would be in danger, but to get Jacquot away from the man who had dominated him for so much of his life. But if she could have seen the young hero now, she would have had no reason to fear, indeed she might have wished for his protection herself.

The Count’s hands closed convulsively on the final pages of Jacquot’s story, crumpling them cruelly. How dare he? Who did that little ingrate think he was? An image of Jacquot barring the door to the hut with the polished axe flashed across his mind and he groaned as he remembered his own cowardice. He knew who was responsible for all of this – that girl in the picture. She had bewitched him, as he had known she would from the moment Gaston had presented the picture to him. How many times had he stood in front of her at night, holding his candle high, fascinated and drawn by that face? He had never experienced such a feeling before, a longing to know her that rose from deep in his heart’s core. He was used to having his way, but that girl held him at a distance, challenging him, questioning him until he would have to leave the room, in case she walked out of the canvas and he would have to answer for himself. Now he would have to destroy her.

He thought back to Celine, Jacquot’s mother. He had loved her, at first with delight, and then with a passion that had bordered on insanity. When the boy was born, he could have taken her in to be his mistress … his wife even. God knew there were enough examples of such behaviour in his family, but by that stage genuine love and compassion were no longer enough for him. The heights of passion that he craved could only be satisfied by the thrill of his night time
forays and the rush of power that came with total control over his victims. To begin with, he persuaded himself that the moon genuinely did have a role in commanding his passions; that it was not really he who prowled the corridors and forest glades, but someone else over whom he had no control, and for whom he had no responsibility. But then he began to enjoy the suffering he was causing to his victims and claimed it for himself. The moon became a mechanism to foster and curb his passions in turn. The people of the chateau began to re-tell their old stories of predatory monsters who hunted by the full moon. Of course he spoke out against such tales, dismissing them as peasant superstition, but secretly he was pleased; the danger of discovery fed his appetite further.

But where had this appetite sprung from? Where had it all started, and why did it seem to be his destiny to destroy the things he loved?

Up until the day of his fourth birthday, little Auguste du Bois thought he could do no wrong; whatever he wished for was his. Now he couldn’t remember the cause of his punishment on that day, but it had come in the form of a slap on the hand from his mother, who, until that moment, had been the source of all the love in his life. With the smack came the command to go out into the garden and not come back until he had found his manners. Tears had given way to resentment, and then to the absolute conviction that Mama no longer loved him. He wandered about the ragged edge of the garden, nurturing this feeling. Butterflies clustered on the purple flowers of the knapweed. Most of these were ‘forest browns’ that lived along the edge of the trees, and therefore familiar. All at once a butterfly
that had had its wings folded spread them wide, and a flash of gorgeous colour caused the boy to stop in his tracks. On the lower wings were two jewelled eyes that appeared to be looking at him. The upper wings rose like two surprised eyebrows above them. Never had he seen anything so beautiful. He knelt down slowly, careful not to disturb it. The peacock eyes returned his gaze. Closer and closer the boy moved until he was within inches of the butterfly. It seemed to fill his whole view; every antenna, every scale, every hair was perfect, while in the background the meadow grasses became a green fuzz into which the knapweed bled in soft purple smudges. The symmetry, the unexpected colours, the fragility and the fact that the eyes returned his look so fearlessly, enraptured him. He was held fast by those eyes; they promised a love that would replace the vacuum left by his mother’s rejection.

At that moment the butterfly closed its wings, like a book snapped shut in mid-sentence, and the eyes disappeared. Sudden fury welled up inside the boy; the eyes had no right to disappear. They had betrayed him, like his mother. But he could deal with this betrayal; this fluttery creature was smaller than him, weaker than him. The smack he dealt it with his chubby hand was a very good imitation of his mother’s slap of half an hour ago. He sat back on his haunches and looked at the fragments of his passion of a moment ago. He felt regret, but also satisfaction. It was the first time he had tasted power, and he liked it.

As he walked back towards the chateau, his feeling of power grew and grew. He was a giantkiller. What did he care about smacked hands and Judas kisses when he had found the ultimate solution for those weaker than him?

His mother looked up from her sewing as he passed. ‘And where did you get that smug little smile from,
Auguste?’ she asked, not unkindly.

The Count sat staring into space, the pages of Jacquot’s story rucked up under his hands. So, it was: ‘a princess, with hair the colour of sunlight, and a dress of emerald green’ that had given the boy the sword to slay the monster. The Count ground his teeth; he could feel the pulse beginning to throb in his temples. Anger was replacing humiliation. There was still time to retrieve something of the night. He would deal with the boy tomorrow, but now his focus was that picture. He would show them all who had the real power around here.

Some part of his rational mind argued that a picture was just a picture: canvas, paint and a wooden stretcher. But he knew that it was more than that; this was witchcraft – as Gaston had known full well. And the cure for witchcraft was fire.

The Count’s anger was so intense that Louise felt its energy long before he came into the room. For the first time she felt that her existence was in real danger. This wasn’t like Colette’s petulant flick with the duster or Gaston’s threat to ride through her when she was forcing him to help the peasant and his cart. With a conscious effort of will, she moved from her picture to the opposite side of the room. At that moment the door was thrown open and the Count du Bois burst in.

He strode down the room to where Louise’s portrait hung, protecting the flickering flame of his candle with one hand. He swung to face the picture. ‘Witch!’ he screamed. ‘I should never have let you into the chateau. Bloody Gaston planted you here to spy on me. I could see it in your face the moment I laid eyes on you. And now the boy defies
me. Damn it! My own–’ she heard him check himself. He held up Jacquot’s crumpled manuscript and waved it at the portrait. ‘Le Jacquot, my log boy,’ he said scornfully, ‘he fancies himself as the new Charles Perrault! This is my reward for giving him the education of a gentleman! He has the cheek to lecture me.

‘A princess in a green dress!’ he went on sarcastically, his voice rising: ‘Is it just chance that you have a green dress? Like hell it is! All I ask is his indulgence on this one night in the month, and he defies me, and gives me this to read. Do I look like a monster?’ Suddenly a catch came into the Count’s voice and his anger seemed to fade. ‘And what about you … Louise? You bewitched Gaston, didn’t you? And he had to get rid of you.’ He put the candle down on one side of the wide grate; then he reached up and began to lift Louise’s portrait from its hook. ‘I am truly sorry for what I am about to do, but you will have to go. If Jacquot had lit the fire tonight this would have been easy.’