Sepulchre

by Kate Mosse

  The following morning, All Saints’ Day, several bodies were recovered from the smouldering ruins, servants who - it was presumed - had found themselves trapped by the flames. And there were other victims, men who didn’t work on the estate, from Rennes-les-Bains itself.

  It was not clear why Léonie Vernier had chosen - or been forced - to remain behind when other inhabitants of the Domaine de la Cade, her nephew Louis-Anatole among them, fled. There was also no explanation of why the fire had spread so far, so fast, and destroyed the sepulchre too. The Courrier d’Aude and other local newspapers of the time made mention of the high winds that night, but even so, could they have bridged the gap between the house and the Visigoth tomb in the woods?

  Meredith knew she would figure it out. In time, she’d fit all the pieces together.

  The rising light glanced off the surface of the water, the trees, and the landscape that had held its secrets for so long. A breath of wind whispered across the grounds, through the valley. The priest’s voice, clear and timeless, called Meredith back to the present.

  ‘In nomine Patri, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.’

  She felt Hal take her hand.

  Amen. So be it.

  The Curé, tall in his heavy black felt cloak, smiled at her. The tip of his nose was red, she noticed, and his kind brown eyes glittered in the chill air.

  ‘Mademoiselle Martin, c’est à vous, alors.’

  She took a deep breath. Now the moment had come, she was suddenly shy. Reluctant. She felt Hal squeeze her fingers, then gently let her go.

  Struggling to keep her emotions in check, Meredith stepped forward to the edge of the grave. From her pocket, she took two items recovered from Julian Lawrence’s study, a silver locket and a gentleman’s fob watch. Both were simply inscribed with initials and a date: 22 octobre 1891, commemorating the marriage of Anatole Vernier to Isolde Lascombe. Meredith hesitated, then crouched down and dropped them gently into the ground where they belonged.

  She glanced up at Hal, who smiled and gave the slightest nod. She took another deep breath, then pulled out an envelope: the piece of music, Meredith’s treasured heirloom, carried by Louis-Anatole across the water from France to America, and down the generations to her.

  It was hard to let it go, but Meredith knew it belonged with Léonie.

  She looked down at the small slate plaque set into the ground, grey against the grass:

  LÉONIE VERNIER.

  22 AOUT 1874 - 31 OCTOBRE 1897.

  REQUIESCAT IN PACEM.

  Meredith let the envelope go. It twisted, then spiralled down, down through the still air, a flash of white slowly falling from her black-gloved fingers.

  Let the dead rest. Let the dead sleep.

  She stepped back, hands clasped in front of her, her head bowed. For a moment, the small group stood in silence, paying their final respects. Then Meredith nodded to the priest.

  ‘Merci, Monsieur le Curé.’

  ‘Je vous en prie.’

  With a timeless gesture, he seemed to draw in all those gathered on the promontory, then turned and led the small party back down the hill and round the lake. As they struck out across the lawns, glinting with early morning dew, the rising sun was reflected like flames in the windows of the house.

  Meredith suddenly stopped.

  ‘Can you give me a minute?’

  Hal nodded. ‘I’ll just see them settled inside, then come back for you.’

  She watched as he walked away, up on to the terrace, then she turned back to look across the lake. She wanted to linger a while longer.

  Meredith pulled her coat tight around her. Her toes and fingers were numb and her eyes were stinging. The formalities were over. She didn’t want to leave the Domaine de la Cade, but she knew it was time. This time tomorrow, she’d be on her way back to Paris. The day after, Tuesday 13th November, she’d be on a plane above the Atlantic on her way home. Then she’d have to figure out where the hell to go from there.

  Work out if she and Hal had a future.

  Meredith looked across the sleeping waters, flat as a mirror, to the promontory. Then, beside the old stone seat, Meredith thought she saw a figure, a shimmering, insubstantial outline in a white and green dress, tapered at the waist, full at the hem and arms. Her hair hung loose around her, shining copper in the sun’s cold rays. The trees behind her, silver with hoar frost, glinted like metal.

  Meredith thought she heard the music once more, although she wasn’t sure if it was inside her mind or from deep within the earth. Like notes on manuscript paper, but written upon the air.

  She stood in silence, waiting, watching, knowing it would be the last time. There was a sudden glint on the water, a refraction of the light perhaps, and Meredith saw Léonie raise her hand. A slim arm silhouetted against the white sky. Long fingers encased in black gloves.

  She thought of the Tarot cards. Léonie’s cards, painted by her more than a hundred years ago to tell her story and that of the people she had loved. In the confusion and chaos of the hours immediately after Julian’s death on Hallowe’en - while Hal had been at the commissariat and calls were going backwards and forwards between the hospital, where Shelagh was being treated, and the morgue where Julian’s body had been taken - Meredith had quietly, and without any fuss, replaced the cards in Léonie’s sewing box and returned it to the ancient hiding place in the woods.

  Like the piece of piano music, Sepulchre 1891, they belonged in the ground.

  Her eyes stayed fixed on the middle distance, but the image was fading.

  She’s leaving.

  It was the desire for justice that had kept Léonie here until the full story was told. Now she could rest in peace in the quiet ground she had loved so well.

  She felt Hal come up and stand beside her. ‘How’s it going?’ he said softly.

  Let the dead rest. Let the dead sleep.

  Meredith knew he was struggling to make sense of things. For the past eleven days they had talked and talked. She had told him everything that had happened, leading up to the moment when he burst into the clearing, minutes behind his uncle - about Léonie, about her Tarot reading in Paris, about the obsession stretching back more than a hundred years that had taken so many lives, about the stories of the demon and the music of the place, about how she felt she had somehow been drawn to the Domaine de la Cade. Myths, legends, facts, history, all jumbled up together.

  ‘I’m good. Just a little cold.’

  Meredith kept her eyes fixed on the middle distance. The light was changing. Even the birds had stopped singing.

  ‘What I still don’t understand,’ Hal said, pushing his hands deep into his pockets, ‘is why you? I mean, obviously there’s the family connection with the Verniers, but even so ...’

  He trailed off, not sure where he was going.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said quietly, ‘because I don’t believe in ghosts.’

  Now she was no longer aware of Hal, of the cold, pale purple light spreading through the valley of the Aude. Only of the face of the young girl on the other side of the water. Her spirit was fading into the backdrop of the trees, the frost, slipping away. Meredith kept her eyes centred on the one spot. Léonie was almost gone now. Her outline was shifting, sliding, slipping away, like the echo of a note.

  Grey, to white, to nothing.

  Meredith raised her hand, as if to wave, as the shimmering outline faded finally to absence. Slowly, she lowered her arm.

  Requiescat in pacem.

  Until, finally, all was silence. All was space.

  ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ Hal said again. He sounded worried.

  She nodded slowly.

  For a few minutes more, Meredith stood staring into the empty space, unwilling to break the connection with the place. Then, she took a deep breath, then reached for Hal. He felt warm, solid flesh and blood.

  ‘Let’s head back,’ she said.

  Hand in hand, they turned and walked
across the lawns towards the terrace at the back of the hotel. Their thoughts were running down very different paths. Hal was thinking of coffee. Meredith was thinking of Léonie. And how much she was going to miss her.

  CODA

  Three Years Later

  SUNDAY 31ST OCTOBER 2010

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. My name is Mark and it’s my great honour to welcome Ms Meredith Martin to our bookstore tonight.’

  There was a burst of enthusiastic, if sparse, applause, then a hush descended over the tiny independent bookstore. Hal, sitting in the front row, smiled encouragement at her. Standing at the back, her arms folded, was her publisher, who gave the thumbs-up sign.

  ‘As many of you know,’ the manager continued, ‘Ms Martin is the author of the acclaimed biography of the French composer Claude Debussy, which came out last year to rave reviews. However, what you may not know ...’

  Mark was an old friend, and Meredith had a horrible feeling he was going to start way back, taking the audience all the way through elementary school, through high school to university, before he even got on to the subject of the book.

  She let her mind wander, running down familiar paths. She thought about everything that had happened to bring her to this point. Three years of research, evidence, checking and double-checking, trying to fit together the pieces of Léonie’s history at the same time as struggling to finish and deliver her biography of Debussy on time.

  Meredith never did figure out if Lilly Debussy had visited Rennes-les-Bains, but the two stories collided pretty early on in a more exciting way. She discovered that the Verniers and the Debussys had been neighbours in the rue de Berlin in Paris. And when Meredith visited Debussy’s grave in the Cimitière de Passy in the 16th arrondissement, where Manet and Morisot, Fauré and André Messager were also buried, she had found, hidden in a corner of the cemetery beneath the trees, the tomb of Marguerite Vernier.

  The following year, back in Paris with Hal, Meredith paid a visit to lay flowers on the grave.

  As soon as she’d delivered the biography in the spring of 2008, Meredith had concentrated full time on researching the Domaine de la Cade and how her family had emigrated from France to America.

  She started with Léonie. The more Meredith read about Rennes-les-Bains and the theories surrounding Abbé Saunière and Rennes-le-Château, the more convinced she was that Hal’s opinion that it was all part of a smokescreen to draw attention away from what had happened at the Domaine de la Cade was right. She was inclined to think that the three corpses discovered in the 1950s in the garden of Abbé Saunière’s home in Rennes-le-Château were connected to the events of 31st October 1897 in the Domaine de la Cade.

  Meredith suspected that one of the bodies was that of Victor Constant, the man who murdered Anatole and Marguerite Vernier. Records showed Constant had fled to Spain and been treated in several clinics for third-stage syphilis, but that he had returned to France in the fall of 1897. The second might have been Constant’s manservant, who was known to have been among the mob that attacked the house. His body had never been found. The third was harder to account for. A twisted spine, abnormally long arms, a person of no more than four feet in height.

  The other event that caught Meredith’s attention was the murder of Curé Antoine Gélis of Coustaussa, some time during the same night in October 1897. Gélis was a recluse. On the surface, his death seemed unconnected with the events at the Domaine de la Cade, apart from the coincidence of the date. He had been attacked first with his own fire tongs, then an axe lying in the grate of the old presbytery. The Courrier d’Aude reported there were fourteen wounds to his head and multiple skull fractures.

  It was a particularly savage and apparently motiveless murder. The killers were never found. All the local newspapers of the time carried the story and the details were much the same. Having killed the old man, the murderers laid out the body, crossing the old man’s hands across his chest. The house had been searched and a strongbox forced open, but it was said by a niece who looked after him to be empty anyway. Nothing appeared to have been taken.

  When Meredith researched a little deeper, she discovered two details buried deep in one of the newspaper reports. First, that on the afternoon of Hallowe’en, a girl matching the description of Léonie Vernier visited the presbytery in Coustaussa. A handwritten note was recovered. Second, that a Tarot card had been left pushed between the fingers of the dead man’s left hand.

  Card XV: Le Diable.

  When Meredith had read that, recalling what had happened in the ruins of the sepulchre, she thought she understood. The devil, through his servant Asmodeus, had taken his own.

  As for who had placed Léonie’s sewing box and the original cards in their hiding place beneath the winterbourne, that remained unresolved. Meredith’s heart imagined Louis-Anatole creeping back into the Domaine de la Cade under cover of night and replacing the cards where they belonged in memory of his aunt. Her head told her it was more likely to have been a man called Audric Baillard, whose role in the story she’d not yet figured out to her own satisfaction.

  The genealogical information was more straightforward to pin down. With the assistance of the same lady in the town hall in Rennes-les-Bains, who turned out to be both resourceful and extremely efficient, during the summer of 2008 and early fall, Meredith had put together Louis-Anatole’s history. The son of Anatole and Isolde, he had grown up in the care of Audric Baillard in a small village in the Sabarthès mountains called Los Seres. After Léonie’s death, Louis-Anatole had never returned to the Domaine de la Cade and the estate had been allowed to go to ruin. Meredith assumed Louis-Anatole’s guardian was the father, maybe even grandfather, of the Audric S. Baillard who had written Diables et Esprits Maléfiques et Phantômes de la Montagne.

  Louis-Anatole Vernier, together with a family servant, Pascal Barthes, had enlisted in the French army in 1914 and seen active service. Pascal was much decorated, but did not survive the war. Louis-Anatole did and, when peace was declared in 1918, he made his way to America, officially signing over the abandoned Domaine de la Cade to his Bousquet relations. To start with, he paid his way playing piano on the steamboats and in vaudeville. Although Meredith couldn’t prove it, she liked to think he might have at least crossed paths with another vaudeville performer, Paul Foster Case.

  Louis-Anatole settled outside Milwaukee, in what was now Mitchell Park. It had been pretty easy to uncover the next chapter of the story. He fell in love with a married woman, a Lillian Matthews, who became pregnant and had a daughter, Louisa. Soon after, the affair ended and Lillian and Louis-Anatole appeared to have lost touch. There was no evidence of contact between father and daughter that Meredith could find, although she hoped Louis-Anatole might have followed his daughter’s progress from a distance.

  Louisa inherited her father’s musical talent. She became a professional pianist, in the concert halls of 1930s’ America rather than on the steamboats of the Mississippi. After her debut concert, at a small venue in Milwaukee, she found a package waiting for her at the stage door. It contained a single photograph of a young man in uniform and a piece of piano music: Sepulchre 1891.

  On the eve of World War II, Louisa became engaged to a fellow musician, a violinist whom she’d met on the concert circuit. Jack Martin was highly strung and volatile, even before his experiences in a Burmese prisoner-of-war camp ruined him. He returned to America, addicted to drugs, suffering hallucinations and nightmares. He and Louisa had a daughter, Jeanette, but it was clearly a tough situation and when Jack disappeared from the scene in the 1950s, Meredith imagined Louisa had not been sorry.

  Three years of painstaking research, and she’d made it right up to date. Jeanette had inherited the beauty, the talent, the character of her grandfather, Louis-Anatole, and her mother, Louisa, but also the fragility, the vulnerability of her French great-grandmother Isolde and her father, Jack.

  Meredith looked down at the back cover of the book, resting in her nervous lap. A
reproduction of the photograph of Léonie, Anatole and Isolde, taken in the square in Rennes-les-Bains in 1891. Her family.

  Mark, the store manager, was still talking. Hal caught her eye, and mimed zippering his mouth shut.

  Meredith grinned. Hal had moved to America in October 2008, the best birthday present Meredith could have had. The legal side of things down in Rennes-les-Bains had been complicated. Probate had taken a while and there had been problems with ascertaining exactly why Julian Lawrence had died. Not a stroke, not a heart attack. There were no visible signs of any trauma whatsoever, apart from some unexplained scarring on the palms of his hands. His heart had just stopped beating.

  Had he survived, it was unlikely he would have faced charges for either the murder of his brother or the attempted murder of Shelagh O’Donnell. The circumstantial evidence in both cases was persuasive, but the police were reluctant to reopen the inquest into Seymour’s death in the circumstances. Shelagh had not seen her attacker and there were no witnesses.

  There was, however, clear evidence of fraud and that Julian Lawrence had been skimming the profits and borrowing against it for years to fund his obsession. Several valuable Visigoth artefacts, all illegally obtained, were recovered. In his safe were charts showing his detailed excavations of the grounds and notebook after notebook of scribblings about a particular deck of Tarot cards. When Meredith was questioned, in November 2007, she admitted she had a replica copy of the same deck, but that the originals were believed to have been destroyed in the fire of 1897.