At a quarter to six, De Richleau arrived back at Cardinals Folly and Richard, meeting him in the hall, told him of Mocata’s visit.
‘I am not altogether surprised,’ the Duke admitted sombrely. ‘He must be pretty desperate to come here in daylight on the chance of seeing Simon, but of course he is working against time now. Did he threaten to return?’
‘Yes.’ Richard launched into full particulars of the Satanist’s attempt on Marie Lou and the conversation that had followed. As he talked he studied De Richleau’s face, struck by his anxious harassed expression. Never before had he thought of the Duke as old, but now for the first time it was brought home to him that De Richleau must be nearly double his own age. And this evening he showed it. He seemed somehow to have shrunk in stature, but perhaps that was because he was standing with bent shoulders as though some invisible load was borne upon them. Richard was so impressed by that tired, lined face that he found himself ending quite seriously: ‘Do you really think he can work some devilry tonight?’
De Richleau nodded. ‘I am certain of it, and I’m worried Richard. My luck was out today. Father Brandon, whom I went to see, was unfortunately away. He has a great knowledge of this terrible “other world” that we are up against and, knowing me well, would have helped us, but the young priest I saw in his place would not entrust me with the Host, nor could I persuade him to come with it himself, and that is the only certain protection against the sort of thing Mocata may send against us.’
‘We’ll manage somehow,’ Richard smiled, trying to cheer him.
‘Yes, we’ve got to.’ A note of the old determination came into De Richleau’s voice. ‘Since the Church cannot help us we must rely upon my knowledge of Esoteric formulas. Fortunately, I have the most important aids with me already, but I should be glad if you would send down the village blacksmith for five horseshoes. Tell whoever you send that they must be brand new, that is essential.’
At this apparently childish request for horseshoes all Richard’s scepticism welled up with renewed force, but he concealed it with his usual tact and agreed readily enough. Then, the mention of the village having reminded him of Rex, he told the Duke how their friend had been called away to the inn.
De Richleau’s face fell suddenly. ‘I thought Rex had more sense!’ he exclaimed bitterly. ‘We must telephone at once.’
Richard got on to Mr Wilkes, but the landlord could give them little information. A lady had arrived at about three, and the American gentleman had joined her shortly after. Then they had gone out into the garden and he had seen nothing of them since.
De Richleau shrugged angrily. ‘The young fool! I should have thought that he would have seen enough of this horror by now to realise the danger of going off with that young woman. It’s a hundred to one that she is Mocata’s puppet if nothing else. I only pray to God that he turns up again before nightfall. Where is Simon now?’
‘With Marie Lou. They are upstairs in the nursery I think, watching Fleur bathed and put to bed.’
‘Good. Let us go up then. Fleur can help us very greatly in protecting him tonight.’
‘Fleur!’ exclaimed Richard in amazement.
The Duke nodded. ‘The prayers of a virgin woman are amazingly powerful in such instances, and the younger she is the stronger her vibrations. You see, a little child like Fleur who is old enough to pray, but absolutely unsoiled in any way, is the nearest that any human being can get to absolute purity. You will remember the words of Our Lord: “Except ye become as little children ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” You have no objection I take it?’
‘None,’ agreed Richard quickly. ‘Saying a prayer for Simon cannot possibly harm the child in any way. We’ll go up through the library.’
Seven sides of the great octagonal room were covered ceiling high with books and the eighth consisted of wide french windows through which half-a-dozen stone steps, leading up to the terrace, could be seen and beyond.
Richard led the way to one of the book-lined walls and pressed the gilded cardinal’s hat upon a Moroccon binding. A low doorway, masked by dummy bookbacks, swung open disclosing a narrow spiral stairway hewn out of the solid wall. They ascended the stone steps and a moment later entered Fleur’s nursery on the floor above, through a sliding panel in the wall.
When they arrived the nursery was empty, but in the bathroom beyond they found Simon, with Nanny’s apron tied about his waist, quite solemnly bathing Fleur while Marie Lou sat on the edge of the bath and chortled with laughter.
It was an operation which Simon performed on every visit that he had made to Cardinals Folly so Fleur was used to the business and regarded it as a definite treat; but this tubbing of his friend’s child was a privilege which De Richleau had never claimed, and as he entered Fleur suddenly exhibited signs of maidenly modesty surprising in one so young.
‘Oh, Mummy,’ she exclaimed. ‘He mussent see me, muss he, ‘cause he’s a man.’ On which the whole party gave way to a fit of laughter.
‘Sen’ him away!’ yelled the excited Fleur, standing up and clutching an enormous bath sponge to her chest.
De Richleau’s firm mouth twitched with his old humour, as he apologised most gravely and backed into the nursery beside Richard. A few minutes later the others joined them, and the Duke held a hurried conversation in whispers with Marie Lou.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘If it will help, do just what you think. I will get rid of Nanny for a few minutes.’
Walking over, he smiled down at Fleur. ‘Does Mummy watch you say your prayers every night?’ he asked gently.
‘Oh, yes,’ she lisped. ‘And you shall all hear me now.’
He smiled again. ‘Have you ever heard her say hers?’
Fleur thought hard for a moment. ‘No,’ she shook her dark head and the big blue eyes looked up at him seriously. ‘Mummy says her prayers to Daddy when I’se asleep.’
He nodded quietly. ‘Well, we’re all going to say them together tonight.’
‘Ooo,’ cooed Fleur. ‘Lovely. It’ll be just as though we’se playing a new game, won’t it?’
‘Not a game, dearest,’ interjected Marie Lou quietly. ‘Because prayers are serious, and we mean them.’
‘Yes, we mean them very much tonight, but we could all kneel down in a circle couldn’t we and put Uncle Simon in the middle?’
‘Jus’ like kiss-in-the-ring,’ added Fleur.
‘That’s right,’ the Duke agreed, ‘or Postman’s Knock. And you shall be the postman. But this is very serious, and instead of touching him on the shoulder, you must hold his hand very tight.’
They all knelt down then and Fleur extended her pudgy palm to Simon, but the Duke gently laid his hand on her shoulder. ‘No.’ he whispered. ‘Your left hand, my angel, in Uncle Simon’s right. You shall say your prayers first, just as you always do, and then I shall say one for all of us afterwards.’
The first few lines of the Our Father came tumbling out from the child’s lips in a little breathless spate as they knelt with bowed heads and closed eyes. Then there was a short hesitation, a prompting whisper from Marie Lou, and an equally breathless ending. After that, the little personal supplication for Mummy and Daddy and Uncle Simon and Uncle Rex and Uncle Greyeyes and dear Nanny were hurried through with considerably more gusto.
‘Now,’ whispered De Richleau. ‘I want you to repeat everything I say word for word after me,’ and in a low, clear voice he offered up an entreaty that the Father of All would forgive His servants their sins and strengthen them to resist temptation, keeping at bay by His limitless power all evil things that walked in darkness, and bringing them safely by His especial mercy to see again the glory of the morning light.
When all was done and Fleur tucked up and kissed, the others filed downstairs to Marie Lou’s cosy sitting-room.
De Richleau was worried about Rex, but a further ‘phone call to the inn failed to elicit any later information. He had not returned, and they sat round silently, a little subdued. Richard, vaguely miserable because it was sherry time and the Duke had once again firmly prohibited the drinking of any alcohol, asked at length: ‘Well, what do you wish us to do now?’
‘We should have a light supper fairly early,’ De Richleau announced. ‘And after, I should like you to make it quite clear to Malin that none of the servants are to come into this wing of the house until tomorrow morning. Say, if you like, that I am going to conduct some all-night experiments with a new wireless or television apparatus, but in no circumstances must we be disturbed or any doors opened and shut.’
‘Hadn’t we … er … better disconnect the telephone as well?’ Simon hazarded. ‘In case it rings after we’ve settled down.’
‘Yes, with Richard’s permission I will attend to that myself.’
‘Do, if you like, and I’ll see to the servants,’ Richard agreed placidly. ‘But what do you call a light supper?’
‘Just enough to keep up our strength. A little fish if you have it. If not eggs will do, with vegetables or a salad and some fruit, but no meat or game and, of course, no wine.’
Richard grunted. ‘That sounds a jolly dinner I must say. I suppose you wouldn’t like to shave my head as well, or get us all to don hair shirts if we could find them. I’m hungry as a hunter, and owing to your telegram, we had no lunch.’
The Duke smiled tolerantly. ‘I am sorry, Richard, but this thing is deadly serious. I am afraid you haven’t realised quite how serious yet. If you had seen what Rex and I did last night, I’m certain that you wouldn’t breathe a word of protest about these small discomforts, and realise at once that I am acting for the best.’
‘No,’ Richard confessed. ‘Quite frankly, I find it very difficult to believe that we haven’t all gone bug-house with this talk of witches and wizards and magic and what-not at the present day.’
‘Yet you saw Mocata yourself this afternoon.’
‘I saw an unpleasant pasty-faced intruder I agree, but to credit him with all the powers that you suggest is rather more than I can stomach at the moment.’
‘Oh, Richard!’ Marie Lou broke in. ‘Greyeyes is right. That man is horrible. And to say that people do not believe in witches at the present day is absurd. Everybody knows that there are witches just as there have always been.’
‘Eh!’ Richard looked at his lovely wife in quick surprise. ‘Have you caught this nonsense from the others already? I’ve never heard you air this belief before.’
‘Of course not,’ she said a little sharply. ‘It is unlucky to talk of such things, but one knows about them all the same. Of witches in Siberia I could tell you much—things that I have seen with my own eyes.’
‘Tell us, Marie Lou,’ urged the Duke. He felt that in their present situation scepticism might prove highly dangerous. If Richard did not believe in the powers that threatened them, he might relax in following out the instructions for their protection and commit some casual carelessness, bringing, possibly, a terrible danger upon them all.
‘There was a witch in Romanovsk,’ Marie Lou proceeded. ‘An old woman who lived alone in a house just outside the village. No one, not even the Red Guards, with all their bluster about having liquidated God and the Devil, would pass her cottage alone at night. In Russia there are many such and one in nearly every village. You would call her a wise woman as well perhaps, for she could cure people of many sicknesses and I have seen her stop the flow of blood from a bad wound almost instantly. The village girls used to go to her to have their fortunes told and, when they could afford it, to buy charms of philtres to make the young men they liked fall in love with them. Often, too, they would go back again afterwards when they became pregnant and buy the drugs which would secure their release from that unhappy situation. But she was greatly feared, for everyone knew that she could also put a blight on crops and send a murrain on the cattle of those who displeased her. It was even whispered that she could cause men and women to sicken and die if any enemy paid her a high enough price to make it worth her while.’
‘If that is so I wonder they didn’t lynch her,’ said Richard quietly.
‘They did in the end. They would not have dared to do that themselves. But a farmer whom she had inflicted with a plague of lice appealed to the local commissar and he went with twenty men to her house one day. All the villagers and I among them went with them in a frightened crowd hanging well behind. They brought the old woman out and examined her, and having proved she was a witch, the commissar had her shot against the cottage wall.’
‘How did they prove it?’ Richard asked sceptically.
‘Why—because she had the marks of course.’
‘What marks?’
‘When they stripped her they found that she had a teat under her left arm, and that is a certain sign.’
De Richleau nodded. ‘To feed her familiar with, of course. Was it a cat?’
Marie Lou shook her head. ‘No. In this case, it was a great big fat toad that she used to keep in a little cage.’
‘Oh, come!’ Richard protested. ‘This is fantastic. They slaughtered the poor old woman because she had some malformation and kept an unusual pet.’
‘No, no,’ Marie Lou assured him. ‘They found the Devil’s mark on her thigh and they swam her in the village pond. It was very horrible, but it was all quite conclusive.’
‘The Devil’s mark!’ interjected Simon suddenly. ‘I’ve never heard of that,’ and the Duke answered promptly:
‘It is believed that the Devil or his representative touches these people at their baptism during some Satanic orgy and that spot is for ever afterwards free from pain. In the old witch trials, they used to hunt for it by sticking pins into the suspected person because the place does not differ in appearance from any other portion of the body.’
Marie Lou nodded her curly head. ‘That’s right. They bandaged this old woman’s eyes so that she could not see what part of her they were sticking the pin into and then they began to prick her gently in first one place and then another. Of course she cried out each time the pin went in, but after about twenty cries, the head man of the village pushed the pin into her left thigh and she didn’t make a sound. He took it out then and stuck it in again, but still she did not cry out at all so he pushed it in right up to the head, and she didn’t know he’d even touched her. So you see, everyone was quite satisfied then that she was a witch.’
‘Well, you may have been,’ Richard said slowly. ‘It seems a horribly barbarous affair in any case. I dare say the old woman deserved all she got, but it’s pretty strange evidence to shoot anyone on.’
‘Er … Richard …’ Simon leaned forward suddenly. ‘Do you believe in curses?’
‘What–the old bell and book business! Not much. Why?’
‘Because the actual working of a curse is evidence of the supernatural.’
‘They’re mostly old wives’ tales of coincidences I think. You’ll have to produce something far more concrete than that to convince me.’
‘All right,’ Marie Lou gazed at him steadily out of her large blue eyes. ‘You know very little about such things, Richard, but in Russia people are much closer to nature and everyone there still accepts the supernatural and diabolic possession as part of ordinary life. Only about a year before you brought me to England they caught a were-wolf in a village less than fifty miles from where I lived.’
He moved over to the sofa and, taking her hand, patted it gently. ‘Surely, darling, you don’t really ask me to believe that a man can actually turn into a beast, leave his bed in the middle of the night to go out hunting, then return and go to his work in the morning as a normal man again?’
‘Certainly,’ Marie Lou nodded solemnly. ‘Wolves, as you know, nearly always hunt in packs, but that part of the country had been troubled for months by a lone wolf which seemed possessed of far more than normal cunning. It killed sheep and dogs and two young children. Then it killed an old woman. She was found with her throat bitten out, but she had been ravished too, so that’s how they knew that it must be a were-wolf. At last it attacked a woodman and he wounded it in the shoulder with his axe. Next day a wretched half-imbecile creature, a sort of village idiot, died suddenly, and when the women went to prepare his body for burial they found that he had died from loss of blood and that there was a great wound in his right shoulder just where the woodman had struck the wolf. After that there were no other cases of slaughtered sheep or people being done to death. So it was quite clear that he was the were-wolf.’
Richard looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Of course,’ he remarked, ‘the man may have done all that without actually changing his shape at all. If anyone is bitten by a mad dog and gets hydrophobia, they bark, howl, gnash their teeth and behave just as though they were dogs and certainly believe at the time that they are. Lycanthropy, of which this poor devil seems to have been the victim, may be some rare disease of the same kind.’
Marie Lou shrugged lightly and stood up. ‘Well, if you won’t believe me, there it is. I don’t know enough to argue with you, only what I believe myself, so I shall go and order supper.’
As the door closed behind her the Duke said quietly: ‘That may be a possible explanation, Richard, but there is an enormous mass of evidence in the jurisprudence of every country to suggest that actual shape shifting does occur at times. The form varies of course. In Greece it is often of the were-boar that one hears. In Africa of the were-hyena and were-leopard. China has the were-fox; India the were-tiger; and Egypt the were-jackal. But even as near home as Surrey I could introduce you to a friend of mine, a doctor who practices among the country people, who will vouch for it that the older cottagers are still unshakeable in their beliefs that certain people are were-hares, and have power to change their shape at particular phases of the moon.’
‘If you really believe these fantastic stories,’ Richard smiled a little grimly, ‘perhaps you can give me some reasonable explanation as to what makes such things possible. Brahminism, Budism, Taoism, all the great philosophers which have passed beyond the ordinary limited religions with a personal God are connected up with the Prana, Light, and the Universal Life Stream, but that is a very different matter to asking me to believe in were-wolves and witches.’
‘They only came into the discussion because they illustrate certain manifestations of supernatural Evil,’ De Richleau protested; ‘just as the appearance of wounds similar to those of Christ upon the Cross in the flesh of exceptionally pious people may be taken as evidence for the existence of supernatural Good. Eminent surgeons have testified again and again that stigmata are not due to trickery. It is a changing of the material body by the holy saints in their endeavour to approximate to its highest form, that of Our Lord, so, I contend, base natures, with the assistance of the Power of Darkness, may at times succeed in altering their form to that of were-beasts. Whether they change their shape entirely it is impossible to say because at death they always revert to human form, but the belief is world-wide and the evidence so abundant that it cannot lightly be put aside. In any case what you call madness is actually a very definite form of diabolic possession which seizes upon these people and causes them to act with the same savagery as the animal they believe themselves for the time to be. Of its existence, no one who has read the immense literature upon it, can possibly doubt.’
‘Perhaps,’ Richard admitted grudgingly. ‘But apart from Marie Lou’s story, all the evidence is centuries old and mixed up with every sort of superstition and fairy story. In the depths of the Siberian forests or the Indian jungle the belief in such things may perhaps stimulate some poor benighted wretch to act the part now and again and so perpetuate the legend. But you cannot cite me a case in which a number of people have sworn to such happenings in a really civilised country in modern times!’
‘Can’t I?’ De Richleau laughed grimly. ‘What about the affair at Uttenheim near Strasbourg. The farms in the neighbourhood had been troubled by a lone wolf for weeks. The Garde-Champetre was sent out to get it. He tracked it down. It attacked him and he fired, killing it dead. Then he found himself bending over the body of a local youth. That unfortunate rural policeman was tried for murder, but he swore by all that was holy that it was a wolf at which he had shot, and the entire population of the village came forward to give evidence on his behalf, that the dead man had boasted time and again of his power to change his shape.’
‘Is that a fifteenth or sixteenth century story?’ murmured Richard.
‘Neither. It occurred in November, 1925.’