The Inquisitor’s Tale

The brewster tells the story of one of the three strange children, a girl named Jeanne. The daughter of peasants, Jeanne seems unremarkable, except for her beautiful dog: a white greyhound with a copper-colored nose, whose name is Gwenforte. As a baby, Jeanne is often left in the dog’s care. This surprises our original narrator, who breaks in to ask if it’s normal for dogs to babysit.

Marie explains: one day, while Gwenforte was guarding baby Jeanne at home, a poisonous adder (a kind of snake) slithered into the house. Gwenforte killed the snake before it could hurt Jeanne. When Jeanne’s parents came home and saw Gwenforte covered in the snake’s blood, they thought she had hurt the baby, and killed her. The narrator points out that the dog is alive, and Marie answers that it was dead, and now it’s alive again.

Her story goes on: when the peasants realized their mistake, they buried the dog in the forest, and people slowly began to treat the dog as a saint, visiting her burial spot and leaving offerings.

Meanwhile, baby Jeanne grew up happy and friendly, beloved by everyone in the village. After she had a convulsive fit and recovered in the arms of the town’s wise woman, Old Teresa, Jeanne could predict the future. Old Teresa took her under her wing.

One of Jeanne’s true predictions is of a “giant” coming to take Old Teresa away. This giant turns out to be a towering monk called Michelangelo de Bologna, who indeed takes Old Teresa with him—apparently to try her for witchcraft. Heartbroken, Jeanne becomes serious and furtive, and is at last herself taken away from the village by a band of knights.

Our original narrator is surprised by this whole story, wondering where Jeanne went and how the dog came back to life. Marie says she doesn’t know, but a little old nun at the next table says that she can continue the story.

The nun begins to tell her story from Jeanne’s perspective. Marie objects, saying that the nun couldn’t know what Jeanne saw and thought, but the nun quietly insists that she has her ways. The narrator has a sense that the nun is a little spooky: she seems to have strange powers.

In the nun’s telling, Jeanne has another vision: this time of Gwenforte returning to life, and her holy grove being chopped down. She walks out into the night and discovers that it’s all true. Reunited, Jeanne and Gwenforte soon must flee from the group of raggedy knights who have come to destroy the grove. They run home, and Gwenforte hides in the underbrush, while Jeanne greets her parents. But the knights finds their cottage. Jeanne hides again, and her parents cover for her, playing on the knights’ snobbery against peasants to trick them into searching for Jeanne in a dung heap.

Jeanne, hiding in the woods, thinks this is all very funny, until one of the knights, Sir Fabian, catches her.

The knights tell the peasants that they’re here to destroy Gwenforte’s grove, believing it to be a place for pagan worship, and that they’re taking Jeanne because they saw her there with the dog. The peasants tell them that Gwenforte has been dead for 10 years. Panicking, Jeanne explains her vision. Her parents and the whole village become suddenly afraid of her and allow the knights to take her away to be tried for witchcraft.

The nun finishes her story and passes the narrative on to a monk called Old Jerome, who says he knows another of the strange children, a boy called William. He warns the crowd that his part of the story will be dark and bloody.

Old Jerome, the librarian of the Monastery Saint-Martin, tells the story of William, one of the boys who grew up at the monastery. Jerome explains that many children were raised by monks, and William was the illegitimate child of a crusader and an unknown North African woman.

William grows up big (very big—even as a child, taller than the tallest monk) and inquisitive. He’s a true scholar, a talker, and a thinker. Unfortunately for him, not everyone around him appreciates his talents, and he has a falling-out with one of the senior monks, Brother Bartholomew. Brother Bartholomew lectures the monastery’s children on how peasants, women, and members of every religion but Christianity are in league with the devil; William not only objects to this, but comes up with lots of examples of people who prove that it’s wrong, from the famous scholarly nun Hildegard of Bingen to the great philosopher Avicenna. When Brother Bartholomew pushes back, William becomes so angry that he slams his hand down on an expensive stone table; the table miraculously explodes. William is expelled from the monastery for this act.

Old Jerome’s story goes on: the abbot of the monastery decides to send William away to the abbey of Saint-Denis. William doesn’t see this as a punishment: Saint-Denis is one of the world’s great monasteries, a center of scholarship and wisdom, but he’ll have to travel there through the forest of Malesherbes, a frightening place inhabited by a band of outlaws called the Foul Fiends. Old Jerome tells William that the Foul Fiends have become pale and red-eyed from their time in the dark, and that inverted haloes of black light shine from their heads. William isn’t frightened until he’s reminded that, as a young monk under a vow, he will not be able to fight them with anything but flesh and bone. Regardless, William prepares to head off into the forest—and there Old Jerome ends his story.

The nun picks up where Old Jerome leaves off.

The nun’s story goes: On the night before William leaves the monastery, he switches out his regular belt for a mysterious one he’s been keeping in a hole in his mattress. The next day, he takes a sack of books and a donkey and begins his journey.

William is enjoying his new freedom until, deep in the forest of Malesherbes, he indeed runs into a gang of Foul Fiends. They rob him, and he cheerfully agrees to give them his possessions, even his clothing—revealing his belt, a treasure from his mother which turns out to be decorated lavishly with gold. The Foul Fiends try to take it from him, but his mysterious supernatural strength emerges again, and without using any weapons, he bloodily kills most of them. The remaining Foul Fiends regroup and attack him with arrows, but in another miraculous turn, he is able to wrench off his own donkey’s leg, beat his attackers to death with it, reattach the leg, and go on his way.

The narrator is dubious about this story, but the nun calmly insists it happened. The narrator asks if anyone knows anything about the last of the three children, and a big butcher named Aron says that not only does he know the third child—whose name is Jacob—but that Jacob saved his life last week. 

The butcher, Aron, tells the story of how Jacob, a little boy in a small Jewish village, solves a problem that all his community’s elders can’t. An even younger boy keeps staring strangely off into the distance, and his family is worried for him. The town’s rabbi fears that the boy is demon-possessed. Jacob is the only person who thinks to directly ask the little boy why he stares—to which the little boy replies that it’s because his eyelashes get stuck together. Everyone is delighted and pleased with Jacob’s good sense.

That evening, Christian peasants come and burn down the Jewish part of town. Jacob’s parents send him out into the night to escape. The next morning, Jacob returns and finds his whole neighborhood destroyed, and he rescues Aron from under a collapsed wall. In another miracle, he heals Aron’s wounds with yarrow root and a prayer. Then, he sets off for Saint-Denis, where his parents told him to go meet him at his cousin Yehuda’s house if he couldn’t find them.

The assembled listeners are saddened by this story, but amid their sadness, Old Jerome and the nun suddenly become suspicious of the narrator and his interest in the stories. The narrator shrugs them off and asks if anyone knows what brought these children together, and the innkeeper says that he knows: it happened in this very inn.

The innkeeper recounts the story of how the children came together. He starts with William. Emerging victorious from his struggles in the forest, William runs into more trouble: other travelers who haven’t seen people with dark skin before. A group of pilgrims thinks he’s a masked brigand or a spirit, and even though he tries to introduce himself (and to help them when their cart breaks), they fear and shun him. At last, he makes his way to the inn, where the innkeeper offers him a place to sleep in the stables and a meal in return for work.

Coincidentally, the knights who captured Jeanne are at this same inn. Sir Fabian, the leader of the knights, ties Jeanne to his ankle so she can’t escape while they eat and drink.

Even more coincidentally, Jacob, on the run, finds his way to the stable yard behind the inn. Scared and skittish, he plans to take some old food from the pigs’ trough and leave. The knights catch him taking the slops and threaten to kill him for theft.

Jeanne screams at them to stop, and she trips Sir Fabian with the rope that’s attached to them both. William, sleeping in the stables, wakes up and knocks out the knight who’s about to kill Jacob. And Gwenforte emerges from the woods to join in the fray.

Together, the three children and the dog defeat the knights and escape into the forest. The innkeeper ends his story here. The narrator notices that a new person has joined the party: an elegantly dressed man. But it’s the nun, not this stranger, who takes over the next part of the story.

Out in the forest, the three children are at first mistrustful of each other, each fearing the others’ differences. As they begin to talk and compare notes, they understand that each of them has had a miraculous experience—and each of them needs to go to Saint-Denis. Jeanne, fearing the terrible Red Monk Michelangelo who took Old Teresa away, is reluctant at first. But the boys convince her that she can ask Michelangelo’s superior, the abbot Hubert the Good, to pardon her.

Slowly, the children overcome their fears and start to take pleasure in their differences—for instance, noticing their different accents and habits of speech. They figure out that William, in spite of his enthusiasm and curiosity, can’t be allowed to walk out in front of the group because he goes so fast that the branches he pushes past whip back at the other children. In short, through teasing each other and finding shared purpose, they become friends.

First, they have to go back: William realizes he’s left his donkey and all the books he was meant to take to Saint-Denis back at the inn. They get lost on the way and find themselves instead at a market town, where they plan to ask for directions. Jeanne and Jacob leave William and Gwenforte in hiding, figuring their appearances are too striking and might attract unwanted attention.

The nun’s story pauses, and the narrator is accosted by a red-headed child, who looks both world-weary and clever. The boy, a jongleur—a travelling entertainer—says he’ll continue the story in exchange for a mug of ale. The narrator refuses to give the boy ale, but he buys him some dinner.