The Stolen Queen Read Free Page A

the wound in his heart, which was likely to be as fatal as the boar’s tusk. Melusina said that she would surely marry him, upon the condition that he never looked upon her on a Saturday. Raymond agreed, and so they were married.
    â€˜Then Melusina had the fairies build a great castle near to the spring where they had met, but she warned Raymond that if he broke his promise she would leave him and they would both be very unhappy. Raymond was so ensorcelled by Melusina’s loveliness that he did not even care when their first-born son, Geoffrey Spike-Tooth, was born with a boar’s tusk protruding from his upper lip. But Geoffrey was as ugly inside as he was on the outside. He was cruel to everyone in the castle, but most of all he hated his younger brother who was very holy and pious and had gone to live with the monks in the abbey at Malliers. Geoffrey Spike-Tooth was also jealous of his parents’ happiness, and he plotted against Melusina. He decided to spy upon her in her privacy on a Saturday.
    â€˜On that day, Melusina would shut herself up in her rooms, taking no food or drink, allowing no one to attend on her from dawn until sunset. She had a great bath in her chamber, and filling it was the last task her maids were permitted before their mistress retired. So Geoffrey Spike-Tooth disguised his ugly features in a plain gown and a hood, and carried a jug into Melusina’s rooms as the maids brought the water, then he hidhimself under the bathtub and waited, spying out under the bath cloth.
    â€˜When Melusina got up from her bed and lowered herself into the bath at dawn and the first ray of the sun crept through the window, her legs were transformed into a serpent’s tail, all blue and silver scales. All day the wicked son lay under the bath while the fairy splashed in the waters and, at nightfall, when Melusina walked back to her bed and called for her maids, he escaped and rushed straight to Count Raymond. When the count learned the truth, he did not rage and turn his wife away, as Geoffrey Spike-Tooth expected, but grieved, because now that he knew the truth he risked losing his beloved wife forever.
    â€˜Enraged at the failure of his plan, Geoffrey Spike-Tooth travelled to the abbey at Malliers and set it on fire. The good monks and his own holy brother were burned. Melusina heard this dreadful news and rushed to her husband’s chamber to comfort him. But now, the story says, my little one, that the poor afflicted father was convinced that the fairy’s curse was on his family, and he accused poor Melusina before all the courtiers.’
    My mother would draw herself up tall and make her voice very deep and stern.
    â€˜Out of my sight, thou pernicious snake and odious serpent! Thou contaminator of my race!’
    â€˜Oh Maman!’ I would burst. ‘And then?’
    â€˜Then, Melusina was so shocked that she fell down in a faint but when she awakened, she solemnly told her husband that she must leave him, just as her own mother Pressine had left her father the king for the breaking of his word. Her fate was towander about the world forever, invisible as a spirit. Only when one of her own fairy kind died at Lusignan would she become visible again.’
    â€˜And now the curse!’ I would shriek, delighted at the deliciously terrifying climax of the story.
    â€˜And now I must depart from you, faithless husband, that thou, and those who succeed thee for more than a hundred years shall know that whenever I am seen, hovering over the castle of Lusignan, then it will be certain that in that very year the castle shall have a new lord. And though people may not perceive me in the air, they will see me by the fountain, especially on the Friday before the lord of the castle shall die …’
    *
    And so, like every child in Poitou, I knew the story of the Lusignan ancestress, the serpent-woman Melusina. She haunted this same castle, flapping round the battlements on stormy