The Orchid Shroud

by Michelle Wan

  “Just answer the question.”

  The housekeeper looked sulky. “He might have. He was away for a few days around that time. Although what business it is of yours, I can’t see.” She shifted her grip on the valise. “Well, I can’t stand here wasting time. I’ll leave you to it. But if you plan on coming back here, you’d better let Didier know. He doesn’t like dogs”—she jabbed her chin at Jazz, sleeping beneath the table—“his eyesight’s not that good anymore, and”—an oblique look of many meanings—“he has his Babette.”

  The woman was gone before Mara thought to ask who or what Babette was.

  Several hours later, Mara came to the conclusion that, whatever she thought of Jean-Claude, the genealogist had known his stuff and had done his homework. He had undertaken an exhaustive search—verified births, marriages, and deaths against church and parish records; looked up cadastral plans and census and military records; checked facts with library and other archival sources; and searched newspaper files for relevant citations, photographs, and articles. Séverine’s family (Bonfonds without the “de”) were well-to-do Huguenots whose holdings in the Sigoulane Valley had waxed and waned with the Wars of Religion and the persecution of Protestants in the region. Aurillac, built in 1505, had been the family seat, and in this sense, Christophe was correct—the house had been in the family, at least Séverine’s side of it, for five hundred years. Early information on Xavier was scant. The village of Paulhac in Le Gévaudan was given as his birthplace, and there were mentions of a Xavier Lebrun who had worked in the area as an official for la gabelle, the infamous salt tax. In 1770, Xavier, le Baron de Bonfond, appeared in Sigoulane. After his marriage to his cousin Séverine, he proved himself to have been a man of ambition and ability, turning the tide of her family’s fortunes, then on the brink of disaster, almost single-handedly. Séverine converted to Catholicism before she died of puerperal fever, and Aurillac slowly recovered its former prosperity. Everything was neatly filed by subject and date. There was nothing under werewolves.

  One fat folder contained the minutiae of daily life at Aurillac over past centuries: a remedy for goiter; orders to the cook and to the washerwomen who came up from the village; lists of wages; bills of sale; notes of purchase of livestock; accounts of hunts (probably written in Hugo’s hand) itemizing the numbers of sangliers and cerfs killed; seating plans and menus for banquets, including one flagged by Jean-Claude as being the occasion of Hugo’s thirty-sixth birthday, the day he was thrown from his horse. According to his funerary notice, Hugo died seventeen days later.

  Moving into more recent times, Mara leafed through photocopies of newspaper articles and rotogravures: Dieudonné and Léonie, née Boursicaut, in front of the Bordeaux mairie on their wedding day; Dieudonné in 1921 being feted at the Salle Municipale in Brames for his development of the revolutionary inking technique that Jean-Claude had mentioned and that had so advanced the de Bonfond fortunes.

  Mara leaned back in her chair and let her focus drift to the middle distance. A livid sunset lit the western windows of the library. So far she had found nothing suspicious in the de Bonfond family archives. Certainly no accounts of howling at the moon or evidence of shape-shifting or uncontrolled growth of bodily hair. With a sigh, she returned to her task, taking up yellowed packets of documents tied with ribbon: notarial acts, for the notary was an integral part of French life then as now. She scanned wills, bequests, and land dispositions. One document related to Dominique de Bonfond’s provisions for Odile; another set out Hugo’s provisions for Henriette. The terms were similar: the wife, if she bore a surviving male heir, received an annuity and a life interest in the estate, but only on condition that she continued to live at Aurillac in a state of pious widowhood. French succession law then as now was governed by bloodline, and it was only recently that a surviving spouse shared with children an entrenched right to a deceased person’s estate.

  And finally, there were notes, written in Jean-Claude’s flowing script, of names, dates, places, and assertions that he had not been able to verify. They ran backward from 1730, the year of the false baron’s birth, and were undoubtedly the source of the genealogist’s conclusion that three-quarters of the de Bonfond family tree had been fabricated. She was amused to see the occasional strenuous objection: “Nothing listed in this regard!;” “Impossible! Facts are widely divergent!” It was almost as if the genealogist had taken a perverse satisfaction in finding no substantiation to the de Bonfond claims.

  It was now growing dark. Outside, a wind was building up. Mara heard it gusting against the glass panes. She rose to turn on a standing lamp. It filled the library with a comfortable, rosy glow. Jazz moaned his hunger. Dinnertime had come and gone, according to his stomach, but she returned to her reading, too engrossed to care about food. Eventually, Jazz’s noises took on a new, more pressing note. She gave in.

  “Okay, monster.” She stood up, pulled off her glasses, stretched, and let him out. The dog disappeared immediately into the garden. The wind, redolent of impending rain, ruffled her hair as she stood in the doorway that opened directly from the library onto the rear terrace. Below her, the stone dolphin, dribbling into its pool, was a dark, indistinct shape. She gave the dog sufficient time, then whistled him back. Jazz came reluctantly, looking reproachful.

  Mara noted with surprise that it was nearly half past eight. She assembled Jean-Claude’s notes and replaced them in the cabinet with every intention of packing up for the night. She would come back another time to tackle Cécile’s diary. Yet she hesitated. There was one thing she wanted to check before she left.

  “Fifteen more minutes,” she promised her dog and put her glasses on again.

  Cécile’s diary was contained in eleven folders, dated by year, running from 1861 to 1871. Skimming through a few, she quickly saw what Jean-Claude had complained about. The diary was more a series of personal notes, with little sense of coherence or chronological order. The genealogist had organized the material as best he could, sequencing the unbound sheets according to the writer’s references to verifiable events, religious holidays, birthdays, and seasonal descriptions. As he had said, much of it was guesswork because most of the entries were undated. The handwriting was large and scrawling. “Unformed” was the word that came to Mara’s mind. Or “unfulfilled.”

  In the 1870 folder, which Jean-Claude had shown her, Mara read through dull and unvarying accounts of daily life at Aurillac. The slaughter of a pig merited note as an important event. Mara got the sense of a clumsy, susceptible young woman, the object of perceived or real slights. Cécile had penned, somewhat pathetically:

  Maman dismisses me as unimportant, Papa thinks me stupid, the servants treat me as if I do not exist, and Hugo uses me brutally after his fashion. Even Eloïse scorns me. Yesterday she said I sit my horse like a sack of potatoes. The only creature who cares at all for me is Argent, my mare, and her Maman wants to sell to the knacker.

  The material also attested to Odile’s meanness:

  We dined on haunch of mutton this evening. It was the first time these three days that Maman allowed meat to be served. If Hugo did not hunt, we would have nothing to put under the tooth. Maman guards each sou as if her soul depended on it.

  Later entries contained what Mara had hoped to find: an account of the summer visit to Paris, undoubtedly a high point in Cécile’s life. Hugo and his father had been there since March. Odile, Cécile, and Eloïse had followed in June. “We went,” Cécile had written with naïve candor, “only because Maman heard of Papa and Hugo’s gaming, which she fears will bankrupt us, but for which I was glad, else I would not have seen Paris. Maman and Eloïse traveled up first-class. I went third with Marie, the maid, to oversee the luggage.” Mara cross-checked with the family tree and concluded that more than gaming had been going on. Hugo had married Henriette in August of that year.

  Of greatest interest to her were entries on a certain Armand Vigier, one of Hugo’s friends and a captain in Napoleon III’s army. Cécile’
s acquaintance with him had been struck while the women were driving in the Bois de Boulogne:

  He bowed as they rode past, and then he and Hugo turned back so that Hugo could make an introduction. I very much admired the way he spurred his horse, a spirited black, to canter round and round our carriage. He has a very fine mustache, and I learned that he comes from Tours. He addressed himself mainly to Maman, but I noticed that he kept his eyes on me, for all that Eloïse simpered at him under her bonnet. He addressed me as no other man has ever done, as if I were not plain.

  There were accounts of several meetings with the captain during the space of two months, all in public places and closely chaperoned by Odile or Eloïse. Nevertheless, the captain had managed to get his point across:

  Armand, for he has asked me to call him by his given name, hung back a moment to let Maman and Eloïse go on ahead. Then he took my hand and asked had I an amant, to which I said no. He asked if I could love one such as him. I could hardly speak, the blood rushed so to my face.

  But Cécile’s romance was doomed from the start. Maman interceded once it became clear that the captain had no money, and the family, except for Hugo, returned to the Dordogne in July. In any case, the captain was mobilized that same month and died soon after fighting the Prussians at Sedan. A grief-stricken Cécile had mourned:

  He is taken from me, cruelly and untimely. My grief is past bearing. I have spoken with my sister about taking the veil as she has done. She doubts I have the calling, but if I do not give myself to God, what will I do? I am left with nothing.

  Except a swelling belly, Mara thought. Reason enough to enter a convent. For Mara had found the references to the “stealthy visits” that Jean-Claude had read out to her. They were undated, stand-alone pieces that the genealogist had filed with the pages on the Paris summer. Mara decided that the captain, while alive, must have been very resourceful or extremely determined. With all the close surveillance and so little time, it was a wonder that the pair had managed to get it on at all. In one vivid passage, Cécile described what Mara took to be her first, rather horrific sexual encounter with her mustachioed lover:

  It was my first. I remember it now as clearly as if it were yesterday. Dear God! The flow of blood! And the pain. I was terrified, for I understood nothing then. I thought my stomach had come apart, and it made me think of the time they bled the pig for the making of boudin. He had come to me in the night, stealthily [that word again], as was his wont, and I felt certain that he would not desire me thus. But he pressed his hand over my mouth, saying that he liked it that way, and if I held my tongue, he would be gentle with me. It was the only time that he was so.

  The passage made Armand Vigier appear a brute. But it was curiously disjunctive as well, relating, it seemed, to an event from a more distant past. Mara was also puzzled by the implied volume of hymenal blood and the phrase “as was his wont,” which suggested more frequent visitations and easier access than Captain Vigier could have enjoyed. Studying the words more closely, she began to see another interpretation, one which Jean-Claude, as a man, might well have overlooked. “It was my first” and “I thought my stomach had come apart” did not have to refer to the rupturing of a maidenhead. Could this not be Cécile’s account of her first menstruation? In which case, Jean-Claude had wrongly linked it with Cécile’s army captain. Viewed in this light, the passage strongly suggested that the stealthy visitations had begun long before Cécile had gone to Paris and that they had more likely occurred within the precincts of her own home. But who was he who came to her in the night, who “liked it that way” and had promised gentleness, but just the once? One person came to Mara’s mind: Hugo, whom Cécile had accused of “using her brutally.” Had he been subjecting his youngest sister to systematic rape since childhood?

  Frowning, Mara rose and walked over to Cécile’s unfortunate portrait. The terrified girl had grown into a dispirited female with a low forehead, her father’s eyes, and an undershot jaw. Her olive-green gown framed an uninteresting décolletage, and her hands, encircling a temperamental-looking brindled pug, were large. The sitter, probably then in her mid-twenties, used to a lifetime of abuse and with little hope of marriage, looked resentfully conscious of her unloveliness and slightly mad.

  “You bastard,” she said aloud to Hugo’s painted self, hanging opposite.

  Farther down the wall, Xavier drew her with his wolfish glare. She moved to stand squarely before him, glaring back, as if by doing so she was challenging the whole of the unpleasant de Bonfond clan. “Sang Es Mon Drech.” The scroll declared its bearer’s self-proclaimed right to blood. A thought struck her. She scanned the bookshelves and eventually found a French-Occitan dictionary. She opened it and ran her finger down the page for the Occitan equivalent of the word loup-garou. It was, she learned, leberon. She almost laughed aloud at the irony of it. Despite his unpleasant features, Xavier, it seemed, had a sense of humor. As for Baby Blue—she sighed inwardly—if he was Cécile’s bastard, he was not a love child; instead the product of that age-old, sordid family pastime, incest.

  Mara suddenly had no desire to read the remaining pages of the 1870 folder. The library with its handsome architectural features felt somehow oppressive and slightly menacing, as if the book-lined walls and hanging portraits had slyly closed in on her as she sat in her lonely pool of light. The rest of the space about her was in shadow. To her left, the doorway leading into the grand salon gaped black and uninviting.

  It was then that she heard it—a distant wail that reverberated through the house like a cat in an echo chamber. With a low growl, Jazz lumbered to his feet, hackles rising. Mara rose, too, gripping the edge of the table. She strained her ears to trace the source of the cry. Perhaps it had not come from the house after all but from outside. A night bird, she told herself, and realized that she had been holding her breath. The unexpected proximity of the next sound nearly caused her to scream. It was soft, like a drawn-out sigh, coming from the darkness of the adjoining salon. Slowly, Mara turned terrified eyes to the doorway.

  “Thérèse?” she croaked. Had the housekeeper returned unexpectedly?

  A sharp crack from another direction caused her to wheel about. The exterior door of the library flew open. A dark, narrow object wavered about in the opening. It took Mara a second to recognize it for what it was, and the threat it represented. With a scream, she threw herself down behind the table.

  “For god’s sake, Didier, don’t shoot!”

  You oughtn’t to be here,” the gardener shrilled, every bit as frightened as she. “He’s gone. She’s off to her sister’s. I see a light. Babette here doesn’t take kindly to strangers in the house.” He waved his shotgun, and again Mara ducked.

  “I’m sorry, Didier. I should have told you. But I’m not a stranger. You know me.”

  “Babette doesn’t,” the old man insisted. “And she doesn’t like dogs.” During this interchange, Jazz, who was not an attack dog despite his pit-bull ancestry, had approached and was nosing the old man’s knee tentatively.

  “What do you think you’re doing here anyway, in the middle of the night?” Didier’s tone was still aggrieved, but he pushed Jazz away with the muzzle of the shotgun before lowering it to the floor. Mara breathed more easily and stood up.

  “I’m looking for information on the de Bonfonds,” she told him honestly. “Anything that will help clear up Jean-Claude Fournier’s murder.”

  “Him!” The gardener scowled and stepped fully into the room, pulling the door shut behind him since it was raining outside. His jacket was spotted with water. “Always poking his nose where it didn’t belong. Asking questions.”

  “Questions? What kind of questions?”

  “Daft things about the family, such as was no business of his. Nor yours, either. Now, if I was you, I’d go home and leave well enough alone. And take this animal with you.” Babette’s steely snout came up again.

  “All right.” Mara needed no further urging to put away Cécile’s diary and gat
her up her things. But she made a mental note: one way or another, she was coming back to find out what it was Jean-Claude had been after.

  Didier marched her at gunpoint through the salon, innocent of specters now that the light had been turned on. Had she really heard something in there? As he ushered her out the front door, she said: “Didier, I heard a noise just a little while ago. A kind of wailing. Did you hear it?”

  Up close she could see stubble on his chin and the milky circles around his irises, smell his odor, an old man’s whiff of stale urine.

  “Wailing?” he said, giving the word a full measure of contempt. “No wailing around here. Unless it was done by that hound of yours.”

  27

  THURSDAY AFTERNOON, 13 MAY

  Le Coquelicot was a ramshackle eatery situated in the humble delta of the Rauze, a minor tributary of the Dordogne. It sold ice creams, drinks, and frites, served at little tables set out on a silty beach under the trees. Mara arrived at a little past four. Julian was waiting for her, a canoe, which he had rented from the concession there, already loaded in his van. She left her car in le parking and climbed in beside him. They would drive to some point on the main valley road, put the canoe in the water, and paddle downstream. That much she knew.

  What she had not realized was that the Rauze drained the Sigoulane Valley, running north-south along the western foot of Aurillac Ridge. Normally a shallow stream sliding sluggishly in a wide bed, it was in full spate at the moment from the recent heavy rains. Julian drove until he found a spot at the north end of the valley where the road came close enough to the stream to let them put directly into the water.

  “I wish you’d tell me what this is all about,” said Mara as they carried the canoe between them to the bank.

  “You’ll see.”

  “But why do we have to go by boat?”

  “Because according to Didier, where I want to take you is inaccessible by foot right now.”