Hope thrums into life, dark wings beating violently inside your heart.Bisclavret is alive.With it comes rage, that the woman should have known this, and kept it from you. How could she, of all people, be capable of such cruelty?
‘Can he be changed back?’ you demand of her. ‘What manner of curse is it that you’ve laid upon him? Some potion, some spell?’
‘The curse that’s on him is no work of mine,’ she snaps, anger breaking through her pain and fear. Her voice shakes, and her expression’s drawn with the agony of her ravaged face, but she manages to spit out her defence: ‘He was born with a shifting skin and a wolf’s heart and there’s no fault on me for that. I married him unknowing, he a trickster who did not confess to me until too late for an annulment, and as God is my witness I think no woman would have done different to me upon the learning of it. We were both of us lied to, my lord, for it’s not you he told, either.’
You cannot forgive her for her actions yet, when Bisclavret himself has not. ‘And yet you did not come to me with the knowledge,’ you say carefully. ‘I am your king. I held your protection. He was my knight. Surely this was my judgment topass.’ You cannot fathom what you would have done, if she had told you. You cannot fathom what you would have done if he had, either.
‘Would you have taken my part?’ she says, with a bitterness to her tears. ‘He was favoured, favourite, knight and friend. I am a woman, not to be trusted.’
‘You were my ward,’ you say, but the past tense lands heavily.Were.Until she was given to him, and then she was Bisclavret’s, and she is right: you would have weighed her word lightly against his. You close your eyes for a moment, to better carry the burden of this knowledge, and then you look on her again. ‘Very well. He hid this from you, and you kept it from me. But while the curse may not be your work, still it must be you who entrapped him. For he who was ever-shifting and human enough to be knighted has remained a wolf now for two years, and I must think it was you and his cousin who made it so.’
The physician has almost finished with her face. She’ll be badly scarred, all her gentle beauty lost, and for a moment you are filled with pity and with grief for that. And then you recall the wolf vagrant in the forest for a year until you found him, the creature sleeping at the foot of your bed, fealty above and beyond his oaths even after he lost the skin he swore them in, and you cannot pity her.
She doesn’t want to answer you. She must know that if he’s made human again, Bisclavret will denounce her for whatever it is she did to him – but you will have the secret of his changing from her, one way or another.
She says, at last, ‘His clothes.’ Her words are muffled by the bandages, and you have to ask her to repeat herself. ‘He told me that his clothes help him to stay human. I asked him where he left them when he changed and he confessed to me the place he used, and then we stole them.’We. So the cousinwas a participant, not merely an accessory after the fact. Was it the desire for inheritance that motivated him, or for her hand? ‘I was afraid,’ she continues, and she looks at you like a penitent seeking intercession. ‘Look upon me now and tell me I was wrong to be afraid.’
You look upon her. Her face is a bloody ruin, the violence she wrought on her husband now inflicted on her in turn. It is a grotesque wound, and a painful one, and if she survives without it festering, she’ll carry it the rest of her life, unrecognisable as her former self. You cannot say that she was right – but neither can you say that she was wrong, when the evidence for the wolf’s capacity for harm is there in front of you.
Fear is a cunning thing, that makes of the most loving wives a traitor.
You push away the question of blame and repeat, ‘His clothes.’ It doesn’t seem enough. ‘What do you mean by that – specific garments?’ If it’s merely clothes he needs, you could have clothed him a thousand times, draping him in the finest cloth and ornament.
She shakes her head, tears running tracks through the blood on her face. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. But they need to be his.’
Your heart sinks. For a moment you’re filled with visions of Bisclavret made wolf forever, until it occurs to you to ask: ‘Have you any of his garments still?’
‘I . . .’ How dare she hesitate? There are lies rising in her throat and you want to rip them from her, all the violence of the wolf’s fury curling your hands into fists at your sides. You take a breath, remind yourself that it’s not in your nature to hurt her, wait for her to voice some excuse or answer.
She doesn’t. You repeat the question. ‘Have you any of his garments?’
‘No,’ she says hesitantly, and you might have predicted as much – why waste good cloth on a man who wasn’t coming back? Of course they would be gone, long since remade into other clothes, and your heart and hopes cut into pieces with them. You try to think of workarounds, loopholes. Perhaps livery, armour, anything—
But she hasn’t finished speaking. ‘I have none,’ she says. ‘But his mother’s estate, where he lived for so long . . . there will be clothes of his there yet, for he did not bring them when you made him a knight.’
His exile. Never did you think it might be his redemption, too. You remember well the clothes she means, patched things, unfashionable, but they were the truth of him for so long. Can it be true? Do they exist still?
‘Will you swear to it?’ you demand. ‘This is not some falsehood?’
‘I swear to it,’ she says, and the winged hope in your heart begins to beat again.
You have her give the messengers instructions and then you send them on their errand; you’d have sent her, if she were well enough to travel, but the messengers will be faster, anyway. When they’re gone, you leave her to rest and return to the castle, but even a hard ride home, testing your horse’s speed, cannot relieve you of the impatience that soon has you wearing grooves in the stone floors of the keep with the force of your pacing.
It will be some days before they return, even riding fast and changing horses whenever they can. Until then the wolf is locked in a hastily-emptied stable block, the horses temporarilyrehomed so that the scent of him will not startle them. You should go to him, speak to him, but – but you cannot look the creature in the eyes knowing that somewhere in there, possibly, is a man. You’re too haunted by all the ways this hope might be destroyed to risk allowing the flame to burn any brighter. Perhaps there’s nothing left of him now. Perhaps he’ll not be able to turn back. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps . . .
You’re a coward, is the truth of it. You don’t know what to say to him. How do you speak to a knight who has been so wronged and remained so loyal? How do you face him after confessing all the darkest truths of your heart? He has sat witness to your confessions, to your nightly vigils, to utterances that ought by rights to have been between you and God. You can’t be sure what portion of your words he has comprehended – does he have language, sapience, the rationality to understand your prayers? You’re both known and unknown, exposed and protected, and the uncertainty of that vulnerability is somehow worse than the simple fact of it.
And so you pace. And wait. And try not to allow yourself hope, because there’s no weapon more cruel than the destruction of momentary belief in some better world where the man you love is alive and well and beside you.
Finally, a servant comes to fetch you. The messengers have returned.
You meet them in the hall, where the wolf – uncomprehending – has been brought by two of the knights, and now lies wary but docile at your feet. You take from them the garments they’ve brought, and your lingering doubts about the veracity of his wife’s words fade. These are Bisclavret’s clothes, shabby though they are: you recognise them from that very first feast. It’s a wonder that his cousin did not burn them for the sake of appearances; still more strange that they have remained intact,and not remade, but that there’s little good cloth here to make anything much.
If his wife knew they existed, then his cousin must have done. They could have destroyed them, one or both of them, and rid themselves of the possibility of his return – but perhaps they weren’t ready to forsake him entirely. Perhaps some small part of his wife regrets what she did, and wanted to leave herself a ladder back to grace.
Now that you have the clothes in your hands, you know not what to do. You feel foolish as you kneel in front of the wolf, hold them out. He sniffs them and something in his posture changes, but he’s no more human than before. Just a wolf, circling the assorted clothing of a dead man and the king who kneels beside it.
You wait. The wolf nudges the clothes with his snout and then noses at your hands, but there’s no sign of shifting skin. The truth is bitter: it’s not going to work. You cannot bring him back, if he’s even there at all.
