I’m not Catholic – not very religious at all, in fact – so
the fact that part of the story is a young woman’s conversion to Catholicism
surprised me, too. It was the dominant and official religion in France in the
seventeenth century, of course, but magic was still a major player. France had
dabbled in witchcraft trials for a while, but never with the intensity of the
Spanish Inquisition and the English and their colonies. At the time I’ve set
this story, the court scandal was not that people consulted witches and bought
potions from them, but that some of those potions were poison bought to free
unhappy spouses and greedy heirs.
Oh, and that the king’s official mistress, Madame de
Montespan, might have been participating in satanic rituals. She might NOT
have, too, as all the “evidence” was given under torture, when witches were
saying anything at all to try to make it stop. But King Louis XIV had all the
evidence gathered and locked away, then burned the box. He was probably
protecting the children he had with her, as he had legitimized them and given
them estates and titles and rich spouses, and not protecting her, precisely.
So anyway, a lot of Googling of saints and practices and
churches and miracles later, and here we are.
Melisande is becoming Catholic to please her birth father
and get enough money to support herself and her family. Lucas has been steeped
in it from childhood and is in danger of becoming as rigid and angry as his
godfather, who is Melisande’s father. He’s at a turning point in his life,
though, where his godfather has shown his feet of clay, hunger for power, and
hypocrisy one too many times. And along comes this element of his godfather’s
past, the illegitimate child of the old days when the Comte was partying with
witches. Let the struggle for the souls begin.
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