The sun was fully set. Boys in special surplices moved from candelabra to candelabra with delicate, whiplike tapers. All of the wall tapestries featured hunting scenes. His first words, seeming to come from somewhere behind him, were that I was a little angel. He had reddish hair and a trimmed red beard. A blue satin ruff. His face in the candlelight was like a half-veiled lamp.
Henriet was told to prepare me. I was pulled into an antechamber where my clothes were stripped from me and burned on a grate. I was fitted with a doublet of green and brown velvet and loose-fitting breeches and shoes, then taken through a small passageway bolted with an iron gate on either end and set with chevrons along its length to what looked like a side-chapel arranged with painted screens. Above the screens loomed the worked canopy of a gigantic bed. In the firelight the embroidered tigers flexed and clawed their mates. Benches with saw-tooth serrations above the headrests lined the walls. This seemed a secret room constructed where roof trusses converged from the projecting base.
A boy near the door was identified by Henriet as the aquebajulus: custodian of the holy water. He held before him a small bronze bowl. Upon entering, each of the lords dipped two fingers in it and made the Sign of the Cross, and then the boy departed.
Those present in that chamber besides myself, Henriet, and the lord de Rais were his lord’s cousins Gilles de Sillé and Roger de Briqueville. That night while they took their ease on those benches and drank hippocras from a silver beaker that the steward had fetched, I was made to shed the doublet I had just donned and to lie across the billowy down of the bed’s snowy comforter and to receive onto my belly the ejaculate of his lord’s member. He knelt above me, having finished, attentive to my face with his head cocked as though listening for something, and then Roger de Briqueville handed him a jeweled dagger, the tip of which he pressed to my Adam’s apple, and the sting caused me to squint before his other cousin cleared his throat and reminded him of my uncommon beauty, suggesting I be retained as a page. The lord de Rais turned his gaze to Henriet, who looked at me. In his eyes I saw my mother’s gloomy and drained consideration. He shrugged, and nodded. With that shrug his lord returned his attention to my features. He set the dagger on the coverlet between us, touched his semen with a fingertip, and drew a line to my throat with it. Then he dismounted the bed. I was ignored through the conversation that followed.
Lying there, not yet having been granted leave to move, I experienced the ongoing impression that all this was inexplicably directed at me. The lord remarked that when he was three, his brother, René de la Suze, was born, upsetting the entire household, and that relations between them had never been cordial. He added that when at eleven he’d lost both parents, his father gored by a boar and his mother carried off by an inflammation of the brain. That same autumn had brought the disgrace of Agincourt, with the loss of his maternal grandfather’s lone son and heir.
When he stopped the only sounds were the logs on the fire. Henriet caught my eyes with his but I couldn’t tell what he hoped to communicate. And the lord de Rais, as though he’d already asked more than once, bade everyone to leave. When I rose, he instructed me to stay.
The firelight shimmered because I was weeping with terror. He asked my age in a gentle voice and, when answered, exclaimed “Fifteen!” with a kind of graciousness, as if at an unexpected gift.
He asked if I had heard of the emperor Nero. When I could not stop my tears, he went on to inform me that Nero never wore the same clothes twice. That he almost never traveled with a train of less than one thousand carriages. That his mules were shod with silver and his muleteers wore coats of Carnusian wool.
He said that at my age he knew already the men who were to influence the entire course of his life. That these great souls had taught him that to venture little was to venture much, and the risk the same.
He returned to the bed and eased himself down beside me, sympathetic to my shivering and heaving. While touching me he explained that balked desire, seeing itself checked as if by a cruel spell, undergoes a hideous metamorphosis. And steep and slippery then became the slope between voluptuous delight and rage. He said he was still undecided as to whether he was of a mind to let me rest and that only a straw turned the scale which kept me there. He lay beside me in silence for some moments while I regained custody of my emotions. Then he made me swear I would reveal none of the secrets about to be entrusted to me, prefatory to the oath administered a few hours later before the altar in the Chapel of the Holy Trinity. In swearing so I understood I was gathering to my heart the secrets of sins both committed and to come. This oath was taken in the presence of the same gathering that had witnessed the initial events in the secret room. And following the oath I was seated at the lord de Rais’s right hand for a dinner of roast goose with sausages, a stew of hares, white leeks with capons, plovers, dressed pigs, a fish jelly, bitterns, and herons in claret, with rice in milk and saffron afterward.
My account proceeds by gaps, not unlike my life. The castle at Champtocé was an apparition out of a fairy story: black and grave, sprouting crooked tall towers with battlements like broken teeth. Grimly flattened fields surrounded it. But everything inside was transformed by braziers of light and furniture of gold leaf, by statues and bound manuscripts of worked silver. My sponsor explained the tumult of passing men-at-arms by informing me that our lord kept a personal army of two hundred and fifty, each equipped with the finest mounts and armor, as well as complete new liveries three times a year. He traveled, Henriet explained, from residence to residence and kept an open house at each, so that anyone, high-born or low, could stop for food and drink. As for the low, it was well-known that this invitation was extended only to young and beautiful children, either unaccompanied or, if not, left behind to dine at their leisure.
He unlocked a curved black grate guarding access to a spiral stairwell ascending the north tower, and led me up the stone steps and at the top we paused before a room, also locked. The smell was startling. Henriet held a small cloth soaked in cloves over his nose and mouth. He did not offer to share it. Jean de Malestroit, Bishop of Nantes, was to take possession of the castle in forty-eight hours, he said, so this work had to be completed by then. We were joined by Gilles de Sillé and another servant who did not give his name. Inside the room we found the skeletons, heaped in a colossal faggot-box set near the hearth, of forty-two children. The skin was shrunken and dried about the bones and flaked off to the touch. The box was the height of our chins and the jumble of bones inside as high as our chests. A stool was brought to help Henriet and myself climb up and in, each of us using a staff to clear space for our legs. This disturbed the beetles and flies and other insects to which the bones had been abandoned, as well as a kind of powdery dust that settled in our mouths and eyes. No one spoke except about how best to bundle the loads into large coffers bound with iron and already waiting in the middle of the room. When filled, each was to be double-bound with rope as a proof against the failure of the iron bands. Eight in all were required. I distinguished the number of children by counting the skulls. Our purchase on everything was increasingly complicated by hands turned white and greasy with a slimy ash.
We became aware of noises at the door’s peephole, though none of my co-workers seemed troubled. I heard a woman’s soft laughter. Henriet warned me to keep guardianship of my eyes. He later explained that Roger de Briqueville at times invited noble ladies of the district to watch such operations in progress.
We swept the last bits into the faggot-box, and a layer of resin-wood and ground aromatics was spread to mask the smell. The coffers were carried down the spiral steps at nightfall to waiting wagons, which were driven to a quay on the Loire and loaded onto barges to be poled down to Machecoul. There, before sunrise, they were hauled up to what Henriet revealed was our lord’s own bedroom. And there they were emptied and the bones burned in his presence. And when each pyre cooled, it was our task to dump the ashes into the moat.