Falcon 1 - The Lure of the Falcon Read online

  Once, in a fit of rage, when he had put that question to the old servant, Rozenn, who had all but brought him up, she had only smiled fondly at him and patted his cheek.

  'I dare say he wanted you for himself, my child, even before you were born,' she had said then. 'You know that you must dedicate your life to his service.'

  For a long while, that explanation had satisfied him. But for the past two years, ever since he was fourteen, it had been no more than a theory, and one which he had been bending all the powers of his youthful logic to break down. God could not have decided, even before a person came into the world, that he was destined irrevocably for the Church. Or if he did do it, he would at least take care to inspire his chosen servant with a real vocation.

  Yet this was far from so in Gilles' case. He was genuinely, even deeply religious, but no more nor less than any other young Breton of his age. God, to him, was a vast, mysterious being, frightening and rather cruel, the best of whose servants were bound to renounce absolutely everything that was most wonderful in that very God's own creation: the world and all its vast wealth and infinite delight. The older he grew, the more Gilles was repelled by the austerity of that difficult service. He could see himself far better in the braided cocked hat of one of the king's soldiers than in the narrow black habit, worn shiny with age, of a man of God! Unfortunately, his mother had decided once and for all that he was to be a priest.

  His mother! Whenever he conjured up the image of Marie-Jeanne Goëlo, Gilles was filled with such a strange mixture of feelings that he could never decide which one predominated. There was a kind of devotion mingled with fear and, from the onset of adolescence, a kind of angry resentment also. In return for a little love, had she so wished it, the child would have given her all the affection and adoration that were in him. But that Marie-Jeanne had never wanted.

  As far back as he could remember, Gilles had been held at arm's length by a mother who had never kissed him and the two of them, though bound by the closest of all blood relationships, would have lived together in almost total silence until the boy's departure for the college six years earlier, but for Rozenn's warm presence, so full of bustle and affection.

  It was from Rozenn, also, that Gilles had learned something of the events leading up to his own birth which had shattered his mother's life and brought him into the world a bastard. It was a common enough story, the classic tale of a girl seduced and abandoned, except that Marie-Jeanne's own fanatical character had raised it to the level of Greek tragedy.

  Marie-Jeanne Goëlo was the daughter of a retired ship's surgeon, invalided out in consequence of a naval engagement and settled in the small town of Pont-Scorff. She had never known her mother, who had died when she was born, but she had been the prettiest of the waiting women serving the Comtesse de Talhouët-Grationnaye, whose chateau of Leslé was not far from Pont-Scorff. It was the Countess who had made the match with Ronan Goëlo and she who had taken charge of the little girl after her mother's death.

  She had seen to it that the child was given an excellent education at a good convent in Quimperlé, where the Talhouëts passed the winter months. Marie-Jeanne was a grave, reserved, yet attractive child, beautiful in an austere way, with her pure features, thick brown hair and very beautiful eyes of the same colour. Above all, she was extremely religious and it soon became an accepted thing in the Talhouët family that when Marie-Jeanne grew up she would quit her rather worldly convent only to enter another and much stricter one belonging to the Benedictines of Locmaria.

  And then, at the end of one of those summers which took the Talhouët family and Marie-Jeanne with them back each year to Leslé, the thing happened. The nun-to-be was found to be pregnant. Dry-eyed but with a deathlike countenance, she herself broke the news of her condition to the Countess but it proved quite impossible to get a word from her about the circumstances of the disaster or the name of the man responsible. Immured in a ferocious silence, the sixteen-year-old had rejected both blame and pity. What she sought from her benefactress was rather a sentence than any form of assistance.

  And the Talhouëts, who had four children of their own and entertained a great many young people, could only fall back on guesswork, for no one had ever observed any unusual intimacy between Marie-Jeanne and any of the guests at the chateau.

  That winter, Marie-Jeanne did not go back to Quimperlé. She remained hidden away at Leslé in the care of the housekeeper, Rozenn Tanguy, and in May 1763 brought Gilles into the world. But Leslé, for all its lakes and woods, was not so far removed from the world that no rumour could leak out, and a fortnight after the clandestine birth the one-time naval surgeon Ronan Goëlo was found hanging from the kingbeam of his house, above a collection of empty rum bottles.

  Realizing that there would be malicious gossip to contend with and that Marie-Jeanne and her baby might not be safe on her own estates for much longer, Madame de Talhouët set about finding them a refuge. Her younger son, the Abbé Vincent, who had insisted upon standing godfather to the child, had been obliged to return home after the dissolution of the Jesuits and had just then been installed as rector of the nearby town of Hennebont. He it was who took charge of mother and baby. They removed to Hennebont and settled in a small house by the ramparts, taking with them Rozenn, who had become passionately fond of the little boy.

  But Marie-Jeanne longed for still greater silence and solitude. Regret for the cloister bit deeper than ever in her shuttered heart. She loathed the noises of the harbour and the town. And so, with the small legacy left her by her father, she bought a house and garden hidden away behind thickets of gorse and blackthorn near the moorland village of Kervignac. There she shut herself away with Rozenn and the baby to live a life of self-denial centred chiefly on prayer.

  Gilles grew up a solitary little boy with an uncaring mother whom he had never known to smile. He learned to play quietly so as not to disturb the meditations of this would-be nun. On the rare occasions when she talked to him at all it was all of God, the Virgin and the saints, to teach him his prayers and try to inspire him with a disgust for this world. And the better to convince him, she taught him very early that he was not like other children but a kind of outcast who could find peace and salvation only in the bosom of the Church.

  'The world will reject you with loathing,' she would tell him. 'Only God will open his arms to you.'

  In the teeth of the Abbé Talhouët's remonstrances and despite the tears of Rozenn, who could not bear to see her nursling made unhappy, Marie-Jeanne Goëlo strove, week after week and year by year, to instil into her son's head the belief that in this world he must be either a priest or an outcast. Unless he chose the devil's path which could lead him only to the scaffold.

  She was only partly successful. The child had eyes to see with and although he was told that the world was wicked, corrupt and dangerous, he could not bring himself to see it so. There was all the beauty of the countryside in spring, there was the sea, the wind, the starry nights, the smell of sun-warmed earth, birdsong and trees and all the animals that filled the little world of any peasant child. There were horses, those great, splendid beasts he adored instinctively, like creatures out of legend. And then there were Rozenn's songs and the countless wonderful tales of old Brittany, of which she seemed to possess an inexhaustible fund.

  He had been told so often that he was not like other children that he sought the reason for it, and learned that it was because he had no father. Then he wanted to know more and pestered Rozenn with questions the poor woman could not possibly answer.

  'A gentleman, he was,' she admitted one day, 'but his name I don't know, for your mother would never tell it.'

  Over the years, the image of that father about whom Rozenn would only speak so guardedly began to haunt Gilles' imagination, becoming ever more highly-coloured. Perhaps because his mother denied him the love which, like all children, he had a basic need for, he grew the more attached to his missing parent, rejecting the picture of an unscrupulous seducer and
clothing him in the glory of a great adventurer and a man with a passion for freedom.

  And so, as the figure of this faceless father grew within him, there grew up also a still unrecognized yearning to rejoin him somehow, beyond time and space, and become as though one with him. At this point he ceased questioning Rozenn, who in any case had no more to tell him, out of a vague fear of coming across something which might spoil his private hero for him. He was silent, too, whenever his mother happened to refer to the time when he would commence his theological studies.

  Become a priest? He had never really wanted it. But tonight, as he ran across the moor where the great standing stones stood like the petrified sentinels of some mysterious kingdom, he set his face against the alien thought once and for all. How could he freely offer God a heart possessed by the shameless vision of a little siren with a head of flaming red hair?

  When at last he reached his home, crouching like a big cat in a small hollow, surrounded by may trees, brambles and gorse bushes, he paused for a moment, alarmed at the thought of encountering his mother in his present scanty attire. When he pictured the icy way she would look at his nakedness, he felt a shiver run down his spine.

  He crept cautiously to the little, low window winking out like a big eye into the night, hoping that Marie-Jeanne would have retired already to her chamber, to her prayers, by this late hour. In fact, she never took much notice of what he did with himself in his holidays and would sup when it suited her, without waiting for him, for Gilles would be out all night sometimes at sea, fishing with the sons of the pilot, Le Mang, who were the only friends he had ever made in the village.

  Pressing his nose to the window, he saw that the room was indeed empty, except for Rozenn, seated on a settle by the hearth telling her beads and dozing intermittently, as her habit was, her head nodding forward from time to time upon her chest. The long, polished oak table was set for one.

  Gilles smiled at the reassuring picture, opened the door quietly and slid inside as noiselessly as a cat. Three strides took him to the big chest which ran along the carved wall where the box beds were concealed. He opened one section of it, took out a coarse shirt, similar to the one he had lost, and a pair of trousers to go with it and put them on.

  Then he crept back to the door, slipped out and came in again, more noisily.

  'I'm late!' he called, 'but it was so lovely down by the river I forgot the time. I'm sorry!'

  Rozenn started and blinked her blue eyes vaguely at the boy from under the pointed arch of muslin which she wore over her grey bun instead of a cap, in the fashion of the women of Auray.

  'Eh! It's you!' she said, getting up with an effort. 'I think I must have dropped off for a moment.'

  'Dropped off! I think you were fast asleep. Why didn't you go to bed? I'm old enough to get my own supper, you know.'

  She shook her head, displeased at this revival of an old bone of contention between them.

  ' 'Twouldn't be right! How many times do I have to tell you, men of your breeding never have got their own food? Sit down and eat!'

  'Where is my mother? Gone to bed already?'

  'No. To church. There is continuous prayer. Your mother will be there all night.'

  'All night? Surely that's rather a lot?'

  The old servant shrugged, indicating her own opinion of Marie-Jeanne's excessive devotions.

  'One of these days she'll be asking them to make her sacristine, so that she can spend all day there, too. Blessed St Anne! There's no sense in the woman.'

  Gilles nodded agreement and attacked his soup with the hearty appetite of his age. His rescue and his run across the heath had both made him ravenous. And he said no more because, although there were more questions he would have liked to ask, it was not done for a man to talk while he ate. So it was not until he had finished his meal that he glanced up at Rozenn, still standing by him, with eyes bright with curiosity.

  'My mother never goes visiting and she sees no one,' he said, by way of an opening, 'but you know the whole country all the way to Hennebont and Port-Louis, don't you, Rozenn?'

  'I've no call to be discourteous,' she snorted, rising on the defensive. 'If folks speak to me, I answer them! Why should you ask?'

  'Nothing really. I was only wondering if you knew a family called Saint-Mélaine?'

  The grizzled brows frowned under their little starched roof.

  'Well – what of them?' she said suspiciously. 'Why should you want to talk about them?'

  'Oh… no reason,' Gilles said, rising so as to forestall further questions. 'As I was coming by the park of Locguenolé, I met a girl who said that was her name and that she was visiting at the chateau. But it doesn't matter…'

  And to cover his embarrassment he went out, saying he would make sure the hens were shut up because a fox had been seen hanging round. Curiosity was Rozenn's besetting sin and she would be sure to pursue her little inquisition to the bitter end. While he made his conscientious round of the small hen run, he was busy making up a tale about a fall into a ditch and a twisted ankle which should preserve both his own self respect and Judith's modesty.

  His hope was not disappointed. Rozenn knew better than anyone how to put the most detailed questions without appearing to. She would have made an incomparable confessor because not only could none of the gossips for miles around resist her but she could even make the most taciturn old fisherman talk, the ones who only undamped their toothless gum from their pipe stems enough to take in warming draughts of brandy or cider.

  'She could wring a confession from the bishop himself – or even from my verger!' Gilles' godfather, the Abbé Vincent, would say, and he had known the old woman all his life. 'When I was a child, she could even make the poachers at Leslé talk and would take a share of their loot off them, then send them off with the remainder, plus a flask of brandy and a lecture.'

  Consequently, Gilles very soon discovered all he wanted to know from her.

  Judith de Saint-Mélaine had lost her mother some months previously and had been admitted as a boarder to the Convent of Our Lady of Joy at Hennebont, where the abbess, Madame Clothilde de la Bourdonnaye, and her Bernardine nuns undertook the education of young ladies of noble birth and little fortune and in general made nuns of them. Her father, an elderly gentleman and all but penniless, had been obliged to quit the small estate at Fresne, not far from Ploermel, which had been his wife's dowry and their sole property and move to an old, crumbling house in the walled town of Hennebont bequeathed to him by some forgotten cousin.

  So the baron and his daughter had gone to live in the dead cousin's dark, cramped house and thanks to the good offices of the La Bourdonnayes, whose lands marched with those of Fresne, and also to her godmother, the Comtesse de Perrien, Judith had been admitted to Our Lady of Joy to embark on what, until then, had been a wholly neglected education. For with a mother who was a permanent invalid and two half-wild brothers she had grown up as naturally as a wild flower and with no more care.

  'You see,' Rozenn concluded, taking up her knitting again, but giving the young man a meaning look which instantly set him blushing, 'this young lady of yours is scarcely luckier than you are. You have no father, she has lost her mother, she is nobly born but as poor as Job. You are to be a priest and she a nun. And so you may put her out of your mind.'

  'What makes you think I had her in mind at all?' Gilles said sulkily.

  Rozenn took off her spectacles and wiped them on a corner of her apron. Then she uttered a short, mirthless laugh.

  'My poor boy! If you hadn't, you would have given me and my tales short shrift long before this, saying you'd lost interest.

  But you heard me right out without a word, and your eyes like stars. Is she so very pretty?'

  Gilles turned his back on her abruptly and began rumpling his thick, dark-gold hair as though seeking for some elusive idea.

  'Yes… yes, I suppose she is! But after all, what difference does it make? You say she's no better endowed than I am, but you're
wrong. Even if her future were not already decided, she could never be anything to me because she may be poor but she is still noble and if she has no mother, at least she bears her father's name. She was born in wedlock while I am nothing but a bastard. Which, in a world where birth is the only real passport to a proper life, is to say nothing. So we'll not talk about it again, ever…'

  And rather than let Rozenn's distressed eyes see him give way to the flood of bitterness that was overwhelming him, he escaped from the house and roamed about the heath until late into the night.

  During the days that remained of the holidays, before he was to return to college after All Souls, he did not mention Judith's name again, but he was rarely seen about the house.

  Yet he no longer went to sea with the Le Mang brothers as he used to do, nor did he fish in the river any more. Even the ramparts of Port-Louis, the nearby naval fort, where he used to love to wander and the Eastern waterfront where he liked to go sometimes to breathe in the spicy odours of the great ships returning from the Indies, saw him no more. He would sit for hours by the banks of the Blavet, in the nest in the long grass to which, that evening, he had dragged an unconscious form, watching the moving waters flow past but with no thought of casting a line.

  Two or three times, he went as far as Hennebont and wandered for a long time along the path between the river and the high walls of the convent, and then walked back to Kervignac without so much as calling on his godfather, although he loved him dearly, both for his inexhaustible goodness and for his ever-watchful care. Too watchful, perhaps, in the present case. Gilles was chiefly afraid that the priest's shrewd eyes would very quickly discover his secret.