Beasts of the Bastille - a Revolutionary Serial

Part 6

For Part 1 of this serial, read HERE

For the previous part read HERE

The Story So Far - twins Joseph-Marie, a witch, and Marie-Joseph, a deserting soldier, are held in separate prisons. They contrive a way to write letters to each other involving familiars requiring blood payment.

But though Marie still faces torture and abuse at the hands of the ecclesiastical authorities, Joseph has broken out of his jail.

Marie continues their correspondence…

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My Dear Joseph,

I am breathless with joy! That you are safe and in the hands of my most esteemed friends gives me no end of happiness. No doubt they love you as they love me, for you and I are one, and they with me. I contain multitudes.

I have a plan of my own to tell you of. I haven’t yet explained how I got to be in god’s wretched torture pit. It was by my own design. I paid a farmer’s wife to accuse me of witchcraft so that I would be arrested. My reasons for this are simple. The priest here fancies himself an expert witch hunter. He speaks of nothing else in his tired homilies. Harasses all manner of women and girls, he demeans and belittles, thinks all women evil, and arrests as many as he can get away with. He has tortured and murdered many innocent women. All because he is an ugly, putrid little man with blackened teeth and a vile personality, wholly incapable of kindness or empathy. No woman would touch him.

Him, I could dispatch easily enough without the trouble of a prison cell, to be sure. But he is in the good graces of a particular archbishop who has also taken a morbid interest in the punishment of witches. He travels to assist his sycophantic priest in obtaining the confessions of accused women who remain steadfast in their innocence. Their tortures are endless and they delight in inventing cruel new ways to tease the devil out of women. Perfect men of god, full of hatred and vitriol, too arrogant to see their folly. Righteousness and cruelty go always hand in hand.

As I said, they have only killed women who could not have confessed, for they had no sin of heresy in their hearts. I have withstood the tortures of the priest, knowing his superior would come to assist him in breaking me of my willpower. Today that archbishop arrives and I will tear them both to pieces in my cell. I will feast upon their holy remains and I will grow in power and ferocity. Once I have rid the world of these monsters, my escape will follow.

I write this with great difficulty. My wolf is barely contained within its human prison. I feel my bones crack in preparation for its escape. I walk with difficulty as tendons and ligaments loosen. My speech distorted, my mind wanders to droughts of blood and raw meat sliding down my gullet.

I love you my brother, we will meet again, in one world or another.

Yours,

Marie-Joseph

Marie love in much pain cant write but safe will send yr familr with this mssge

Healing now with frnds

Yr brother loving Jo

Joseph,

It is with great difficulty I write this letter in secret. The archbishop did not come alone. He brought exorcists with him, they mean to strip the devil from within me. I love my demon master. I cannot live without him. Oh, Joseph, for so long he has been my sole comfort, always within me, always holding me up when I would fall. The sweet succor of his strength has been mine alone since childhood. If they take him, and if I cannot find you… I will die. I am a wretched being. My body destroyed, my mind in chaos. But I will fight. We will fight. We speak in internal whispers, profess our love… we hope our cries for help will be heard.

Our name is Legion, for we are many.

God will not devour us.

Yours,

Marie

My sister, my sweet monster Marie,

This shall be the last letter I write you and send by way of your strange messenger.

In a week I shall either be with you or be dead.

Can you imagine what it will be to be united at last, after a lifetime split apart like the cracked halves of a nutshell? It could be that we no longer match each other, that life itself has deformed us so we do not fit together anymore. If that’s the case, so be it. But I will be with you, and if you are indeed a monster then I will also be a monster. Indeed ever since I plied a trade as a soldier and executioner, taking the poor wretches of the land and stringing them up to hang like ripe bursting fruit on roadside trees, I have been some kind of monster.

I am nearly healed, or healed enough. No doubt just as you felt my pains you will also feel the agonies of my healing as I lie here in an abandoned cottage, the summer rains glistening in through the frayed thatch of the roof, and I suck on robbed honeycomb as my bones mend and the stings of a hundred honeybees smart like resourceful imps.

I have healed where I was broken; where I fell is where I rise again. I take an old musket which I found on the body of a soldier in a roadside ditch – I could have sworn it was me myself in my old uniform, festering in the June sun with grass growing through my broken skull – and I turn it stock-side up to use as a crutch.

And I start to hobble. From Grenoble to where you are is a good five-day hike, and I must stay off the main roads where the King’s Men are patrolling for vagrants. I don’t fear them any longer, just as I fear nothing but re-imprisonment, but I do not wish to die until I at least have held you once more and stroked the hair of my sweet Marie, my little sister, in the days so long ago when our father used to come in search of you and I would hide you in my arms and never let go until he’d tired of beating me.

Adieu, or maybe I should say à bientot – see you soon my dearest sister

Your loving brother and the half of your soul

Joseph

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NEXT PART - Tuesday June 23.

Be there or be ancien régime!