The Moonlight Mistress

“Long before I was born, he was married to my great-aunt.”

In some families, like her own, a connection by marriage could be a close one, but Pascal’s tone said otherwise. Lucilla looked away from the road for a moment, at Pascal. His expression was blank. She sensed some family trouble there. “You didn’t know him well.”

“At all,” Pascal said. “My great-aunt never returned from Germany. She died shortly after her marriage. She bore no children. It was forever after a source of grief for my grandoncle, Erard, who was her brother.”

“Kauz presumed upon his distant relationship with you?”

“To try and obtain funds, yes. My superiors found items of interest in his work and thought I would be the best candidate to extract further information from him.”

“Unpublished items of interest, I assume,” Lucilla said. She cast her mind back to the library at Somerville and the welcoming odor of old books. She remembered pursuing strings of letters through a series of journals, trying to discover if any of the writers thought or felt as she did, back when she still imagined she had hope of a permanent academic position, somewhere other than a school for girls. The shifting rivalries and alliances had fascinated her. She’d corresponded with a few fellow chemists, never revealing her gender, but it was difficult to explain why she held no position, and never attended conferences. She had not wanted to lie and pretend to be infirm.

“Yes. He is very secretive—it is rumored he has other laboratories than those at the Institute and at his home, where he pursues bizarre interests in isolation from the scientific community. His public work is often privately funded, and no one knows how much remains unpublished. For instance, his work with the body’s healing mechanisms ran parallel to that of an English biologist I knew from Cambridge, and there were hints of great advances he did not fully reveal. Also, disturbing implications about how the body could be harmed.”

“What college at Cambridge?” she asked.

“Trinity.” He paused. “My English is more respectable than my French.”

She’d barely heard him speak his own language. She nodded. “So why did you come to Germany? What did he promise you?”

Pascal said, “You should understand, not all of the scientists with whom I speak are conventional. I am used to being told strange things. I didn’t know when I traveled here what Kauz wished to reveal to me, though I had my suspicions. He gave only hints.”

“Stop hedging,” she said, annoyed. “I want the story.” She risked a glance at his face, and was surprised by how disconcerted, almost fearful, he appeared. He looked away quickly. His next words were almost lost in the roar of the motor and the rush of the wind.

“Very well, I will tell you. Kauz claimed he had met a woman who could transform her body into that of a wolf.”

“You mean a werewolf?”

His jaw dropped. “You don’t sound surprised.”

“If it weren’t odd, you wouldn’t be embarrassed to tell me about it,” she pointed out. “I think such legends are interesting. My father used to terrify us with lurid tales of beasts who would eat us at the full moon. Well, lurid enough for children. I imagine Kauz’s imagination outdid my father’s. For instance, that he made his werewolf a woman. That doesn’t surprise me at all.” He’d acted as so virulent a misogynist, could perversion be far behind?

“The scope of Kauz’s imaginings is impressive.” His tone was flat.

“I take it you didn’t believe him.” Pascal didn’t reply immediately. Lucilla glanced over. He was glaring at the innocent cows whom they were passing. “You did believe him,” she said.

“I did not disbelieve. There are more things in heaven and earth,” he growled.

“That’s true,” she said. “But?”

“He had no evidence, no photographs or film.”

“Or a werewolf.”

“No, not one of those, either,” he confirmed with a hint of humor. “Though perhaps I should be grateful he did not present me with a corpse. Wolf or human.”

Lucilla shuddered. “What evidence did he show you? He must have had something. You seem like a practical sort of chap.” Except when blathering about human souls in the midst of sex, but she could forgive him that. “Did he have samples, of blood or fur?”

“No, only quantities of figures,” he said. “Weights of the woman and of the woman-as-wolf. Lengths of time to shift from one to the other, and back again. A detailed description of the process, which was not limited to the full moon as legend suggests. An analysis of nutritional needs, and lack thereof.” He paused. “Length of time to heal injuries. As woman and as wolf, and if the change from one form to the other took place while injured. Clean cuts, ragged cuts, cuts from a silver blade, bruises to soft tissue. Broken bones.”

“I like Kauz less and less. That’s monstrous.” Electrifying a dead frog was nothing compared to deliberately injuring an intelligent creature. One was science, the other cruelty.

“His laboratory notebooks read as if he’d held a werewolf captive for months. The records did not appear to have been faked—he’d written them over a long period of time. His results were consistent with physical possibility. However, he could not produce this werewolf, though he repeatedly hinted that he would do so once he was sure he could trust me. But I do not think that day would ever have come. His werewolf may have existed only in his fevered mind. I am not sure if I am grateful or not, that he could produce nothing to support his statements. Then, I cannot help but worry that his captive was real, and that he might have killed her. As he kills his laboratory animals once they have served his purpose.”

She glanced away from the road and saw Pascal looking back at her, his expression troubled. “Perhaps she escaped,” Lucilla suggested.

“Perhaps,” he said. “To survive so long, she must have been—be resilient.”

Lucilla said, “I don’t think anyone at the Institute knew of this.”

“No. Perhaps I should have spoken of it to the trustees, but I didn’t think they would take my word, a visitor and a foreigner, over his. I was preparing to visit him again, to see if I could gather more evidence. Then I heard that war had been declared. I am now obligated to return to France.”

She drove for another kilometer in silence. Neither of them could do anything now about a situation that might be at least partly illusory. Best to distance herself from the troubling implications and concentrate on the most fascinating part of Pascal’s revelations. “Both species are mammals,” she said. “I wonder how different they are? Humans and wolves?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you,” Pascal said. “Do you think it possible?”

“Perhaps the wolf form isn’t a true wolf. Perhaps it only looks like one. On the inside, it could be more human. It’s an interesting exercise. Though I wonder how the change would initiate? Would the werewolf trigger a chemical reaction in her own body? It’s a bizarre idea, but possible, I suppose.”

“Like the duck-billed platypus.”

Lucilla cast him a glance. He was smiling. She said, “If it could turn into a duck, as well.”

“Have you ever traveled to the Antipodes?”

Lucilla considered his change of subject. She didn’t want to talk about Kauz anymore, either. “Alas, no. You?”

“Once, with my grand-oncle Erard, who worked on a merchant ship. I was eleven. It was the greatest adventure of my life.”

His tone sounded affectionate in a way she hadn’t heard before. “Tell me about it, and him,” Lucilla said.

“Perhaps later. First you will tell me how you became interested in chemistry,” Pascal said.

“Done,” she said.

INTERLUDE

LIEUTENANT GABRIEL MEYER WAS IN THE MIDST of testing his boy trumpeters on their fingering exercises when his fellow lieutenant and closest friend, Noel Ashby, entered the band room. Ashby, a lean man with cropped red hair and a slender mustache, leaned against a cabinet and crossed his legs at the ankles, outwardly casual, but Gabriel could read the tension in his normally relaxed posture, and he tensed, as well. Kern fumbled a pattern and stopped.

With a glance, Gabriel silenced the comment about to erupt from Wiley’s mouth. Wiley was inclined to rivalry. “No, keep on with it,” he said to Kern gently. “If you stop, you might stop there the next time, and make a habit of it.”

“Sir,” Kern squeaked, and lifted his trumpet again, aiming it at the regimental wolf banner that hung behind Gabriel’s chair. This time, he played more slowly, but accurately.

“Good,” Gabriel said. “Why don’t you two run along. I hear there’s cake for tea.”

When the boys had gone, Noel ambled over to Gabriel’s podium and leaned on his wooden music stand. “Reserves have been called up,” he said.

Gabriel rubbed his mustache with his forefinger. “So it’s happened then.”

“Soon,” Noel said. “I came here because we’re to be in the same company.”