Mistress of the Revolution Read Free Page B

me to flog you and deprive you of riding, but I will do neither. I will be content with your promise. Do not cry, dear.” He raised me to my feet and took me in his arms. “I love you too much, little sister, not to forgive you. I know that you were only thoughtless and did not mean any harm.”
    I had gone from utter misery to the most complete happiness I had known in my eleven years. I sobbed on his shoulder while he held me. I never wanted that moment to end.
    I liked my new life at Fontfreyde better than my mother’s first words of welcome had led me to expect. The Marquise hardly received anyone, except for my brother’s few friends and my eldest sister Madeleine, the Countess de Chavagnac, a handsome, dark-haired woman of about thirty. Madeleine’s husband, a sallow, unpleasant man, seldom accompanied her. She had two boys, a few years younger than me, both away at school in Clermont. My other sister, Hélène, whom I had yet to meet, was the Abbess of the Convent of Noirvaux, hundreds of miles away.
    I often found refuge in the kitchen, where I was assured of Joséphine’s welcome. She tried to teach me to cook, but my fingers were cursed.
    “Go sit on one of the benches in the cantou ,” she said, “and entertain me with your silly talk. You’re the only young, cheerful thing in this old place. You may lick the platters clean after I’m done, but don’t touch anything until then. You couldn’t boil an egg if you tried. No matter. You’ll marry a great lord someday, and you’ll be too fine a lady to even know the way to the kitchen in your own house.”
    I also gained the confidence of the maids, who, when my mother had her back turned, felt free to treat me like their little doll. They were all good souls, elderly and kind. One of them, Antoinette, had been disfigured by smallpox, which had ploughed her face and robbed her of one eye. I had caught the dreaded disease myself when I was in the care of Mamé Labro, but my only memento of it was a tiny round scar on my left temple. At first, I had recoiled from Antoinette, frightened by the dark hollow of her empty orbit, but soon became fonder of her than of the other maids. She sewed for me, hiding from my mother, a doll made of rags, the only one I ever owned.
    The maids told me the many tales of the high country, such as the story of the Beast of Gévaudan, which, twenty years earlier, had devoured hundreds of children and shepherdesses. The mayhem lasted until a monstrous brute, the likes of which had never been seen, was shot by a gamekeeper, Chastang, at the end of a nightlong hunt in the forest.
    “The Beast recognized Chastang,” said Antoinette, looking at me with her only eye. “The man was a wolf runner , a witch who had made a pact with those brutes. He could turn into one at will. Then he would lead them to devour Christians.”
    “And his master, the Count de Morangis, was no better,” added Guillemine, another maid, breathless with excitement. “The Bishop accused him from the pulpit of celebrating black masses on the naked body of his youngest sister.”
    I winced in horror at the idea of a man seeing his sister nude. “Black masses?” I asked.
    “A black mass, Mademoiselle,” said Guillemine, “is the most wicked blasphemy, a mockery of the Holy Mass. It’s a ceremony where an infant is bled to death over a woman lying naked on an altar. And the Count de Morangis forced his sister to take part in such a thing!”
    I saw drops of blood falling on the white skin of the young lady; I heard the cries of the child. It was still worse than picturing the mangled remains of the little shepherdesses killed by the Beast. My stomach lurched.
    “That’s why the Count’s vassals feared him like the plague,” continued Guillemine. “And they still do, because he’s alive and well, the fiend from hell.”
    Antoinette put her hand on my arm. “Of course, Mademoiselle Gabrielle,” she hastened to observe, “that was in Gévaudan,