Philippa Gregory - Changeling

‘I?’ Luca hesitated.

‘You are the inquirer,’ Brother Peter reminded him. ‘Here is a place to understand the fears and map the rise of the Devil. Set up your inquiry.’

Freize looked at him; Isolde waited. Luca cleared his throat. ‘I am an inquirer sent out by the Holy Father himself to discover wrong-doing and error in Christendom,’ he called to the villagers. There was a murmur of interest and respect. ‘I will hold an inquiry about this beast and decide what is to be done with it,’ he said. ‘Anyone who has been wronged by the beast or is fearful of it, or knows anything about it, is to come to my room in the inn and give evidence before me. In a day or two I shall tell you my decision, which will be binding and final.’

Freize nodded. ‘Where’s the bear pit?’ he asked one of the farmers, who was leading a horse.

‘In the yard of the inn,’ the man said. He nodded to the big double doors of the stable yard at the side of the inn. As the horses came close, the villagers ran ahead and threw the doors open. Inside the courtyard, under the windows of the inn, there was a big circular arena.

Once a year, a visiting bear leader would bring his chained animal to the village on a feast day and everyone would bet on how many dogs would be killed, and how close the bravest would get to the throat of the bear, until the bear leader declared it over, and the excitement was done for another year.

A stake in the centre showed where the bears were chained by the leg when the dogs were set on them. The arena had been reinforced and made higher by lashed beams and planks so that the inner wall was nearly as high as the first-floor windows of the inn. ‘They can jump,’ the farmer said. ‘Werewolves can jump, everyone knows that. We built it too high for the Devil himself.’

The villagers untied the ropes from the horses and pulled the bundle in the net towards the bear pit. It seemed to struggle more vigorously and to resist. A couple of the farmers took their pitchforks and pricked it onwards which made it howl in pain and snarl and lash out in its net.

‘And how are you going to release it into the bear pit?’ Freize wondered aloud.

There was a silence. Clearly this stage had not been foreseen. ‘We’ll just lock it in and leave it to get its own self free,’ someone suggested.

‘I’m not going near it,’ another man said.

‘If it bites you once, you become a werewolf too,’ a woman warned.

‘You die from the poison of its breath,’ another disagreed.

‘If it gets the taste of your blood it hunts you till it has you,’ someone volunteered.

Brother Peter and Luca and the two women went into the front door of the inn and took rooms for themselves and stables for the horses. Luca also hired a dining room that overlooked the bear pit in the yard and went to the window to see his servant, Freize, standing in the bear pit with the beast squirming in its net beside him. As he expected, Freize was not able to leave even a monster such as this netted and alone.

‘Get a bucket of water for it to drink, and a haunch of meat for it to eat when it gets itself free,’ Freize said to the groom of the inn. ‘And maybe a loaf of bread in case it fancies it.’

‘This is a beast from hell,’ the groom protested. ‘I’m not waiting on it. I’m not stepping into the pit with it. What if it breathes on me?’

Freize looked for a moment as if he would argue, but then he nodded his head. ‘So be it,’ he said. ‘Anyone here have any compassion for the beast? No? Brave enough to catch it and torment it but not brave enough to feed it, eh? Well, I myself will get it some dinner, then, and when it has untied itself from these knots, and recovered from being dragged over the road for a mile and a half, it can have a sup of water and a bite of meat.’

‘Mind it doesn’t bite you!’ someone said and everyone laughed.

‘It won’t bite me,’ Freize rejoined stolidly. ‘On account of nobody touches me without my word, and on account of I wouldn’t be so stupid as to be in here when it gets loose. Unlike some, who have lived alongside it and complained that they heard it sniffing at their door and yet took months to capture the poor beast.’

A chorus of irritated argument arose at this, which Freize simply ignored. ‘Anyone going to help me?’ he asked again. ‘Well, in that case I will ask you all to leave, on account of the fact that I am not a travelling show.’

Most of them left, but some of the younger men stayed in their places, on the platform built outside the arena so that a spectator could stand and look over the barrier. Freize did not speak again but merely stood, waiting patiently until they shuffled their feet, cursed him for interfering, and went.

When the courtyard was empty of people, Freize fetched a bucket of water from the pump, went to the kitchen for a haunch of raw meat and a loaf of bread, then set them down inside the arena, glancing up at the window where Luca and the two women were looking down.

‘And what the little lord makes of you, we will know in time,’ Freize remarked to the humped net, which shuffled and whimpered a little. ‘But God will guide him to deal fairly with you even if you are from Satan and must die with a silver arrow through your heart. And I will keep you fed and watered for you are one of God’s creatures even if you are one of the Fallen, which I doubt was a matter of your own choosing.’

Luca started his inquiry into the werewolf as soon as they had dined. The two women went to their bedroom, while the two men, Brother Peter and Luca, called in one witness after another to say how the werewolf had plagued their village.

All afternoon they listened to stories of noises in the night, the handles of locked doors being gently tried, and losses from the herds of sheep which roamed the pastures under the guidance of the boys of the village. The boys reported a great wolf, a single wolf running alone, which would come out of the forest and snatch away a lamb that had strayed too far from its mother. They said that the wolf sometimes ran on all four legs, sometimes stood up like a man. They were in terror of it, and would no longer take the sheep to the upper pastures but insisted on staying near the village. One lad, a six-year-old shepherd boy, told them that his older brother had been eaten by the werewolf.

‘When was that?’ Luca asked.

‘Seven years ago, at least,’ the boy replied. ‘For I never knew him – he was taken the year before I was born, and my mother has never stopped mourning for him.’

‘What happened?’ Luca asked.

‘These villagers have all sorts of tales,’ Brother Peter said quietly to him. ‘Ten to one the boy is lying, or his brother died of some disgusting disease that they don’t want to admit.’

‘She was looking for a lamb, and he was walking with her as he always did,’ the boy said. ‘She told me that she sat down just for a moment and he sat on her lap. He fell asleep in her arms and she was so tired that she closed her eyes for only a moment, and when she woke he was gone. She thought he had strayed a little way from her and she called for him and looked all round for him but she never found him.’

‘Absolute stupidity,’ Brother Peter remarked.

‘But why did she think the werewolf had taken him?’ Luca asked.

‘She could see the marks of a wolf in the wet ground round the stream,’ the boy said. ‘She ran about and called and called, and when she could not find him she came running home for my father and he went out for days, tracking down the pack, but even he, who is the best hunter in the village, could not find them. That was when they knew it was a werewolf who had taken my brother. Taken him and disappeared, as they do.’