The Historical Nights' Entertainment, Rafael Sabatini [freenovel24 .txt] 📗

La Voisin.

 

The door was opened for them by a young woman of some twenty years

of age - Marguerite Monvoisin, the daughter of the witch - who led

them upstairs to a room that was handsomely furnished and hung with

fantastic tapestry of red designs upon a black ground - designs that

took monstrous shapes in the flickering light of a cluster of

candles. Black curtains parted, and from between them stepped a

short, plump woman, of a certain comeliness, with two round black

beads of eyes. She was fantastically robed in a cloak of crimson

velvet, lined with costly furs and closely studded with double-headed

eagles in fine gold, which must have been worth a prince’s ransom;

and she wore red shoes on each of which there was the same eagle

design in gold.

 

“Ah, Vanens!” she said familiarly.

 

He bowed.

 

“I bring you,” he announced, “a lady who has need of your skill.”

 

And he waved a hand towards the tall cloaked figure at his side.

 

La Voisin looked at the masked face.

 

“Velvet faces tell me little, Madame la Marquise,” she said calmly.

“Nor, believe me, will the King look at a countenance that you

conceal from me.”

 

Therewas an exclamation of surprise and anger from Madame de

Montespan. She plucked off her mask.

 

“You knew me?”

 

“Can you wonder?” asked La Voisin, “since I have told you what you

carry concealed in your heart?”

 

Madame de Montespan was as credulous as only the very devout can be.

 

“Since that is so, since you know already what I seek, tell me can

you procure it me?” she asked in a fever of excitement. “I will

pay well.”

 

La Voisin smiled darkly.

 

“Obdurate, indeed, is the case that will not yield to such medicine

as mine,” she said. “Let me consider first what must be done. In

a few days I shall bring you word. But have you courage for a great

ordeal?”

 

“For any ordeal that will give me what I want.”

 

“In a few days, then, you shall hear from me,” said the witch, and

so dismissed the great lady.

 

Leaving a heavy purse behind her, as Vanens had instructed her, the

Marchioness departed with her escort. And there, with that

initiation, as far as we can ascertain, ended Louis de Vanens’s

connection with the affair.

 

At Clagny Madame de Montespan waited for three days in a fever of

impatience for the coming of the witch. But when at last La Voisin

presented herself, the proposal that she had to make was one before

which the Marchioness recoiled in horror and some indignation.

 

The magic that La Voisin suggested involved a coadjutor, the Abbe

Guibourg, and the black mass to be celebrated by him. Madame de

Montespan had heard something of these dread sacrificial rites to

Satan; sufficient to fill her with loathing and disgust of the

whitefaced, beady-eyed woman who dared to insult her by the

proposal. She fumed and raged a while, and even went near to

striking La Voisin, who looked on with inscrutable face and stony,

almost contemptuous, indifference. Before that impenetrable,

almost uncanny, calm, Madame de Montespan’s fury at last abated.

Then the urgency of her need becoming paramount, she desired more

clearly to be told what would be expected of her. What the witch

told her was more appalling than anything she could have imagined.

But La Voisin argued:

 

“Can anything be accomplished without cost? Can anything be gained

in this life without payment of some kind?”

 

“But the price of this is monstrous!” Madame de Montespan protested.

 

“Measure it by the worldly advantages to be gained. They are not

small, madame. To enjoy boundless wealth, boundless power, and

boundless honour, to be more than queen - is not all this worth

some sacrifice?”

 

To Madame de Montespan it must have been worth any sacrifice in this

world or the next, since in the end she conquered her disgust, and

agreed to lend herself to this horror.

 

Three masses, she was told, would be necessary to ensure success,

and it was determined that they should be celebrated in the chapel

of the Chateau de Villebousin, where Guibourg had been almoner, to

which he had access, and which was at the time untenanted.

 

The chateau was a gloomy mediaeval fortress, blackened by age, and

standing, surrounded by a moat, in a lonely spot some two miles to

the south of Paris. Thither on a dark, gusty night of March came

Madame de Montespan, accompanied by her confidential waiting-woman,

Mademoiselle Desceillets. They left the coach to await them on the

Orleans road, and thence, escorted by a single male attendant, they

made their way by a rutted, sodden path towards the grim castle

looming faintly through the enveloping gloom.

 

The wind howled dismally about the crenellated turrets; and a row

of poplars, standing like black, phantasmal guardians of the evil

place, bent groaning before its fury. From the running waters of

the moat, swollen by recent rains, came a gurgling sound that was

indescribably wicked.

 

Desocillets was frightened by the dark, the desolate loneliness and

eeriness of the place; but she dared utter no complaint as she

stumbled forward over the uneven ground, through the gloom and the

buffeting wind, compelled by the suasion of her mistress’s imperious

will. Thus, by a drawbridge spanning dark, oily waters, they came

into a vast courtyard and an atmosphere as of mildew. A studded

door stood ajar, and through the gap, from a guiding beacon of

infamy, fell a rhomb of yellow light, suddenly obscured by a squat

female figure when the steps of the Marchioness and her companions

fell upon the stones of the yard.

 

It was La Voisin who stood on the threshold to receive her client.

In the stone-flagged hall behind her the light of a lantern revealed

her daughter, Marguerite Monvoisin, and a short, crafty-faced,

misshapen fellow in black homespun and a red wig - a magician named

Lesage, one of La Voisin’s coadjutors, a rogue of some talent who

exploited the witches of Paris to his own profit.

 

Leaving Leroy - the Marchioness’s male attendant below in this

fellow’s company, La Voisin took up a candle and lighted Madame de

Montespan up the broad stone staircase, draughty and cold, to the

ante-room of the chapel on the floor above. Mademoiselle

Desceillets followed closely and fearfully, and Marguerite Monvoisin

came last.

 

They entered the ante-room, a spacious chamber, bare of furniture

save for an oaken table in the middle, some faded and mildewed

tapestries, and a cane-backed settle of twisted walnut over against

the wall. An alabaster lamp on the table made an island of light

in that place of gloom, and within the circle of its feeble rays

stood a gross old man of some seventy years of age in sacerdotal

garments of unusual design: the white alb worn over a greasy cassock

was studded with black fir-cones; the stole and maniple were of

black satin, with fir-cones wrought in yellow thread.

 

His inflamed countenance was of a revolting hideousness: his cheeks

were covered by a network of blue veins, his eyes squinted horribly,

his lips vanished inwards over toothless gums, and a fringe of white

hair hung in matted wisps from his high, bald crown. This was the

infamous Abbe Guibourg, sacristan of Saint Denis, an ordained

priest who had consecrated himself to the service of the Devil.

 

He received the great lady with a low bow which, despite herself,

she acknowledged by a shudder. She was very pale, and her eyes

were dilating and preternaturally bright. Fear began to possess

her, yet she suffered herself to be ushered into the chapel, which

was dimly illumined by a couple of candles standing beside a basin

on a table. The altar light had been extinguished. Her maid would

have hung back, but that she feared to be parted from her mistress.

She passed in with her in the wake of Guibourg, and followed by La

Voisin, who closed the door, leaving her daughter in the ante-room.

 

Although she had never been a participant in any of the sorceries

practised by her mother, yet Marguerite was fully aware of their

extent, and more than guessed what horrors were taking place beyond

the closed doors of the chapel. The very thought of them filled

her with loathing and disgust as she sat waiting, huddled in a

corner of the settle. And yet when presently through the closed

doors came the drone of the voice of that unclean celebrant, to

blend with the whine of the wind in the chimney, Marguerite, urged

by a morbid curiosity she could not conquer, crept shuddering to

the door, which directly faced the altar, and going down on her

knees applied her eye to the keyhole.

 

What she saw may very well have appalled her considering the exalted

station of Madame de Montespan. She beheld the white, sculptural

form of the royal favourite lying at full length supine upon the

altar, her arms outstretched, holding a lighted candle in each hand.

Immediately before her stood the Abbe Guibourg, his body screening

the chalice and its position from the eye of the watching girl.

 

She heard the whine of his voice pattering the Latin of the mass,

which he was reciting backwards from the last gospel; and

occasionally she heard responses muttered by her mother, who with

Mademoiselle Desceillets was beyond Marguerite’s narrow range of

vision.

 

Apart from the interest lent to the proceedings by the presence of

the royal favourite the affair must have seemed now very stupid and

pointless to Marguerite, although she would certainly not have found

it so had she known enough Latin to understand the horrible

perversion of the Credo. But when the Offertory was reached,

matters suddenly quickened. In stealing away from the door, she

was no more than in time to avoid being caught spying by her mother,

who now issued from the chapel.

 

La Voisin crossed the ante-room briskly and went out.

 

Within a very few minutes she was back again, her approach now

heralded by the feeble, quavering squeals of a very young child.

 

Marguerite Monvoisin was sufficiently acquainted with the ghastly

rites to guess what was impending. She was young, and herself a

mother. She had her share of the maternal instinct alive in every

female animal - with the occasional exception of the human pervert

- and the hoarse, plaintive cries of that young child chilled her

to the soul with horror. She felt the skin roughening and

tightening upon her body, and a sense of physical sickness overcame

her. That and the fear of her mother kept her stiff and frozen in

an angle of the settle until La Voisin had passed through and

reentered the chapel bearing that piteous bundle in her arms.

 

Then, when the door had closed again, the girl, horrified and

fascinated, sped back to watch. She saw that unclean priest turn

and receive the child from La Voisin. As it changed hands its

cries were stilled.

 

Guibourg faced the altar once more, that little wisp of humanity

that was but a few days old held now aloft, naked, in his criminal

hands. His muttering, slobbering voice pronouncing the words of

that demoniac consecration reached the ears of the petrified girl

at the keyhole.

 

Ashtaroth, Asmodeus, Princes of Affection, I conjure you to

acknowledge the sacrifice I offer to you of this child for the

things I ask of you, which are that the King’s love for me shall

be continued, and that honoured by princes and princesses nothing

shall be denied me of all that I may ask.”

 

A sudden gust of wind smote and rattled the