“Yes, they were,” Adrien said. “The landscaping, the courtyard, the hunting lodge, the Beckett Garden, the rock garden . . .”
“But not this garden.” She turned to the plan toward the front of the book for the walled garden labeled Sub Rosa in Beckett’s distinctive, angular hand. “I’ve never seen this one.”
“That’s because it was never meant to be seen. In former times, if private matters were to be discussed, a rose would be hung overhead so that everyone would know that the meeting was ‘under the rose,’ or confidential.”
“Are you saying this is, like, a secret garden?”
Nodding, he said, “It’s hidden deep in the woods to the north, about halfway between here and the lodge.”
“Seriously?” She looked back down at the precisely inked layout in the book, her eyes glittering.
Her excitement was contagious. “Would you like to see it?” he asked.
“Hell, yeah,” she said, springing to her feet. “I mean, heck, yeah. But I feel guilty keeping you from your work. You could, um, give me directions, and I could just—”
“You’d never find it on your own, and it’s not an imposition. I’ll enjoy it.” Adrien stood and started to hold out his hand, then withdrew it, hoping she hadn’t noticed.
“This is unbelievable,” Isabel said as Adrien led her through the gate in the stone wall enclosing the secret garden, the wall itself so thick with foliage and vines that it was almost indistinguishable from the surrounding forest.
He took her on a tour of the garden: the koi pool with its scattering of lily pads, the fanciful corner turrets, the statues and birdbaths nestled among tangles of fragrant roses . . .
“How come you never showed me this when I was here that Christmas?” she asked. “We skied all through these woods.”
“No way to get here on skis,” he said. “There are no paths leading here.”
“Right . . . So then, how do they get lawn mowers in here to cut the grass?”
“It’s done with scythes,” he said.
“Seriously.” Isabel kicked off her sandals and walked around a bit with an expression of childlike wonder, as if trying to determine whether scythe-cut grass felt different underfoot than mower-cut grass.
Sitting on the stone lip of the pool, she said, “Those are some big freakin’ carp. And the water’s so clear.”
“It’s well filtered.”
Dipping her hand in, she said, “Oh, it feels awesome. I thought it’d be cold, but it’s just right.” She trailed her fingers back and forth through the water, a speculative gleam in her eyes. With an impish grin, she said, “You think these fish would mind a little company?”
“What, you want to swim?”
“It’s not big enough to swim in, but a little dip to cool off?” She stood up and began undoing the buttons of her blouse. “I don’t know about you, but I’m really feeling the heat after that hike through the woods.”
He imagined the two of them in the water together, naked and alone in this remote, sunny little oasis in the midst of an ancient forest. It made him think about the bathhouse last August, and the hunger that had flared between them with such pure, sweet, violent force. It had been the most powerful lovemaking he’d ever experienced, an explosion of passion . . .
Followed by stinging regret.
Her smile faded as he stood there in idiotic, conflicted silence. God, how he wanted her. It might not be wise, but since when had reason not been at odds with desire?
She looked down and started rebuttoning her blouse.
He started toward her. “Isabel . . .”
“Nah, dumb idea.” She turned and headed toward the entrance to the garden, still buttoning. “Anyway, I should really be getting back. It’s almost teatime. Dad will expect me.”
“No, wait. We can . . .” Merde. “We, um, we can walk back together. You won’t know the way.”
“I paid attention, and you’ve got work to do. Catch you later,” she said as she strode through the gate.
“Isabel,” he said.
She didn’t turn around.
He didn’t follow her.
Four
THANKS FOR KNEECAPPING ol’ Bernie in there,” I told Madeleine as she guided me out into the courtyard. “You should have let me take him outside, though. Might have relaxed me a little to punch his lights out.”
“He would have peed his pants if you’d called him out,” she said. “You do realize he had no clue you were heading in that direction.”
“You think?”
“I know.” She stopped walking and faced me, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand. “Please tell me those cigarettes in your back pocket are American.”
I produced my Marlboros and shook out two.
“There is a God,” she said.
I touched a match to her cigarette, which crackled as it ignited. With her absurdly high platform sandals, she was as tall as I was.
She inhaled with an expression of bliss. “It would have been shorter to take you to the gate tower through the corridor inside, but I wanted a smoke, and I don’t like to smoke in other people’s houses.”
“Me, neither.”
She sat on a stone bench in the shade of a cherry tree, crossed her long legs, put her head back, closed her eyes, and savored her little taste of tar and nicotine from the good ol’ U.S. of A. I leaned against the tree trunk to light my own cigarette.
I could see what Emmett meant about the Botticelli thing, especially the hair, which was a hot n’ spicy ginger. She had a classic redhead’s complexion, skim milk with freckles spattered just about everywhere, even on her eyelids. Her eyelashes were long and coppery.
She glowed.
Madeleine’s style of dress was hippie chic without that fresh-from-the-dustbin look that distinguished her friends’ attire. From how she’d dressed that weekend, I guessed she shopped in boutiques rather than thrift shops. Today, for example, she was wearing a long, slinky blue dress with dramatically flared sleeves. It had a bodice that laced up in front, exposing a good three-inch-wide gap of flesh all the way down to her waist. On a woman who was really stacked, it might have looked like she was selling it by the hour, but Madeleine’s breasts were small, with no cleavage to interrupt that smooth white band of skin. Her nipples pushed hard against the slick material of the dress.
Without opening her eyes, she blew out a stream of smoke and said, “Bernie’s a little boy. Just a rich, coddled little boy who has no idea what grown-up men are all about.”
“You two break up?”
She nodded. “Last night.”
I thought about Emmett, hoping he’d materialize soon so he could snap her up before Pieter beat him to it.
She slitted her eyes open and looked at me. “Most people would ask why.”
He took a puff. “None of my business.”
She looked away to tap her ash on the ground, didn’t look back. “I walked in on him fucking Mindy Black last night in our room, on our bed. He wasn’t even that flustered. He said, ‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this whole establishment monogamy thing,’ without even . . . I mean, while he was still inside her. I closed the door, and I could hear them starting right up again, the bedsprings squeaking, you know. And I heard them laughing.” That last sentence kind of crumbled apart wetly.
I pushed away from the tree. “You okay?”
She took a drag on her cigarette and looked at me, pink splotches on her cheeks, her eyes a little too shiny. “So I went to Pete McCormack’s room and fucked him.”
“Oh.”
“He’s from back home. He’s pre-med at Columbia. He’s gonna fucking do something with his life. He’s gonna be a man.”
“Mm.”
“I mean, not that I want a relationship with him, or anything like that, but you know what I mean.”
“Sure.” Not really.
She looked away again and took another drag. “He thought he could keep me from getting pregnant by”—she mime
d quotation marks with her fingers—“realigning my chakras.”
“Star—uh, Bernie?”
She nodded. “So he wouldn’t have to use a rubber. He doesn’t like rubbers, he doesn’t like diaphragms. Interferes with spontaneity, he says. Spoiled little shit. He wants me to—wanted me to go on the pill, but it makes me fat, so that’s not gonna happen, and I hear it hurts like hell to get an IUD. And I will not do it without birth control. Never have, never will. Even last night, the pissed-off rebound sex with Pete, he grabbed a Trojan off the nightstand, I didn’t even have to ask. I mean, I know they’re only eighty-five percent effective, but I’m guessing that’s about eighty-five percent more effective than that chakra shit.”
“I’m guessing you’re guessing right.” Was I really having this conversation with this woman I’d just met three days ago and barely even spoken to until ten minutes ago?
She looked at me. “Were you really a POW?”
“No, I just made that up to get over with girls.”
“Was it awful?”
I shrugged as I drew on my cigarette. “Beautiful downtown Hanoi. What’s not to like?”
Awful. What did that mean to a girl like this? A broken nail? A pretentious asshole of a boyfriend? Because of the gag order imposed on the released prisoners, even Emmett didn’t know the half of it—the black box, the leg irons, the dysentery . . . I hadn’t wanted to leave before the other guys, but given that I was delirious and emaciated, with unset fractures from that marathon, disastrous ass-kicking and two dislocated shoulders from the “Vietnamese rope trick”—punishments for a misbegotten escape attempt—I was given zero say in the matter. Three months in the hospital, and I was good as new—or at least, I could fake it pretty well if you didn’t know the full story.
Madeleine looked at me as if she were trying to read my thoughts, and maybe she did, because she said, “Do you have a girlfriend, Hitch?”
In my mind’s eye, I saw Lucinda’s last letter to me, written in her tidy, straight up-and-down handwriting on the pale green writing paper with the ferns around the margins.
Dear Rob,
You’re wrong. We can make this work. You love me, you’ve told me so countless times. And you know how I feel about you. I think I’ve made that pretty clear in my letters, and of course in person before you went to London. If we really do love each other, that’s all that matters, not whether the marriage will be “real” by some screwed-up standard that means nothing to me and should mean nothing to you. I’ve spent so many months writing to you, begging you not to break off the engagement, waiting for you to come to your senses. I can’t keep doing this forever. At a certain point, I just start feeling . . . I don’t know, pathetic and clingy, I guess.
God, what did they do to you in that prison? I know the outcome, but I don’t know how it happened. Obviously it was a nightmare, the whole experience. I know you can’t talk about it, but I wish I knew. Maybe then I’d be able to figure out how to get through to you.
In the meantime, this is it, Rob. I’m going to do what you’ve been asking me to do. I’m going to stop writing. But I’m not going to stop loving you, ever. And I’m not going to stop praying that you’ll see the light and come back to me.
All my love forever,
Lucinda
“No,” I said. “No girlfriend.”
“You didn’t hear his message?” asked Julien Morel as he came out from behind the gigantic desk in his study, a sun-drenched room hung with paintings and medieval tapestries.
“What message?” I asked.
Crossing to his stereo to turn down the Miles Davis album he was playing, Morel said, “Emmett, he called your room and left a message on your . . . How do you say it? Répondeur.”
“Answering machine,” Madeleine said. Each luxuriously appointed bedroom in the château was equipped with a wooden-cased device that I’d taken for a reel-to-reel tape player, until I saw the name PHONE•MATE on it and noticed that it was, indeed, connected to the telephone.
“Ah,” Morel smiled at her. “Parlez-vous français?”
“J’ai étudié le français à l’école.” She gave him a shyly sweet smile that made me think, Oh, man, maybe ol’ Bernie was right. Maybe les femmes really did love zee French accent.
It wasn’t just the accent. Morel was charming and aristocratic, and a good-looking guy despite, or maybe even because of, his prematurely gray hair.
“In my house,” Morel said, “there is a problem with, er . . . l’électricité. This morning, I leave to come here, and is fine, but then Élise—Madame Morel, my wife—she calls to say it stopped working. Is very old, the wires and the fuse box. I know nothing of such things, but Emmett tell me he knows a little, and will try to fix, or get someone else to fix.”
I told him I hadn’t been back to my room since early that morning, so I didn’t get the message. Meanwhile, I was thinking Great, now what’ll I do all day? Play solitaire and drink myself into a coma?
“Élise, she is nervous to be without the lights when the sun go down,”Morel said. “Our house, is in the woods, and get very dark. And l’électricité is needed for the stove and the hot water. If it is just she and I, is not such a problem. We come here. But there is Adrien, our son. He is un bébé, eight months old. We do not like him here with . . . the guests.”
“Can’t say as I blame you,” I said.
“What are you typing?” Madeleine asked, looking at the IBM Selectric on his desk, which he’d been pecking away at when they came in.
“Correspondance,” he said. “This and that.”
“I could give you a hand with it,” she offered. “I type fifty words a minute.”
“Oh, no,” he said. “You have your friends . . .”
“They’ve started to bore me. Seriously, I can type your letters as you dictate them. You’ll be amazed at how fast it’ll go, and then maybe you can help me with my French.”
There came a little grunt that drew their attention to a nearby windowsill on which a gray cat was lounging in the sun, watching them with a languid feline smile.
“Well, who are you?” asked Madeleine, reaching out to pet it.
Morel grabbed her arm as the animal shot to its feet, hissing furiously.
“Jesus!” She would have fallen over as she stumbled back, thanks to those ridiculous shoes, had Morel not maintained his grip on her arm.
“He is very unhappy to be touched,” the Frenchman said.
“God, he scared the hell out of me,” Madeleine said. “Feel how hard my heart’s pounding.” She took his hand and pressed it to the bare flesh between her breasts.
He met her gaze.
“Your hand is so warm,”she said. “You don’t have a fever, do you?” With her free hand, she stroked his forehead, and smiled. “Just one of those hot-blooded Frenchmen, huh?”
Taking that as my cue, I excused myself, leaving Julien Morel to decide for himself whether to take the enticing redhead up on her offer—and wondering if it was such a good idea for Emmett to pounce, after all.
Five
SHOWTIME, ISABEL THOUGHT as she approached the darkened hunting lodge on slippered feet around eleven that night. She was shivering like crazy, not only because she’d just followed an interminable dirt road through the woods on a cool night wearing nothing but her thin cotton travel robe and flip-flops, but because she was out of her freakin’ mind to be doing this.
It was dark as hell, there being just a sliver of moon hidden behind a suffocating layer of clouds that had been hovering up there waiting to burst into rain since around dinnertime. The illumination from her flashlight jittered as it played over the statue of Diana, goddess of the hunt, that was the centerpiece of the lodge’s front garden, before-and-after watercolors of which were included in David Beckett Roussel’s extraordinary book of plans. Diana smiled down on Isabel from her pedestal as if to say “Turn back now, honey, before you make a complete ass of yourself.”
The lodge itself had been built in the
sixteenth century of the same dusky volcanic rock from which the castle and most of the outbuildings were constructed. It was a beautiful edifice, stately but welcoming both inside and out, the most perfect house she’d ever seen.
No guts, no glory, Isabel thought as she turned the knob of the front door.
The door was unlocked, of course. This wasn’t New York. She eased it open and stepped into the entrance hall, only to find that the house wasn’t completely dark after all, nor completely silent. There was light coming from the rear, where she knew the so-called hunting hall to be because of all the hours she and Adrien had spent there that long-ago Christmas vacation, as well as barely audible music.
Damn. She had hoped to find him asleep upstairs, so that when she stole into his bed and woke him with soft kisses, he would be groggy and malleable.
Fighting the urge to turn back, she switched off her flashlight and padded silently toward the back of the house, the music growing louder as she approached the hunting hall. It was a nimble-fingered piano piece called “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)”—how perfect is that—from an Oscar Peterson album she and Adrien used to play a lot that Christmas. Night Train was one of the hundreds of jazz LPs, some of them dating back to the 1920s, that his late father had spent his life collecting. While Julien Morel was alive, Adrien had been big on rockers like Springsteen and Bob Seger; he didn’t get jazz, didn’t care to. After the plane crash that claimed the lives of his parents and Isabel’s grandfather, thrusting Adrien into the role of gardien, he bought a state-of-the-art turntable with a record changer and set about playing every single album, one after the other. He developed a love of cool jazz that rubbed off on Isabel that Christmas and never left her. Her own CD collection covered most of the living room wall in her apartment.
Whether from the damp chill in the air or her nerves, or both, Isabel trembled like a rabbit as she stood in the wide, arched entrance to the hunting hall. It was a cavernous, high-ceilinged, dark-timbered room with plastered walls and a massive stone fireplace, in which low flames twitched and sputtered. Against the back wall, lined with leaded glass windows, was a long, slablike table that had come from the refectory of some medieval monastery. A scanner, laptop, printer, and three desk lamps stood on the table amid a sea of books, papers, and parchment scrolls. There was also a record player, the old kind; he was playing the same vinyl album they used to listen to together.
Whispers of the Flesh Page 19
