The Burning Court (23 page)

“That’s right,” said Edith. She turned to Brennan with a business-like politeness. “Captain Brennan, isn’t it? The others were telling me about you a few minutes ago, when you dismissed them.” Her smile had genuine charm. “But I’m sure you won’t dismiss me.”

Brennan was affable but noncommittal. “Miss Despard? I’m afraid we’ve been—” he nodded towards the shattered wall, and coughed.

“Oh, that was to be expected. I have the solution of your difficulties here,” said Edith, and gently touched the books under her arm. “You see, I overheard you saying you believed the wardrobe there had some connection with this case. It has, very much so. I found these books inside it last night. The second volume turned down easily at one chapter; so I gathered that Uncle Miles, though you could hardly call him a man of books, had found something in it to study. I should like to read you some of it—all of you. You may not find it enthralling. It is academic and even rather dull. But I think you ought to listen. Will you close the door, Ted?”

“Book?” said Mark. “What book?”

“It is Grimaud’s
History of Witchcraft,”
replied Edith.

Sitting down in the basket-chair by the window, she spoke with no more apology or diffidence than if she were dealing with a laundry-list. Yet, just before she began to read aloud, she lifted her eyes towards Stevens; and he was startled at the interest and curiosity with which she regarded him, as though she wondered. Her voice was clear and fluent, if without great expression.

“The root of the belief in the ‘non-dead’
(pas-morts)
appears to have originated in France in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. It is first written of by the Sieur de la Marre in 1737
(Traité sur la Magie, Sortilêge, Possessions, Obsessions, et Maléfices)
; for some years it was seriously discussed even by men of science; and controversy about it was again aroused by a criminal trial so recently as 1861.

“Briefly, the non-dead are those persons—commonly women—who have been condemned to death for the crime of poisoning, and whose bodies have been burnt at the stake, whether alive or dead. It is here that the province of criminology touches the province of witchcraft.

“From the earliest times the use of poison was regarded as a branch of sorcery, nor is the origin of the belief difficult to trace. ‘Love-potions’ or ‘hate-potions,’ admittedly a part of magic, have always been the mask under which the poisoner has worked; and to administer even a harmless love-potion was made punishable under Roman law.
¹
During the Middle Ages it was identified with heresy. In England, as late as 1615, a trial for murder by poison was, in effect, a trial for sorcery. When Anne Turner was tried before Lord Chief Justice Coke for poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury, there were shown in court her ‘inchantments’—figures in lead, parchments, a piece of human skin—and the spectators could feel the wind of the Black Man’s passing.

“ ‘At the shewing of these and inchanted papers and other pictures in court,’ writes the recorder, ‘there was heard a crack from the scaffolds, which caused great fear, tumult, and confusion among the spectators, every one fearing hurt, as if the Devil had been present, and grown angry to have his workmanship shewed by such as were not his own scholars.’
²

“But it was in France, during the latter part of the same century, that the practice of murder-cum-diablerie reached its height. It is stated that in Lisbon there were so many hags practising witchcraft that they had a quarter of their own.
³
Out of Italy (where the ladies of Toffana’s secret-society poisoned six hundred people) came Glaser and Exili, who searched for the Philosopher’s Stone and sold arsenic. In another chapter we have seen how eagerly the ladies of Louis XIV’s court embraced the cult of Satanism, notably the sacrifice of a child on the body of a woman during the Black Mass.
⁴
Muffled rites took place in-muffled rooms. The witch La Voisin evoked ghosts at Saint-Denis. Those enlisted now for Satanism were not, in Gaule’s phrase, ‘every old woman with a wrinkled face, a furr’d brow, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voice, or a scolding tongue’: they were the handsomest women procurable, from seamstress to court lady.
⁵
And husbands and fathers died.

“Through the confessional, some hint of these underground crafts reached the Grand Penitentiary of Paris. At the Arsenal, near the Bastille, was established the famous ‘Burning Court,’ whose vengeance was the wheel and the fire. The mysterious death of Madame de Montespan, Louis XIV’s favourite, in 1672, gave impetus to the poison-seekers. Between 1672 and 1680 some of the greatest ladies in France were summoned before the Burning Court: among them two nieces of Cardinal Mazarin, the Duchess of Bouillon, and the Countess of Soissons, mother of Prince Eugene. But what opened every secret cabinet to the world was the trial in 1676—a trial lasting three months—of the Marquise de Brinvilliers.

“The activities of the Marquise de Brinvilliers had been revealed through the accidental death of her lover, Captain Sainte-Croix. Among Sainte-Croix’s effects was a teakwood box to which was attached a paper of instructions that after his death it ‘might be delivered to the Marquise de Brinvilliers, who resides in the rue Neuve St. Paul.’ The box was filled with poisons, including corrosive sublimate, antimony, and opium. Madame de Brinvilliers fled; but was ultimately brought back to trial, on a charge of wholesale poisoning, by the efforts of a detective named Desprez. Though she was ably defended by Maître Nivelle, it was Desprez who secured her conviction. He produced in court a written confession which she had privately entrusted to him. It was a hysterical document, containing—among a terrible list of things she had really done—things which apparently she could not have done. She was sentenced to be beheaded and burnt.
⁶

“ ‘After the sentence, in order to make her divulge the names of any accomplices, she was put to the “water-torture.” This was a part of the judicial system: the victim was placed on a table, a leather funnel was put into her mouth, and water was poured into it until…’”

Briefly, Edith Despard raised her eyes from the book. The grey light of the window lay flat on her hair; and Edith’s expression was only one of great curiosity and interest. None of the men moved. Stevens was staring at the pattern in the carpet. He remembered now the address of the house in Paris to which Dr. Welden had told him to go if he were interested in famous crimes. It was Number 16, rue Neuve St. Paul.

“Madame de Sévigné saw her going to execution afterwards, and laughed and gossiped. A great multitude saw her do penance before Nôtre Dame, in a white shift, barefoot, with a lighted candle in her hand. She was now forty-two years old, and much of her doll’s beauty was gone. But she was a model of penitence and devotion, which satisfied the noble Abbé Pirot. She does not appear, however, to have forgiven Desprez: and, on mounting the scaffold, she uttered some words which were imperfectly understood. Her body was burnt in the Place de Grève.

“Due to the revelations at the trial, the authorities were ultimately able to penetrate the net of diablerie beneath the court of the Grand Monarque. La Chausée, a servant of Sainte-Croix, had already been broken to death on the wheel. The witch and poisoner La Voisin, taken with all her accomplices, was burnt alive in 1680. The dancers before Satan were gone; their ashes were scattered; and the great devil grinned alone on Nôtre Dame.

“But all persons do not seem to have accepted this. Although there is no apparent reason of their belief, Maître Nivelle is said to have told the Grand Penitentiary: ‘There is something beyond this. I saw them die. They were not ordinary women. They will be restless.’

“Now, what is behind this? It is noted that even today there are outbreaks of Satanism in Europe, as instanced by the investigation of MM. Marcel Nadaud and Maurice Pelletier so recently as 1925.
⁷
It needs no documentation to show that there have been outbreaks of poisoning, mass-murders—usually by women, and usually without any apparent motive. For instance (argues Perrot), there was Anna Maria Schonleben in Bavaria in 1811, and Marie Jeanneret in Switzerland in 1868;
⁸
there was Frau Van de Leyden, who poisoned twenty-seven people; there are even men, like Palmer and Cream in England.
⁹
What motive actuated them? In the case of the women, there was seldom any gain to be derived from the death of their victims, no hope of profit, no wrong to right. They were not mad: even though they seem puzzled to explain their own motives.

“It has been argued that theirs was a simple lust, and that they loved the little white powder of arsenic because it gave them the power of queens and the workers of destinies. But this does not explain all. If the women possessed a desire to kill, it cannot be thought that their victims possessed a desire to be killed. The most curious feature in all of these cases is the ease, the sense of fatality, the complete willingness of these victims to undergo it—even when they must have known they were being poisoned. Frau Van de Leyden said openly to a victim: ‘It will be your rum in a month.’ Jedago said: ‘Wherever I go, people die.’ Yet they remained undenounced. It is as though there were some diabolic bond uniting murderer and victim, something not unlike a spell or a hypnosis.

“This theory was first vaguely stated by the Sieur de la Marre in 1737, due to a case which agitated Paris in that year. A girl of nineteen—Thérèse La Voisin, the same surname as the alleged sorceress who was burnt in 1680—had been arrested for a series of murders. Her parents were charcoal-burners in the Forest of Chantilly. She could not read or write. She had been born in the ordinary way; and until the age of sixteen seemed quite normal. But even the ponderous detective wits of the time were aroused by eight deaths in that neighbourhood. A curious circumstance was that under the pillow or blanket of each person was found a cord—usually of hair, but sometimes of string or plaited hair—tied into nine small knots.

“They understood this. Nine, as we have seen, is the mystic number, the multiple of three, and it occurs over and over again in connection with magical ceremonies everywhere. The tying of nine knots in a string is believed to put on the victim a spell which places him entirely in the power of the sorceress.

“When the authorities descended on her house, they found the girl La Voisin in the wood near by, under a thicket, without clothes and with what one of them describes as ‘the eyes of a wolf.’ Taken to Paris and questioned, she made a statement. She screamed at the sight of fire. Though her parents said she could not read or write, she could do both; and spoke like a court lady. She admitted committing the murders. Asked the meaning of the spell put on them, she said:

“ ‘They are now one of us. There are so few of us, and we have need of others. They are not truly dead; they are alive again now. If you do not believe me, open their coffins and you will see. They are not in the coffins. One was at the Grand Sabbath last night.’

“It seems to have been true that the coffins were empty, at least. Another strange feature of the affair was that, at her trial, the girl’s parents came near proving something like an alibi for one of the crimes: resting on the fact that she must have walked two kilometers in a remarkably short time, and in some fashion penetrated a locked house. La Voisin is said to have replied:

“ ‘That is of no consequence. I went into the bushes, and I put the ointment on myself, and I put on the dress I had before. Then I had no trouble.’ Asked what she meant by the ‘dress she had before,’ she said: ‘I had many dresses. This was a beautiful dress, but I did not wear it when I went to the fire.’ At mention of the fire she seemed suddenly to recollect herself, and fell into a fit of screaming. …”

“I’ve had about enough of this,” interrupted Brennan, heavily. He passed a hand over his face, as though to make sure it was still there. “Excuse me, Miss Despard, but I’ve got work to do. This is April, not Halloween. Women on broomsticks are a little out of my line. If you tell me that a woman put a spell on Mr. Miles Despard, and rubbed herself with ointment, and got into a dress several hundred odd years old, and consequently walked through that wall—well, all I’ve got to say is, I want a case that’ll at least get past the grand jury.”

Edith, though a trifle supercilious, was not put out.

“You do?” she said. “Then here is one. The part I wanted you to read, really, comes next. But if you can’t derive profit from it, I won’t bother to read it. It’s about a woman named Marie D’Aubray (the same maiden name, I can tell you, as the Marquise de Brinvilliers) who was guillotined in 1861. Whatever you think of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, I presume you don’t think they were quite so unenlightened in the eighteen-sixties.”

“You don’t mean she was executed for witchcraft?”

“No. She was executed for murder. The details aren’t pleasant, and I don’t want to go over them. But I should just like to read you the description of her, written by a contemporary reporter, as she stepped into the dock. It says: ‘The case attracted wide attention, not only because of the good looks and comparative wealth of the accused woman, but by the modesty of her bearing; a modesty so great that when, on one occasion, the procurer-general put certain blunt words to her, she colored like a schoolgirl.’ And here we are: ‘She stepped into the dock bowing timidly to the President of the Tribunal. … She wore a boat-shaped hat of brown velvet, with a drooping plume and a gown of brown silk. In one hand she carried a silver-topped smelling bottle, and on the other wrist she wore a curious antique gold bracelet, with a clasp like a cat’s head, and a ruby in the mouth of the clasp. When witnesses began to testify as to the details of the Black Mass in the upper room of the villa at Versailles, and the poisoning of Louis Dinard, several over-excited spectators shouted, “No, no!” It was observed that her only sign of agitation was to finger this bracelet on her wrist.’ ” Edith closed the book with a snap. “Truth will out, Ted.
You
know who’s got a bracelet just like that.”