THE HEDGEHOG HOURS

CASSANDRA DAUCUS

Thanks for agreeing to meet with me. How’s the library treating you? Any interesting new acquisitions?

Oh, I had a great trip! Thanks for writing my recommendation letter. Yeah, Cambridge was great, the weather was fantastic. Sure, it was rainy, but it was cool. I’m glad to be home, but it sucks to be back in this heat. Yes, I got to see everything I wanted to, and then some. That’s why I asked you here, actually. I saw a manuscript I think you’d really like, if you haven’t already seen it.

Thanks for the latte–oh look, there’s a table in the corner.

Okay, the manuscript. It’s in the Wentworth Collection at Canterbury College. They call it “The Hedgehog Hours.”

Right? I laughed, too, when I first heard about it.

Put down your phone–you won’t find anything about it online. When the Wentworth collection was donated to the college in the 1950s the agreement included some kind of photography restriction, so nothing in there has been digitized, and they aren’t in the online catalog, either. Just the old print catalog that M. R. James did back in the 1920s.

Yeah, it’s a good description, but it doesn’t do the book justice. He calls it “Horae, Alberic de Mauléon,” but the curator calls it Baron Alberic’s Book of Hours, and everybody else calls it the Hedgehog Hours– which is much more dramatic, don’t you think?

Why Hedgehog Hours? Because the margins of the book are full of hedgehogs. I’m used to seeing illuminated prayer books with flowers and odd creatures decorating some of the margins–birds and berries, angels or snails, depending on exactly where and when the book was written and illustrated, and how much the commissioner could afford–but this one is notable in that every single page has a decorated margin, and every single margin includes at least one hedgehog. Not only hedgehogs, but hedgehogs transformed into strange hybrid creatures– bird bodies with hedgehog heads, hedgehog bodies with snail heads, that kind of thing. Right? It’s unusual, if not unheard of, in 15th century religious art.

Why hedgehogs?

As far as I know Alberic de Mauléon didn’t care for hedgehogs one way or the other. But there’s so much more to it than that.

Alberic was a baron in the province of Béarn, along the northern edge of the Pyrenees. As a young man, Baron Alberic had been married to the daughter of a count, although she died in childbirth and her proper name has been lost to time. Their only child was a son, Guillaume de Mauléon. It sounds like Alberic didn’t care much for him, or perhaps he was simply too busy to bother with a small child, so he sent Guillaume to live with family in Toulouse. By the time he reached his mid-teen years, Guillaume was in Paris.

While in Paris, young Guillaume fell in with an artistic crowd, poets and painters and playwrights, with whom his quick wit and good looks made him popular. He wrote poetry himself, although only a few of his poems survive. He was a sort of apostle and patron, attaching himself to artists, using his wealth and status to help them share their work with a wider audience. Eventually he even became a muse, the subject of art as well as a material supporter of its creation. And no one admired him, or looked to him for patronage or artistic inspiration, more than the artist Andreas. Andreas was highly regarded, born in Spain but trained in Paris, and must have been a few years older than Guillaume.

Guillaume wrote poems for Andreas, and Andreas painted pages for Guillaume and, by all accounts, lived off his largess. A few of his paintings survive, fragments now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and one at the Morgan.

Yeah, those have been digitized. Here, you can look at them on my phone.

What do you notice about them? Yes, hedgehogs! The Morgan leaf is especially striking, look at it: two young men sitting together in front of a lovely pastoral background of hills and a far-off city, typical of manuscript art from mid-fifteenth century Paris. The man on the left is tanned with dark curling hair and the other has striking blue eyes and straight ginger hair peeking out from under a jaunty cap. The ginger man peers out of the page, as though regarding the reader, while the dark-haired man only has eyes for the other. They sit close together, holding a hedgehog between them, set where their knees touch. The men aren’t identified, but it is assumed they are none other than Guillaume and Andreas.

Yes, Guillaume and Andreas were close. Apparently in Paris they even shared rooms under the shadow of the cathedral of Notre-Dame; historians would call them “close friends,” but we know they were much more than that. They tell us that themselves.

Hedgehogs? The little animals that prick? Come on, that can’t be an accident.

Anyway, as you can imagine, Alberic was not pleased by his son’s artistic nature, and he despised his personal proclivities and pastimes. In an effort to reign Guillaume in, when he was in his early 20s Alberic called him back home. Alberic’s intent was to prepare his son to inherit the barony, and part of that preparation would have been to arrange an advantageous marriage for him. Guillaume undoubtedly had no interest in leaving Paris, or leaving Andreas, or getting married. But in early 1456 he returned to Béarn, and he brought with him a gift for his father: a book of hours, carefully scripted and sumptuously decorated with illustrations by none other than Andreas.

Why would Andreas create such a beautiful gift for the man who wished to tear his lover away from him? Stop interrupting and I’ll tell you!

I’ve been holding back–hedgehogs are in more than just the margins of the Hedgehog Hours. As you know, it’s common for prayer books to include an owner’s or donor’s portrait; a small painting of the person commissioning the work, either on their own or included as part of a biblical scene. The Hedgehog Hours is no exception.

The portrait in this book shows, not Guillaume, but his father Alberic. This isn’t so unusual, I suppose, since the book was commissioned as a gift for the man. It is, however, highly unusual because of where it is placed. Not where you might expect it– alongside a grieving Virgin Mary holding her son in a Pietà scene, or kneeling amongst the Magi in adoration of the Virgin and newly-born Child. No, this one is in the opening illustration for the Office of the Dead.

Right? I’ve never heard of such a thing, either.

Now, according to the donation agreement restrictions, photography of the Hedgehog Hours isn’t allowed in any form, but I managed to sneak my phone into the reading room, and I took a photo when the curator wasn’t paying attention.

I can’t stop thinking about it.

Just look. Baron Alberic kneels on grass in the bottom left of the foreground, his hands clasped in front of his chest. A broad crown of vivid green rises up from behind him–an oak tree, which dominates the left side of the page. Alberic’s gaze is fixed on the grave, over on the right. Two men dressed in red and blue lower a shroud-wrapped corpse into the dark hole, while a priest holding a book and flanked by a few tonsured figures dressed in black holds his hand out in blessing. But the thing in the illustration that really catches my eye is the hedgehog.

The hedgehog– so much larger than a real hedgehog, almost as large as the Baron himself–perches in the oak tree, and looms over Alberic, like some kind of–I don’t know. Something awful. The hedgehog is dark, closer to black than brown, with countless thin quills and beady little red eyes that stare down at Alberic with as much undisguised hatred as an illustrated hedgehog can possess.

Unfortunately, there is no historical record of the gift or his reaction to it. My imagination, however, is vivid, and I imagine that Alberic understood the meaning behind the imagery, and that he wasn’t amused by it at all.

Sorry, I was just thinking about my dad. I’ll take my phone back, thanks.

Yeah, It’s macabre for sure. Imagine seeing it in person! I found it hard to look away, to concentrate on any other part of the illustration. Every time I tried, my eyes ended up drifting back to that hedgehog. After a while I couldn’t escape the feeling that the hedgehog was looking at me and not at the Baron. I had to turn the page and then it took me hours to get it out of my head. Even now, weeks later, looking at this photo gives me a thrill, and not a good one.

It is funny that the manuscript isn’t better-known, isn’t it. You’d think that some student would sneak photos and post them online, but I guess it just… I don’t know, I kind of get it. I wouldn’t dream of posting this on Insta, even though I think people would really be into it.

How did I find out about it?

It’s kind of funny: I heard about it at last year’s Horrorfest. Some guy at the bar found out I was into medieval manuscripts and told me that he’d worked in the Canterbury College Library as a student and he discovered it while poking around the shelves. He claimed to have had a physical reaction to it, said that after he’d paged through it for a few minutes he started to itch. A painful kind of itch, like being rubbed by a hairbrush, or scratched by a handful of pins. Once he saw the demon hedgehog in the tree he really started to get freaked out. He kept thinking there were hedgehogs in the stacks with him, like hiding behind the books, crawling behind the shelves, just out of sight. Said he had to leave the library, and even then, it took him a couple days to get over it. I’m pretty sure he was trying to pick me up, not sure why he thought a story like that would make me want to hang out with him. But anyway, it sounded interesting, so when I got the grant to visit Cambridge, I knew I would find an excuse to visit Canterbury College and take a look.

I see that smile. Trying to imagine some poor guy trying to pick up this gorgeous lesbian?

Yes, I laughed too.

Anyway… Do you want to know what else I found out?

Later that week, in a pub, I met a Cambridge grad student– Lauren– who’d had a fellowship working with the Wentworth Collection the year before. When I told her I’d been there to look at the Hedgehog Hours, she told me that some chemical analysis had been done on the ink used in the book, and the results had been hushed up. Why? Because they showed that the giant black hedgehog in the tree was painted with an ink containing both silver and human blood.

There are apparently also some questionable notations made among the illustrations of King David in the Penitential Psalms. No, I wasn’t really paying attention to those, and since the book isn’t digitized I’d have to go back to check.

Probably not until after I graduate, sadly.

Anyway, even more interesting than that is what Lauren told me about the last days of Baron Alberic. He died in 1456, not long after Guillaume returned from Paris. Alberic kept a journal, a small paper booklet in which he would make notes to help him remember tasks from day-to-day. It’s in the collection of the public library at Mauléon, and she saw it when she was in the south of France doing field research a couple of years ago. It’s clear that during these months, Baron Alberic’s health, both physical and mental, was going steadily downhill. Following his son’s return his entries become more frequent, and longer. He complains of sleepless nights, of itching on his skin that keeps him awake, and odd shadows that he believed hid demonic creatures that he refused to name. His doctor prescribed him herbal baths and bleeding to balance his humors, but it didn’t help.

If Guillaume kept a journal, it doesn’t survive, so it’s difficult to say how he was feeling during these months, or what he thought of his father’s disturbance. Difficult, but not impossible–I did say that I have a vivid imagination, and I know you do, too.

As July shifted into August, Baron Alberic’s entries became more and more unhinged. He rants and raves about prickly monsters that lurk in the shadows under the bed and behind tapestries, that sneak behind the bookshelves and crawl up the wall, that fly about the room only to swoop upon him when he least expects it. The last journal entry is from the day before he died, in which he says that he will have to stop sleeping altogether, because he knows that ‘they are coming to get me in my sleep’.

Just one more, I promise. Tucked into the same folder with Baron Alberic’s journal is another document, dating from about 20 years after his death. It was written by the priest who gave the Baron his last rites, on the occasion of his own death. Apparently very early in the morning of the day he died, Baron Alberic awoke screaming, asking to see his son and begging for forgiveness. Guillaume quickly called for the priest, who arrived to find the Baron in bed, and in the depths of some serious breakdown. He flinched at every shadow, and insisted that he not be left alone.

“They’re in the dark!” he shouted. “In the shadows! Under the bed! They came out of the book! Dozens of them! They’re all mixed up! Keep them away! Keep them away!”

Freaky, right?

Of course, the priest had no idea what this was about, and attributed it to a fever apparently the Baron was scorching hot and sweating so heavily that his nightclothes stuck to his skin when he tried to pull them off. He only quieted in the last moments before he passed away. By then it was morning, and in the sunshine that beamed through the window the priest could see that the dead man’s exposed skin was swollen and red, and covered entirely with tiny scratches.

Yeah, maybe Lauren was just trying to impress me, I don’t know. What I can say is that I did a bit of historical research after I came back, and I can confirm some of what she told me. Baron Alberic definitely died in August of 1456 of some sudden and undetermined illness, after which time his son Guillaume inherited his title and land. Guillaume never married, and spent his long and prosperous life writing poetry and as a supporter of the arts, in particular as patron to his lifelong “friend” Andreas.

I hope they had a happy life, too. And you have to let me know if you ever make it to Canterbury College, where you can see the Hedgehog Hours for yourself.

Cassandra Daucus (she/her) writes a variety of horror. Cassandra lives
outside of Philadelphia with her family and three cats, where she ponders the medieval and lovingly caresses dead skin while working as a curator of rare books. Her social media and website can be found at https://linktr.ee/residualdreaming.