The Blood: A Denouement

Reading a story five pages at a time every few days is not like sitting down and reading the whole tale at one time, and this is one of the reasons why we are moving out of sequence. We left Owen and Uriah in Chicago, planning to read the journal of the Jacquillard Family, and now we return to them. This takes place on the same night that Jim and Seth have the dream, and just remember, that the scenes with Uriah and Owen, and their reading of the journal are all on that night and the morning after....

At home, Owen set a fire to roaring and drew the curtains against the dark. Suddenly Uriah was aware of the night and of things out there, not simply criminals and raccoons or badgers, but deeper things, some in the psyche and some from beyond. He had a sudden serious winter time desire to lock all doors and huddle near the great hearth. Behind the hearth, he remembered, stretched the passages that led even to the House of Onnalee.

Owen made potato cheese soup. It didn’t take long. He cared little for dishes or cleaning tonight, and Uriah promised to help in the morning. As they sat by the fire, with cider. Uriah opened up the folder, and turning the frontispage, began to read, like a litany:

• Leinghelde 496
• Stedefelde 515
• Rosamunda 537
• Wulffaxa 563
• Wulfstan 598
• Chlodomar 620
• Lodovicis 647
• Karloman 667
• Tentaman 698
• Ettomar 721
• Theodaran 757
• Ereleuva 785
• Hadrian 805
• Clovis 832
• Wensis 860
• Audofleda 890
• Amalasunta 913
• Athalaric 940

*Athalaric married Wodolfa in 971 and became the Earl of Chlotane on the border of the Kingdom of the East Franks, that is Germany. Here be the Earls of Chlotane who were called also, Wulfmann or Kinderwulfe.

• Otto 973
• Alvin 1001
• Otto 1028
• Myre 1052
• Myron 1080
• Peter 1106
• Kristoffer 1137
• Alvis 1170
• Frederick 1198
• Frederick 1220
• Ingrid 1250
• Marabeth 1272
• Swinda 1295
• Calfredo* 1315

Uriah could not help but pause over names that looked familiar.

• Claire 1345
• Ignito 1362
• Louis 1390
• Charles 1413
• Maximillian 1455
• Sigismund 1478
• Frederick 1501
• Charlotte 1525

“And it goes on.”

“Yes,” Owen said. “But the history… now for the history.”

Uriah read: “Insofar as the history of the Jaquillard family is near its end and insofar as the Gift once given to us has been lost, it behooves me as the historian of this once great family to recount its stories and its bloodline into ancient times, but especially beginning with the Lady Geneva by whom we are twice related to the other ancient house, the Wolfemen, who came of hard times and afterward vanished from our history. Here is the history of our family back unto that worthy ancestress, Geneva, who gained great power through the Warg, the spirit of our house whose name in natural life was Stedefeld and who is now called Hagano. The things of which I will speak shall seem, at first, unbelievable. I can barely believe them myself, but they must be set in writing, both for those of us who remain, and for those who are branches of this one tree. For if the long line of ancestors is correct, there is at least one other family who bears the Wolf Gift, and it is my belief that they are not very far. So, I shall tell this story in two pieces, that of our ancestress Geneva, and that of my own life, which revolved around the love of my life, Lucien, and our esteemed Grandmother, the lady Claudette, most magnificent of the Comtesses de Jaquillard.”

“You feel like a bed time story?” Uriah teased.

“Oh, yes,” Owen said. “Please.”

During Charlotte’s time, because of the Wars of Religion, her children fled into France and into Bavaria. Both under much reduced circumstances. We are descended from her French line which settled first in Luxembourg,

• Claire 1345
• Ignito 1362
• Louis 1390
• Charles 1413
• Maximillian 1455
• Sigismund 1478
• Frederick 1501
• Charlotte 1525.”

“Tomen, Louis, Henri, Geneva…”

The account of geneva of straussbourg

Today, I will write of him for the first time. I had thought him a very apparition of the Devil, believed that if I prayed him away, then he would go away. There is none I can whisper to, not even the priests. Especially not the priests. I believe in God and am wholeheartedly a daughter of his true Church. I look on in horror at what the Protestants have done, but I know one thing, be they Lutherans or even the hated Calvinists, or be they the priests of God’s true Church, their rulers are men, and men have no love for women. If I were to tell the truth of what I had seen, I would be killed for a witch, and possibly my whole family with me. And there is no saying that a priest would not reveal my confession, for if he justified it to himself that I were a witch, he would surely burn me…

I saw him again today. Beautiful he was so that I recalled the Scripture, the Prince of Darkness walketh about like an Angel of Light. But this one seemed no Angel, or a very rough one, and it seems to me that these days the devil is everywhere, and be it blasphemy or no, it seems he is wherever a churchman says he is, he is in the enemy of every church man and that would seem to be other churchmen and ever and always, women.

Once I saw a witch killing. Shall I tell you of it? My family, blessed with not much wealth, but enough that we are not peasants, stayed in a town one night and no longer, and beheld the poorest and most alone of poor and alone women taken, called a witch and blamed for the devastation of the land and all misfortune, and then killed, but as she was led away my mother said, “There are true women of power, and this was not one.”

Later I asked why they did it.

“Because a woman who is not bringing children into this world and who is no longer desirable has no place. In this world, to this God and his priests, most women have only a small place, but take those two things away and what use have we? Most clerics would do away with all of us if they could.”

She was quiet a while, and I could tell she was debating if she should continue. She had stopped combing her hair. She finally spoke.

“They would kill anything feminine and powerful. Be careful my child in these days. These are not like the days of old.”

Be careful.

My mother and father are cousins, distant, but from the same great family. They fled their original home generations ago, and now we remain here, close to the Kingdom of France. There are stories about our family we were fleeing, stories which, in this time made it dangerous to be us. Every day we hear of some poor man who is burned for being a blood drinker or shapeshifter or a witch or a combination of the three, and it makes me tremble. I think, a witch, now a witch should be wise enough to not be caught, but once caught, how could he or she escape? There are ancient tales only whispered at night of the very oldest gods that say even Gullveig, the mother of witches, though Odinn burned her three times and she escaped three times, could not escape being burned. How much less one human woman, human girl? In our family we have always whispered about aunts who were witches, grandfathers who took the forms of wolves either when they chose or the moon chose for them, wise women and gifted boys who heard the thoughts of animals, and whose spirits could pass in and out of beasts.

But what does he look like? This Spirit? I cannot even say he is a spirit, for he looks solid enough. For all I know he may be a man, and yet I know he is no man. For one, even in the depths of winter, he wears a leather jerkin but no sleeves. His arms are hard and muscled, like a working man, like savages of long ago, not like the weathy lords or, indeed the peasants. And he is tall, and his eyes are blue, like the sun on the ice in winter. His hair is the color of summer wheat. He is altogether as handsome as he is fiercesome.

Geneva, what are you saying?

I heard a priest say that women should not write because the more you write, the more you have a sense of yourself, and the self is sinful and I never understood what he meant until this moment when my heart is stirred thinking of this man who fills my dreams and whom I have seen from the corner of my eye.

There are some things I cannot ask my mother and some things I dare not ask my father. I go to his sister, Mechtild, my widowed aunt who has come to live with us. I ask her about the man in the corner of my vision to see if I am mad, or possessed or simply in fancy. When I speak of him, her face changes.

“You are not the first to see this man,” she says.

“Who is he?”

Mechtild grows quiet and she says, “There is no Christian word for him. He is the spirit who accompanies our family. Some even say is our ancestor.”

“The first of the Strausses?”

“The first of the wolves,” my aunt says.

She says it so plainly, and I have never known anyone to just speak that truth.

“Before any of us he was,” Mechtild said. “That is all I know.”

Last night there was no strange blond man, but there was a Franciscan walking barefoot in the snow. The snow is not going away this year. It is higher than ever despite the approach of spring. Ash Wednesday was less than a week ago. Here the flowers never come until Holy Thursday, but not withstanding it is as if winter will not relinquish its hold.

In the morning, I can hear the chanting from our chapel.

Kyrie elieson

Christe elieson

Kyrie elieson

Here we only have word of the Protestants and their excesses, but my grandmother tells me of when we fled Guninginburg in the days of Martin Luther, and of the wars fought by Zurich and Geneva. She tells me there was a man who thought he was a prophet of God and took over the city of Munster until he and it were burned. All of my life I have heard of war. All of my life the land has been burning and women and some men with it. You can always smell the incense here. My grandmother says, “After everything happened, Catholics became much more Catholic. It wasn’t always this way. A good Roman might never think of the Pope, and then came Luther, and after him Melancthon and Zwingli and the whole hideous lot. Then we could never stop thinking of being Catholics again.”

But I like the incense and the songs, and I love them in Lent. They are dense as the snow, and in the dark we say

Lord have mercy

Christ have mercy

Lord have mercy

Father tells me not that I am to be married, he would never phrase it that way, but that he has found a man who might be a good candidate for marriage. He says, “It is not like it was before. Once any lord would do and people put up with all sorts of things.”

By things he means the whispers about the abilities our family has. We called these Gifts, but some would call them curses

“But you are the only child in this generation. We thought God might give us a son, but he was content to give us you and what more could we wish for? We have to find a man who respects your inheritance, and respects your name.”

“And he must a Catholic,” my grandmother murmurs.

“That goes without saying,” my father says.

But the essence of what they are telling me is my marriage choices are very limited, more than ever, and it is not in my mind not to marry. As they have said, there are no brothers and no sisters, the family line has come to me in this generation along with a few other cousins I do not know.

I genuflect to my father.

“I will be most pleased to do my duty.”

Alice, one of our maids, tells me of the Mad Woman of Essenbad.

“They say she prophesied and put both curses and blessings on people, and she lived in a house by the woods outside of town. And then last year several of the cows fell ill from the teat sickness and there was no rain, just drought. Well, you know how people is, always looking for reasons where there be none, only this woman had given them plenty of reason. So what do they do, but jump up in the middle of the night, a real army of pitchforks and stakes, and bring her to the prison. There the witchfinders come and examine her body for the witch’s teat, though, the way it’s described to me it just sounds like nasty men getting their jollies on fingering moles on an old woman. Well, at any rate, they hold a trial and ask her if she dance with the devil or if she fuck him—pardon me, ma’am—have intercourse. And she says no, but then all sorts of other folks start saying they’d seen her flying on a broom in the night, and dancing with a naked black man with a forked tail and what the not. Well, she is convicted lick split, and they plan to come for her in the morning, burn her in the light of day as soon as they can get a minister, for Essenbad be a Protestant town, and when they come to get her in the morning—poof, she’s gone.”

“Gone,” I say.

“Aye!” says Alice. “Gone just like that. Transformed herself into a rat or a cat and slipped away. The jailer swears a black cat streaked past him in the night, but he knew not what to make of it at the time. She may have even made herself a flea, so small they could not see her.”

I want to laugh and Alice does too, but we don’t. This is an almost happy end to a most awful story, and outside of this house the story of a poor old woman being marked for death may not be viewed as awful. In our world it is not that we do not believe that there are no witches, only that the women being burned are not them, and that the Devil so many men are in love with, is just a warped reflection of themselves.

“That is blasphemy,” Alice said when I said that.

“Well, then let it be blasphemy.”

Alice looked at me in shock, and then clapped her hands to her mouth, eyes dancing. Any who lived in this house and worked for this family could not be too shockable.

His name is Piers and he suits me fine. His voice is funny to me. He speaks our language, but his home in the Lorrainne, in that old land which is sometimes German and sometimes France. What is more, his mother is English. He is animated and tells us about London where the streets are crowded and they toss piss from the windows onto peoples’ heads. Ships come in from all over the world, and he has cousins who have crossed the great oceans and settle in the colonies of America.

After dinner he takes out a long pipe and puts brown leaves in it. He lights it and the room is filled with a heady smoke.

“This is tobacco,” he says.

“Is it true that the New World is covered in brown savages who run about half naked and pray to strange gods?” one of my cousins asks.

“My lady,” he says to her, “it would serve you well to remember that not very long ago we were savages ourselves who ran about white and naked and prayed to gods that we have made strange.”

Though he was still handsome and merry when he said it, there was a sobriety to him as he passed the pipe to my father, and he was not fawning before my father, but like a man before another man.

“They call them savages because they have forgotten what they were. All about the world we crash into people who are still in touch with the world, and because we have broken our pact with the earth and chosen to believe in stories from a poisonous book, we do not understand the world or each other.”

“Sir,” my grandmother said, quietly, “I think you speak heresy.”

“They know nothing of heresy,” Piers continued. “Not over there across the sea. They have no stories of a father in heaven wagging his finger at the ordinary deeds of men, nor of fights between would be priests over things of no account. The smoke is their religious ceremony, a gift from their mother Goddess.”

“Like Mary.”

“No,” Piers shook his head, “not like Mary at all. And there they honor their people of power, Their wise women are consulted and heeded, not burned at the stake, and their men who change forms—”

“Piers,” my father said, not harshly, but firmly. “Please. No more.”

Piers nodded and said, “Of course. This is your table, but things are very different in the rest of this great world than what we have let them be here.”

Night draws on, but sleep is not with me. The whole house has gone to bed and the moon is white and high when I come down the steps into the main hall and see Piers, holding a great cloak.

He looks to me.

“Lady, how do you find me?”

And I answer nothing.

“I am here to win your hand. You have been silent all the night. At least your mouth has been but your eyes, your clever eyes tell another story. There is much behind them.”

“Lord Piers, are you headed out?”

“For a bit,” he said.

The great cloak is a wolf skin and the head of the wolf hangs from his hands.

“Would you come?”

He holds out his hand.

I think of saying yes, but instead say, “Not at this moment.”

“Suit yourself, Madam,” he says, bowing.

I am entranced as he walks out of the door, so tall and assured, unlike any man I’ve ever seen, the heavy cloak scraping over the flagstone floor. For a moment the door opens, and Piers is outlined by the blue of the starry night, and then the door shuts and I am in darkness. It is only a little while before I ask myself why I did follow him, only a moment before I go through the labyrinth of halls back to my room, find my cloak, and donning it, hope I am not too late to find him.

I troop through the fields and by the trees, but I do not find him. Maybe he has ridden away somewhere? Maybe he went to the town to wench, as some men do. No, but he had invited me to come with him, so it cannot be that.

Tonight the moon is round and high, and when I hear wolves calling one to another, howling on the wind, I am not afraid. I make myself still, to find where the sound is coming from, and then I continue, not into the woods, that would be foolish, but on the open fields along the road. I do not know where I am going. I had hoped, I imagine, to see Piers, but there is none of him. I make it to a great rock in the middle of the field and lie on my back, looking at the stars and remembering the stories they tell. My tutor taught me the art of the stars and how to see the constellations in them, to know what were stars and what were planets. I remembered the stories, Cassiopeia, enthroned but hung upside down for boasting of the beauty of her daughter, Pegasus who had sprung from the head of poor ravaged Medusa. And there, victims of the gods, the Little Bear and the Great, Arcis and his mother Callisto, who had been transformed into beasts.

But I could never remember their shapes or how to find them without the help of my tutors and so, I began to make my own patterns, the Ship, the Spindle, the Hawk, the Wolf, but, at last, I stopped even that and allowed them to blink over me, allowed for the feel of the wind in the grass and on my face, allowed for the subtle changes in smell of the air, and, even as I savored them, the hair on my arms rose and I realized I was not alone.

I sat up, and behold, there were, standing so close I could nearly touch them, far larger than I ever expected, two wolves, one white and one golden. There breathing shook the air around me and, eyes glowing, they made no sound. I was not afraid as I believed I would be, indeed, should be, and I held out my hands to them as if in surrender, or maybe as if I were some lady of the wolves and one after the other, each kissed my hand with his wet nose, and their breathing was like great engines, and then, to my further terror, they rose up on their hind legs, as if to consume me, but rather than eat me, they became two tall men, naked but for the heavy cloaks on their shoulders, and one was the man from my dreams and visions, unabashedly nude, cloak hanging from his hands, was Piers.