Page 33 of The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales

‘Je te pardonne. Je te pardonne tout.’

That hour has not yet come. Miette waits, holding her breath, wishing the deed could be over. Or need not to be done at all.

The light from a lantern, jagged and uneven, is getting closer. Miette can distinguish the sound of breathing above the twilight sighings and whisperings and chitterings of the forest. The rattle of an old man’s chest as Golaud walks out of the darkness, out of the cover of the trees and into the glade, following the well-worn path to La Fontaine des Aveugles – the Fountain of the Blind Men – to the place where Pelléas fell.

He moves slowly, pain in every step. Miette watches him and feels nothing. His body is failing him. He is old. His wounds, from war or the hunt, sing loud in the damp evening air. The scars, beneath the velvet of his robes, remind of hunting accidents and the memory of metal and spear. The crumbling of sinew and bone, eating him away from the inside out, grief or regret or anger? For eighteen years she has asked herself the same question, and received no answer. But she does not pity him. She cannot. She thinks only that he must be called to account. In Yniold’s absence, his lack of will, it falls to her.

A daughter to avenge a mother, a less familiar story.

Golaud places the lantern uncertainly on the edge of the well. Miette waits. It is not yet her turn to step upon the stage. Her father is muttering, talking, but so softly that she cannot distinguish one word from the next. She moves a little closer, picks out the words.

‘La vérité. La vérité.’

Over and over, like a chorus refrain, the syllables bleeding one into the other and back again. Demanding the truth. The words he said to his Mélisande as she lay dying.

Tell me the truth.

Golaud leans forward, two twisted hands in the yellow halo of light on the grey stone of the well. Miette steps forward, in silence and without drama. For if she is to rewrite this story, it cannot be told in noise and emotion, but rather enacted with cold purpose. It is a practical ending, not a theatrical one.

One step forward, then two. Un, deux, trois loup. Coming to get you, Mr Wolf, ready or not. A game of grandmother’s footsteps played by two lonely children, she and Yniold, in a desolate palace long ago.

With a third silent step, she is on him.

Now, at last, she is ready to join herself to him. A murderer for a father, a murderer for a daughter.

As Golaud stoops forward to gaze into the blind eye of the water, Miette has the advantage of height. Thinking of Mélisande and her Pelléas, of Yniold’s mother too – dead before her time – Miette lifts the knife and, with the strength of both hands and the weight of her body, she brings the blade down between her father’s shoulders.

He cries out, once, like an animal caught fast in the metal jaws of a trap, then nothing. She has heard it said that the soul takes flight alone and in silence. She does not know if this is true, only that he does not speak or cry out again.

Miette relinquishes her hold on the hilt and steps back, half stumbling on the hem of her cloak beneath her heel, sodden with dew. She, too, is silent. There is nothing to say, though she wills him to turn, wishing her act of vengeance to be understood. At the same time, she does not want to see the life leaving him or her own image reflected in his dying eyes.

Golaud falls forward, as once Pelléas had fallen. His hands slip from the wall, empty fingers scratching down the stone surface of the well, down to the ground. No crash of cymbals to mark the moment of death, no crescendo, merely justice done.

Then, a nightjar calls, a spur to action. Taking the letter from her pocket, Miette places it upon her father’s body. The testimony of Mélisande’s daughter, eighteen years in the telling. A confession of why and how she killed her father.

‘La vérité,’ she whispers.

This is the truth. Set it down, set it down.

The truth is that stories can be rewritten. Acts of love and death.

Miette stretches to take Golaud’s lantern from the rim of the well, taking care not to touch him, then turns to walk back through the forest. How easy, it seems, to kill a man. So easy to separate the spirit from the skin and bone?

In the distance, the bell strikes another hour. It marks the end of one history and the beginning of another.

Gold is the colour of loyalty. Of a duty fulfilled.

THE REVENANT

The Fishbourne Marshes, Sussex

Winter 1955

The Revenant

When latest autumn spreads her evening veil,

And the grey mists from these dim waves arise,