She shook her head.
“I saw the bodies. There were but three. Pelligny lay deep in the alley, fully clad, the other two around the crook, and the larger was naked.”
“Eh?” ejaculated Stuart. “By Heaven, that Italian! I have but now remembered! On, to the house of Francoise de Bretagny!”
“Why there?” I demanded.
“When the Italian in the inn drew his cloak about him to depart,” answered Stuart, “I glimpsed on his breast a fragment of golden chain and a great red jewel – I believe the very jewel Pelligny grasped in his hand when we found him. I believe that man is a friend of Costranno’s, a magician come to take vengeance on Francoise de Bretagny! Come!”
He set impetuously off up the alley, and I followed him, while the girl Margot scurried away in another direction, evidently glad to get off with a whole skin.
Conclusion from the First Draft
“As that Italian drew his cloak about him, I glimpsed his left hand – it lacked the middle finger!”
“What madness is this?” I muttered.
“Aye, and I glimpsed that cursed red jewel glinting on his bosom. Hark, Agnes, suppose that Costranno knew the secret of bringing corpses back to life. Suppose that the jewel held the secret; that after Pelligny and the others cut him down from the gibbet, they were bringing him to his house to restore life to him, when they were apprehended by those rogues. You dropped the jewel on his bosom. Doubtless the incantations had already been made. Moreover that alley, men tell me is paved with stones from an ancient heathen temple that once stood in a grove outside the city, in the days before Rome.
“If such a man were brought back to life, he would remember slowly. But he would seek vengeance. And it was the testimony of Francoise de Bretagny which hanged Costranno!”
To her house we went swiftly, and found a servant lying in the court strangled, with the marks on his throat of a hand lacking the middle finger. We found another servant who had gone mad from seeing the dead man approach Francoise de Bretagny’s chamber and bear her away in her night shift. We followed down a long flight of stairs the existence of which the girl had known nothing, and came into a mysterious crypt. On a stone dais lay Francoise de Bretagny, naked, and Costranno was raising an seven sided slab of stone in the floor, revealing a black gaping hole in the light of a torch which burned in a niche.
I fought Costranno, while Stuart raved and cursed because he could not come at him. I passed my sword thrice through the undeadman’s body without harming him and only my mail shirt beneath my doublet saved me from his terrific thrusts. At last I struck his head from his body and body and head pitched into the black aperture. Taking the torch, I looked down, and a black arm shot out of the darkness and closed on my doublet, striving to drag me into the hole. I struck down with my torch and the thing let go. I had only a glimpse of a distorted apish black thing falling, and the torch fell, dwindling to a speck of light far below, like a meteor. We replaced the slab and carried Francoise out of the crypt, and into the house above, assured of her protection from the watch of the town.
Appendices
HOWARD’S JOURNEY Historical Influences to Historical Triumphs by Howard Andrew Jones
Pound for pound Robert E. Howard’s historical fiction more than holds its weight against Howard’s other genre and series work. Over just a few years Howard fashioned a grander helping of these stories than many historical writers craft over a lifetime of effort, surpassing them not only in word count but in quality.
It should not be assumed, though, that he wrote any of his stories in a vacuum, nor that when he first sat down to draft historical fiction he immediately typed works of genius. Professional author though he was, Howard still had to find his comfort level with the genre. He did so in part by being familiar with both history and the writers who brought it to life before him.
All writers are influenced by other storytellers, finding in some traits or themes that they wish to emulate and in others pitfalls they wish to avoid. Usually writers imitate scenes or characters; sometimes they use plot structures or character types as models to work from; and sometimes they find inspiration at the foot of the storyteller then strike off on their own path.
While it’s typical of writers to learn by imitation, Robert E. Howard seldom imitated for long before his own voice was so intercalated into a composition that the inspiration was no longer obvious. Scholars have noted the influence of Jack London and Rudyard Kipling in his work, as well as Howard’s familiarity with myth and legend, likely via Thomas Bulfinch. The shadow cast by adventure and historical adventure writer Harold Lamb over Howard’s work has been noted but never discussed at length. Robert E. Howard seems to have found a kind of kindred spirit in Lamb, and progressed from modeling off his fiction until, student growing to master, Howard matched and even sometimes surpassed his skill.
That is no mean thing, for Harold Lamb was one of the finest of all American adventure writers. Even today, only a few years out from the hundredth anniversary of Lamb’s first great historicals, Lamb’s pacing feels modern. His best fiction is vibrant, cinematic, and exciting, which put him decades ahead of almost all his contemporaries. His plotting rises from the collision of motivations among his characters and is seldom predictable. His depth of knowledge permeates his work without ever derailing the story to trumpet mastery of the material. His characters live and breathe and ride the steppes with an honest multiculturalism. In his work heroism and villainy do not reside in particular cultures, but with individuals – we do not see much evidence of the white man’s burden so prevalent in other stories penned at this time. Some of his contemporary crafters of historical magazine fiction could spin yarns that worked as well – Arthur D. Howden Smith and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur among them – but no one else so consistently delivered high quality stories, and without resorting to formula.
It was chance that set Howard on the road to encounter Lamb’s fiction at the age of fifteen, when he bought a copy of Adventure magazine. We can’t know whether or not there was a Harold Lamb story in that particular issue, as Howard didn’t mention the issue number. He was hooked by the magazine, though, and Lamb was one of Adventure’s stars. Howard could not have read the magazine for very long without stumbling upon Lamb’s work.
Howard describes the moment of discovery himself in a July 1933 letter to H. P. Lovecraft. Although he had always loved reading, books had been hard to come by. “Magazines were even more scarce than books. It was after I moved into ‘town’ (speaking comparatively) that I began to buy magazines. I well remember the first I ever bought. I was fifteen years old; I bought it one summer night when a wild restlessness in me would not let me keep still, and I had exhausted all the reading material on the place. I’ll never forget the thrill it gave me. Somehow it never had occurred to me before that I could buy a magazine. It was an Adventure. I still have the copy. After that I bought Adventure for many years, though at times it cramped my resources to pay the price. It came out three times a month, then.”
Adventure endured in pulp form for nearly forty-three years, birthed in 1910 and falling into a feeble senility after a change of format in 1953 before an ignominious death. With its reputation for historical accuracy and its stable of well-known authors, Adventure was arguably the most prestigious of all pulp magazines when Robert E. Howard first chanced upon it. Those familiar with magazines of today should not assume Adventure was slim, quarterly, or populated with literary fiction. In a time when there were no televisions, America was a nation of readers, and turned to entertainment in these magazines, new issues of which often appeared two or three times a month. Drug store racks and newsstands overflowed with an immense variety of detective and mystery pulps, which were nestled beside magazines devoted to romance, or sports stories, or war stories. A few, like Argosy and Adventure, published a variety of fiction set in different lands and times, the sole unifying theme of their contents being that the material had to entertain. As for what Howard might have seen when he flipped open a particular issue – one that likely featured an oil painting of a historical warrior dashing into battle, given the typical Adventure cover of those years – let’s turn to pulp scholar Robert Weinberg.