by Michelle Wan
Jean-Claude’s fingers had somehow come to rest lightly on Mara’s shoulder. She stepped away, going over to inspect a smaller portrait hanging next to that of Hugo, a woman in blue with a mass of honey-colored hair. The females of the family, Mara decided, seemed to have been accorded considerably less canvas than their men. This one, however, merited life-sized rendering.
“Henriette,” Jean-Claude identified. “Hugo’s wife and Christophe’s great-grandmother.”
“The Adored One,” Mara recalled. L’Adorée. Also the Walker and Plate-Thrower. She was indeed a beauty, but with a determined set to the mouth that confirmed her potential to make a troublesome ghost.
Jean-Claude shook his head. “Again, we have a play on names. The epithet was actually ‘la Dorée.’ The Golden One.”
“Oh. Because of her hair?”
“Because of her cupidity. When Hugo met her she was a sharp little Parisian courtesan with a passable voice and a driving lust for money. Her father was a drunken stonemason who broke his back rolling off a roof, so young Henriette became the family breadwinner. Her main claim to fame was a magnificent bosom. It was said that she charged by the breast, so that her other nickname was ‘One or Two?’ Christophe believes she sang at the Opéra, but that would have been unlikely because it was still being built when Hugo wedded and then bedded her. Oh yes, she was no fool. She made him wait for it.” Jean-Claude sounded almost disapproving.
“Of course,” he went on, “Henriette didn’t exactly embark on a sea of roses. She married a de Bonfond, for what it was worth, but she had to contend with a lecherous father-in-law, a husband with a reputation for slitting the throats of game he brought down and drinking their blood while they were still alive, and a virago of a mother-in-law.” He pointed to another painting. It was a seated portrait of an older woman dressed in black. A narrow face with pale, close-set eyes scowled down on Mara above a rigid lace fichu. “Odile de Bonfond, née Verdier, wife of Dominique, and reputedly the very soul of avarice. She married into the family in 1835, on the strength of a considerable settlement. The deal was that Hugo would marry one of his Verdier cousins, thereby integrating the family fortunes and saving the Verdiers’ bacon because Odile’s dowry ruined them. Henriette spoiled all that.”
Mara noticed that the dreadful Odile had been painted clutching a cloth purse. Perhaps the artist had a sense of humor. Or irony.
Jean-Claude continued. “Odile de Bonfond doted on her son and loathed la Blonde Horizontale, as she called her daughter-in-law, which we can take as a reference to how Henriette made her living. Dominique, on the other hand, undoubtedly relished having a pretty woman about the house, so the family dynamics must have been quite interesting. However, he died not long after la Dorée came to Aurillac. Just in time, too. His excesses were eating into the estate. Then Hugo died shortly after from a fall from his horse. His saddle girth snapped. Henriette lived to eighty-two, well into the twentieth century.”
“Poor Christophe,” Mara murmured, recalling his boyish enthusiasm over the love story of the century. “But”—she experienced a sudden stab of annoyance—“does he know all this?” Had he been lying to her all the time, was what she really wanted to ask.
Jean-Claude pursed his lips. “If you mean, did he invent the public persona of the de Bonfonds to hide their less than illustrious past, no. All of the misrepresentations I mentioned were established well before him. It’s likely that Xavier was responsible for most of them, including the fake family tree that purports to go back to the Crusades but which, as I said, dates no further back than Xavier himself.”
“But you told Christophe, didn’t you? You told him what you found out.”
Jean-Claude gave an eloquent shrug. “I tried. He had hysterics when I debunked a seventeenth-century claim to an episcopal branch of the family. After that he refused to let me remove so much as a note scribbled on the back of an envelope from the premises. I found it easier simply to give him the results of my research and let him do what he wanted with it. However, I think he must have known something was not quite right, at least where the baronetcy was concerned, because subsequent males after Xavier never used it, and Christophe himself has never attempted to claim it.”
“But the book he’s writing on the history of the de Bonfonds—?”
“Will no doubt be a highly sanitized version of the truth.”
Mara groaned audibly.
Jean-Claude looked amused. “So. Where was I? Hugo and Henriette had one offspring, Christophe’s grandfather, Dieudonné. He was born in 1872, just before Hugo’s death. That’s him as a child, done by Archambault, quite a well-known artist in his day.”
Mara saw a portrait of a boy of perhaps seven or eight with dark hair and eyes and a round, impertinent face. “And later”—Jean-Claude led her to another section of wall, where canvas gave way to photographs, paint to sepia tones—“in middle age.”
The impertinence had now mellowed into complacency: a heavy-set gentleman, posed with his hands on his knees, the broad face riding above a stiff wingtip collar. In feature and expression, he was a cruder, more vigorous version of Christophe.
“Dieudonné saved the day for the de Bonfonds because Dominique really had left the estate in a bad way, and Hugo, if he had lived, would probably have finished the family off. However, young Dieudonné was a terribly clever chap who invented a revolutionary inking technique on which he built a very successful printing business. He married well, Léonie Boursicaut, from an important Bordeaux family. They had a son, Bertrand, Christophe’s father, who further filled the family coffers by marrying into the wealthy Pommarel family. And a daughter, Amélie, who died young of influenza.”
The later generations of de Bonfonds, caught in various attitudes by the photographer’s lens, gazed down at Mara. It seemed to her that prosperity had improved the family features. Gone was the earlier glare of greed and raw ambition. In its place a smug and more subtle acquisitiveness, the rounded look of people who were sure of their importance and their position in the world. She said as much. “I mean, they don’t lunge out at you like they do in the paintings. They sit back and let the camera come to them. See for yourself.”
Her guide looked surprised. He scanned the array of faces for a long moment.
She shook her head impatiently. “Jean-Claude, this is all very interesting, but nothing you’ve said gets us any further ahead with identifying Baby Blue. You’ve mainly talked about the men. It’s the women we should be concentrating on, isn’t it? You said that between 1860 and 1914 there were several females of childbearing age living at Aurillac. Tell me about them.”
His hands went up. “Of course. My apologies. I only wanted to provide you with the, shall we say, necessary background for understanding the family we’re dealing with.” He smoothed back his golden hair. “Well, of the women, you’ve met Henriette. Then there was Eloïse Verdier, Odile’s niece. She stayed at Aurillac between 1865 and 1870—through Odile’s connivance, so she and Hugo could make a match of it—but moved back to her family’s home after he married Henriette. Eloïse got over her disappointment and lived out her life as a spinster devoted to good works. There’s no likeness of her here, but no doubt she was appropriately pious-looking. Then”—Jean-Claude stopped before a head-and-shoulders portrait of an anemic female with an otherworldly expression—“we have Catherine, the eldest of Odile and Dominique’s daughters. She joined a convent at the age of twenty-four. Daughters often took the veil in those days, whether they wanted to or not, because dowries were expensive and the upkeep of unmarried females a drain on family coffers. Mind you, the family had to make a one-time endowment to the convent, but it probably worked out cheaper for them in the end because it was in exchange for Catherine’s renouncing all inheritance rights.”
They stepped up to the next painting: a large, plain female dressed in an unflattering shade of green and uncomfortably posed with a pug in her lap.
“This one’s Cécile, Hugo’s youngest sister
. Hard to say which is uglier, isn’t it, the woman or the dog? She, too, planned to take the veil, but nothing ever came of it. And finally”—moving on to a photograph of a plump, placid-looking woman—“Dieudonné’s wife, Léonie, who came to Aurillac when she married into the family in 1901.”
Mara gazed about her. “Which one?” she wondered aloud.
Jean-Claude nodded. “Indeed. Which one? Léonie I think we can discount. First, she simply doesn’t seem the type, but also because, as I said, a bastard would have been much less of a problem for a married woman, who could pass it off as her husband’s child.”
“Henriette was married,” Mara interposed, “but you said she was widowed early. A bastard could have been an embarrassment for her, too. Or did she remarry?”
“No, and for good reason, although I’m sure she didn’t want for suitors. Her difficulty was that Hugo left her an annuity, not only contingent on her producing a surviving male heir, but requiring her to remain in a state of exemplary widowhood if she wanted to continue to touch her rente. Maybe she took a lover who put her in an embarrassing way, but I somehow doubt it, first because Maman Odile would have had her out on the street tout de suite for breach of contract, and second because I suspect Henriette’s real passion was always money. In any case, she proved herself to be a very able administrator of her young son’s estate.”
“That leaves Catherine, Eloïse, and Cécile.”
“Exactly. Now, Catherine is a definite candidate. Did she have a true calling, or was she confined to a nunnery because she was delivered of an illegitimate son? It’s what they did in those days, you know. As for Eloïse, she came to Aurillac when she was twenty-two and stayed there five years. While cozying up to Hugo, did she curdle the cream by getting pregnant by the stable lad? If so, I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire Verdier clan conspired to help her get rid of the baby. A lot was at stake for them.”
Mara nodded.
“But for my money, the most interesting candidate is Cécile. Why? Because she offers us the most concrete possibilities and provides us with the most information. She kept a diary of sorts between 1861 and 1871, an absolute gold mine for someone like me and the source of most of my personal information on the family. In it she refers to a liaison with a certain captain in the Imperial Army—we’re talking about Napoleon III now—whom she met in Paris.”
He took her to a large, glass-fronted cabinet. It contained, Jean-Claude said, the de Bonfond family papers as well as all his research notes. One shelf was given over to Cécile’s diary, organized by date in cardboard folders, secured at the corners by elastic loops. He pulled out the folder for the year 1870.
“I offer you excerpts that support my hypothesis. These relate to the summer when Cécile met her army captain. I had the unenviable task of putting her ramblings into some kind of order when I took on Christophe’s book project. No easy job, since there were major gaps, and most of her entries weren’t dated. Her handwriting was also awful.”
He opened the folder and paged through a stack of loose sheets covered in ill-formed writing.
“I’ll spare you the details of Cécile’s more graphic entries, but here, for example, she refers to what we can only take as a sexual encounter.” He read aloud: “‘La nuit il me vient sournoisement.’”
“‘He comes to me stealthily in the night,’” Mara murmured to herself.
“It’s undated, and she doesn’t mention names, but it sounds very much like a tryst with her army captain, doesn’t it?” He sifted through more pages. “And again: ‘Il me vient, toujours sournoisement, avec son regard bleu qui me transperce jusqu’aux entrailles.’”
Mara’s eyes rolled at the congested prose: “He comes to me, always stealthily, with his blue gaze that pierces me to the entrails.” Cécile must have been a reader of romance novels.
“However, nothing came of the affair.” Jean-Claude put the papers away and snapped the elastics in place. “The family intervened, and poor Cécile was forced to give her lover up. The fellow was probably just a common adventurer looking for an advantageous alliance anyway. In any case, he was cut down in the Franco-Prussian War only months later.”
Mara guessed, “So she woke up one day to learn not only that her lover was dead, but that she was carrying his baby?”
Jean-Claude nodded. “Significantly, it’s at this point that she first mentions following her sister into the Abbaye des Eaux. She didn’t, in the end, but remained at Aurillac, growing ill, old, and mad.”
“And you think she killed her child?”
“Et voilà. Or possibly the matter was decided for her.”
Mara blinked. “You mean by someone in the family?” Then she recalled that Baby Blue had been smothered with unnecessary violence. “As if in a towering rage,” Loulou had said. As if someone had wanted to crush the very life out of an unwanted bastard. She pictured the infant torn from Cécile’s arms, stifled before the mother’s horrified eyes, imagined the woman’s screams. Had Cécile recovered the broken body of her baby, wrapped it lovingly in a shawl, and enclosed it in the wall?
“Merde,” said Mara. It was all so sordid. An affair, a bastard, the swift dispatch of an inconvenient piece of humanity, probably engineered by the family. And definitely a de Bonfond. Bleakly Mara watched as Jean-Claude closed up the glass-fronted case. How was she going to report this to Christophe? At the moment, she was glad that he was incommunicado.
Jean-Claude shrugged. “Of course, this is all conjecture. There’s no definite proof, except perhaps one or two vague references I found in letters written by Eloïse to Cécile. Eloïse, by the way, is the great-great-aunt of Christophe’s and Antoine’s cousin Michel, who represents the Verdier side of the family.”
“Christophe doesn’t want you talking to them,” Mara reminded him quickly.
“Don’t I know it? When I was researching the de Bonfond family’s history, I suggested accessing the Verdier archives, to fill in the blanks, so to speak. Christophe nearly had a seizure.” Jean-Claude paused thoughtfully. “Come to think of it, this may be the source of the information Michel—or more likely his son, Guy—wants to sell to the media.”
She sighed. “So, in addition to Baby Blue being Cécile’s bastard, Christophe’s family tree is a complete charade. Xavier invented a fake set of antecedents and a baronetcy to cover up the fact that he was a gabelou and, who knows, probably made up the family motto as well.”
“That, too. Very likely.”
“Almost certainly,” said Mara. “Because he couldn’t even get it right. It’s carved into the mantelpiece as Sang E Mon Drech, and appears in his portrait as Sang Es Mon Drech.”
Jean-Claude stiffened. “Show me,” he said.
She did, pointing out the errant “s” that appeared in the painted scroll but was missing in the carved version.
He peered long at the faded cursive lettering. “Blood Is My Right.” He shrugged. “Old documents are full of orthographic errors. Cécile, for one, was a dreadful speller.”
“Although there’s a difference, isn’t there?” She was not going to let him slide away from the fact that he had failed to spot the inconsistency. “Blood And My Right. Blood Is My Right. So which is it?”
Jean-Claude stepped back to gaze thoughtfully up at the fraudulent baron.
“I honestly don’t know,” he said. He looked troubled and, for the first time, completely thrown off his stride.
12
TUESDAY MORNING, 4 MAY
The early-morning air was still and chill. According to local wisdom, the risk of frost would persist until Les Saints de Glace, around the middle of the month. People did not plant their kitchen gardens before then. From where Julian stood on a rocky outcropping high on Aurillac Ridge, he had an unobstructed panorama of the Sigoulane Valley and, farther to the south, glinting in the cold, champagne light, the river. The Dordogne, tumbling out of the crystalline highlands of the Massif Central, was broad and peaceful in this stretch, swinging lazily betwe
en tree-lined banks and limestone cliffs, offering habitat for pike and perch, roach and bream, and good fishing for herons. Immediately below and behind him, forests cloaked the heavily folded earth.
Julian lingered a moment longer, taking in the view. This was his favorite time of day. Admittedly, he preferred to enjoy it clutching a mug of hot, sweet tea while appreciating a different scene: his own bit of land, where pink valerian bloomed on the stone wall dividing his property from that of Madame Léon; where the dew lay silvery on the tussocky grass; where the bottom of his garden was a cloud of cherry blossoms, and the old fig tree by his kitchen door was beginning to set hard little nuggets of fruit among broad, lobate leaves.
But he was driven by the imperative of his orchid. Ever since he had discovered the embroidery, he had been rising at the first sliver of dawn to conduct a fevered but methodical search of Aurillac Ridge. He had but a few precious days to devote to this activity before work on the pavilion kicked in. If it kicked in. He had not yet completed a revised plan, or, more to the point, a new budget for Pierre. The orchid, for the moment, was his top priority.
His reasoning went like this: The embroiderer had seen the flower and stitched its likeness on the shawl. This woman—he assumed it was a woman—was associated with Aurillac. Therefore, she must have seen the orchid somewhere in the vicinity of the manor. Given the roughness of the terrain, and wearing whatever females wore in those days, she would most likely have stuck to places where she could walk easily. Thus, he had already gone over the grounds immediately surrounding the manor and was now exploring the intricate network of paths radiating out through the extensive woodlands surrounding the property. In the back of Julian’s mind, Paul’s objection to the shawl’s provenance lurked like a tiger: “That’s where it ended up. You have no idea where it came from.” Julian preferred to ignore the disheartening possibilities.
