LITMIR.BIZ

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       AUTHOR’ S NOTE

      Words marked with an asterisk are explained in the Historical References and Glossary starting on page 334.

       Manoir de Souarcy-en-Perche, Winter 1294

      AGNÈS de Souarcy stood before the hearth in her chamber calmly contemplating the last dying embers. During the past weeks both man and beast had been beset by a deadly cold that seemed intent on putting an end to all living things. So many had already succumbed that there was barely enough wood to make coffins, and those left alive preferred to use what little there was to warm themselves. The people shivered with cold, their insides ravaged by straw-alcohol, their hunger only briefly kept at bay with pellets of suet and sawdust or the last slices of famine bread made from straw, clay, bark or acorn flour. They crowded into the rooms they shared with the animals, lying down beside them and curling up beneath their thick, steamy breath.

      Agnès had given her serfs permission to hunt on her land for seventeen days, or until the next new moon, on condition they distribute half the game they killed among the rest of the community, beginning with widows, expectant mothers, the young and the elderly. A quarter of what remained would go to her and the members of her household and the rest to the hunter and his family. Two men had already flouted Agnès de Souarcy’s orders, and at her behest the bailiffs had given them a public beating in the village square. Everybody had praised the lady’s leniency, but some expressed private disapproval; surely the perpetrators of such a heinous crime deserved execution or the excision of hands or noses – the customary sentences for poaching. Game was their last chance of survival.

      Souarcy-en-Perche had buried a third of its peasants in a communal grave, hastily dug at a distance from the hamlet for fear that an epidemic of cholera might infect those wraiths still walking. They had been sprinkled with quicklime like animal carcasses or plague victims.

      In the icy chapel next to the manor house the survivors prayed day and night for an improbable miracle, blaming their ill luck on the recent death of their master, Hugues, Seigneur de Souarcy, who had been gored by an injured stag the previous autumn, leaving Agnès widowed, and no male offspring to inherit his title and estate.

      They had prayed to heaven until one evening a woman collapsed, knocking over the altar she had been clinging to, and taking with her the ornamental hanging. Dead. Finished off by hunger, fever and cold. Since that day the chapel had remained empty.

      Agnès studied the cinders in the grate. The charred wood was coated in places with a silvery film. That was all, no red glow that would have enabled her to postpone any longer the ultimatum she had given herself that morning. It was the last of the wood, the last night. She sighed impatiently at the self-pity she felt. Agnès de Souarcy had turned sixteen three days before, on Christmas Day.

      It was strange how afraid she had been to visit the mad old crone; so much so that she had all but slapped her lady’s maid, Sybille, in an attempt to oblige the girl to go with her. The hovel that served as a lair for this evil spirit reeked of rancid mutton fat. Agnès had reeled at the stench of filth and perspiration emanating from the soothsayer’s rags as she approached to snatch the basket of meagre offerings: a loaf

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