It is a fragile peace and cannot last.
Bisclavret considers himself fortunate if he only loses one night each week. Most often it’s more. Two days, three days; he can’t remember the last time he lived one Sabbath to the next in the same skin. The wolf drags him away more often than ever, and each time it’s a little harder to come back. He leaves his clothes neatly folded near the border of his estate, somewhere he can always find them, and still the shift threatens to tear him apart again even while he dresses.
Human, he tells himself, over and over, fumbling his tunic over his head.You are human. Stay here. Stay like this.But the wolf is growing stronger, and he’s afraid.
He conjures excuses that he knows his wife doesn’t believe. No knight is called away by the king so often, and if she chose to ask at the castle, she’d know he never sleeps there, nor does he have business enough to take him afield so many nights each moon. But he brings her gifts, when he can – bright cloth, soft ribbons, delicate pastries, the first flowers of the spring. Anything to make it up to her. Anything to assure her that she isn’t the reason he strays.
If she didn’t know he was lying in the spring, she must know it by summer, and by autumn it’s undeniable. But she doesn’task. Not yet. Not as long as he always returns to her, speaks softly to her, lets her touch keep him human in the long cold nights. And when she looks at him, he never sees fear in her face, or disgust. Above all else, she still sees him as human.
When he’s with her, he can pretend that’s true.
The pretence is a mask he finds himself wearing more and more. In his exile, it was easy enough to manage with one or two servants, leaving comparatively few witnesses to his eccentricities, but that’s impossible now. His wife builds a bustling household around him, and his days of isolation are over, banished by guests and visitors. Their feasts may not rival those at the castle, but the storytellers come nonetheless, and the musicians, and they bring songs of love and tales of glory and a smile to the lips of the lady, so they are welcome. The knight in green comes visiting with his own wife, and before the day is done, the two women are exchanging knowing glances and promising to send over this recipe or that yarn. Even a man like Bisclavret, with little knowledge of women, can grasp that they will be discussing more than householding when they are alone together. But it makes her happy, to visit and be visited, and once upon a time, it was what he wanted too.
The house is transformed after its years of neglect: the roof mended, new hangings on the walls and dust swept from corners left abandoned since his father’s death. The overgrown herb garden has been tamed and coaxed to new life, and sometimes he finds time to walk there with his wife, as once they did in the kitchen gardens of the castle.
But still the cracks are beginning to show. Bisclavret strays further afield, unable to limit his transformations to his own estate because the risk of being seen is too high. He finds an old ruin, a forgotten chapel of one of the old orders – abandoned when the new monastery was built – and hides his clothes there,instead of among the trees. Each time he comes back to himself in that leaf-strewn house of God and walks the two miles home on human feet. Each time his wife is waiting for him, with her careful lack of questions, and a smile that grows more brittle by the day.
This truce is an impossible bargain. Every day is something he has stolen from the jaws of the wolf, and every night it comes feels like a battle for territory he refuses to cede, but he is losing ground, day by day, night by night, and he fears, too, that he is losing her.
She is not yet with child. It’s been long enough now that this is occasioning rumour at the court, in the guise of concerned enquiries, though Bisclavret himself isn’t sure if he’s concerned or relieved not to have to test, yet, whether monstrosity lives in the blood. It weighs heavily on her, though; every time her blood comes she is quiet, withdrawn, and no matter how often he assures her that he doesn’t blame her, it is clear that she blames herself, and finds his promises less and less convincing.
‘We have time,’ he tells her, over and over again. ‘I am content with this.’
But as the season turns and the winter encroaches and her blood comes as regular as church bells, his assurances offer scant comfort, and finally, finally, she says, ‘Content? How can you claim to be content, when it is so abundantly clear that you are not?’
‘If I have led you to believe otherwise . . .’
Her laugh is sharp and bitter. ‘Everybody believes otherwise, Bisclavret. They know that you are gone from me near half the week. They can’t decide what’s more likely – that you’re fleeing a harpy’s tongue or that you’ve got yourself a lover at some remove and are riding out to her in secret. But that you never take your horse, I would assume the latter too.’
He flinches. He should have foreseen that she would perceive a connection between his ever more frequent absences and their lack of a child, as though he married her only for an heir and not for the light and the love that she brings into his life. ‘Of course there is no lover.’
‘Of course,’ she echoes. ‘As though such questions are unwarranted. You do me insult, husband, to speak that way, when well you know that you have kept secrets from me. Long I have wanted to ask you for this truth, and long I have been afraid that you would be angry with me for asking, and so I have held my tongue.’
‘I would never be angry with you for asking anything.’
‘How can I believe that, when I have seen your temper for myself?’
A year ago he would have claimed no temper, but the strain of keeping the wolf at bay has robbed him of patience and sharpened his tongue. A pointed remark from a fellow knight or a small problem on the estate has been known to draw great rage from him, the wolf’s fury seething in his blood, and less and less can he hide his true mood behind a courtly mask. He has never turned that anger on her – that much he can claim, at least – but he suspects that is little comfort.
‘I will not be angry with you,’ he says again, though his heart is in his throat. He cannot tell her the truth: it will ruin him, ruin this, unmake the life that they have built.
‘Then let me ask the question I have swallowed for so long. If not to a lover, where is it that you go, when you are lost to me?’
And there it is.
It would be a softer cruelty to let her continue believing he goes to another woman’s bed, but he cannot do her that dishonour. Not when it isn’t true, and could never be true, because the only woman he has ever trusted with his heart is her. Andhe has told her enough lies; all the pretty gifts in the kingdom could never make up for that.
He’s still wrestling with what to say when she adds, ‘I’m afraid, every time you leave, that you won’t come back. That one day I will lose you.’
He lets out a bitter laugh. ‘I’m afraid of the same thing,’ he says, which does nothing to mollify her. ‘By God, wife, if I could tell you, I would. You know that I would. But I fear I have too much to lose. I am what I have always been: a coward.’
‘You are not a coward,’ she says. ‘I would not have married a coward. But you are a fool, if it hasn’t occurred to you that I have more to lose than you. What becomes of me, without you? This land is not mine. We have no children to lay claim to it. I am not your heir. I would be as much an orphan as before, exiled or once again in the care of the king. Perhaps I will never be able to give you a child, but I am owed answers.’
He suspects, in his heart of hearts, that she is not the reason they have no children. ‘I would give you anything but this,’ he says. ‘Any answer but this one.’
‘This is the one I have asked you for.’
And he owes it to her to answer honestly. She’s allowed him to keep this secret for far longer than he deserves, and what else has she asked of him but this? His cousin would have told her by now, if he had let the man stay.Heshould have told her by now. It was wrong of him to keep this hidden, and let her believe herself unloved, unwanted, second to some other desire.
