The Secret of the Chateau

by Kathleen McGurl

  ‘I’ll break it up and chuck it on the compost,’ Phil said, tossing it onto a pile of garden waste.

  I went inside, my mind still on Catherine Aubert. Maybe I’d just Google her, and see what turned up.

  I made myself a cup of tea, fired up the laptop and began running Google searches on the names ‘Pierre Aubert’ and ‘Catherine Aubert’. They threw up a number of matches; some I was able to discount quickly. A Pierre who lived in Canada and worked for an electric company; a Catherine who’d put numerous photos of herself with a small dog on Facebook. But in among the misses were some hits – mentions of the Auberts in a number of blogs about the area, and in Wikipedia articles about the French court. I read them all. The ones about the French court intrigued me – had my Auberts been a part of Louis XVI’s court, then? I’d assumed they had spent all their time in the Alpes-Maritimes, and it was too far from Paris to be able to make easy, regular trips to Paris or Versailles.

  ‘Maybe they came here to the ancestral home to escape the Revolution,’ I muttered to my laptop.

  ‘Hmm? What’s that?’ Gray said. He was sprawling on a sofa, feet up, reading a cycling magazine he subscribed to.

  ‘The Auberts. Seems they were part of the royal court.’ I guessed she and Pierre travelled to Saint-Michel-sur-Verais during 1789 or 1790. After the ‘women’s march’ on Versailles in the autumn of 1789, the royal family had been taken into Paris and held under house arrest in the Tuileries Palace, and around that time many other nobles had gone to their country residences or into exile. Maybe this was what the Auberts had done.

  I clicked on another link, and gasped. ‘Oh, wow!’ It had led me to a photograph of a painting held in the Louvre. ‘Come and look at this, Gray!’

  He grunted as he heaved himself upright and came to look over my shoulder. ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘Catherine Aubert!’ The caption was Catherine Aubert, Comtesse de Verais, in Versailles, painted 1786. The picture showed a woman in typical costume for an aristocrat in the late eighteenth century – her gown was a confection of frills and lace and ribbons, her hair elaborately piled on her head and decorated with more bows and flowers. Her face was oval, with a beauty spot on one cheek, possibly painted on. The portrait had that agelessness of so many from that era – Catherine could have been any age from fifteen to fifty-five when it was painted. But still I thought I could detect a haughtiness in her eye, pride at her place in the world, disdain for the lowly artist who was capturing her image. Or was it simply the fashion of the time, to give portraits an expression of aloofness? Gazing at her picture, I wanted more than ever before to discover what had happened to her and her children.

  ‘Excellent!’ Gray said. ‘Now you have a face for the name.’

  ‘Yes. I just need to find out what happened to her.’ It’d be lovely to resolve one of my mysteries. That made me wonder about the tower room – work had begun on replacing the floor. I decided to pop upstairs and check on progress.

  A carpenter was at work on the second-floor landing – cutting new joists to strengthen the floor. We’d had it all treated for woodworm, and the carpenter had pulled up and disposed of the old floorboards. I couldn’t enter, but standing at the top of the stone stairs I could look around the room.

  ‘Hey, Lu,’ Steve said, as he came to join me, having handed the carpenter a cup of coffee to keep him going.

  ‘Pleased with progress?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, he’s doing well. It’ll be done in a week.’ He clocked me grinning, and smiled back. ‘I know you’re desperate to get in there again, Lu.’

  I nodded. ‘I am, yeah. Did the carpenter find anything? Under the old floorboards, perhaps?’ I don’t know why but I’d had this vague idea there could be some clue there.

  ‘No. Just dust and dead spiders. Sorry to disappoint.’

  I wasn’t sure what I had been hoping for. A lace handkerchief with Catherine Aubert’s initials. A diary, tucked under a loose floorboard, detailing Pierre’s fears of what might happen to his family as the Revolution progressed. A child’s rattle, that might have belonged to one of Catherine’s children. Perhaps I’d been reading too many novels. Real life was never quite so exciting, even when you lived in a château which had a mysterious window in its tower.

  Later that evening, Gray and I were sitting outside, enjoying the last of the sunset. The evenings were getting cooler and the rest of the gang had gone inside to put a DVD on. Gray and I had decided to finish the bottle of wine and watch the stars come out. We’d grabbed fleece blankets from the sofa to curl up in.

  ‘You really like Aimée, don’t you?’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘I do, yes.’

  I smiled. ‘She’s perfect for you, I would say.’

  He nodded again and bit his lip.

  ‘Gray? Is there a problem?’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s easier, sometimes, to not find a perfect woman. I mean, we had this all sorted – the five of us, moving here, living a fabulous life all together. And then … Aimée comes along, and … Lu, I’m all confused.’

  ‘You can have us and Aimée,’ I said. ‘We’re not mutually exclusive.’ I was wondering if perhaps one day he’d want to move in with Aimée, in which case we’d need to buy out his share of the château, or if he’d want her to move in with us. Which would not be a problem as we had loads of space and she was a lovely person to be around. Maybe I’d get some fashion tips from her.

  ‘I know, I just don’t know quite how … or if …’ He shrugged again.

  ‘How to commit?’

  ‘Er, yeah. I guess that’s it. Never been very good at it, since Melissa …’

  ‘Not sure you ever fully committed to her, either.’ He’d never married the mother of his daughters and had managed to keep up a pretty independent lifestyle even when he was living with her.

  ‘No, probably not. But Aimée – she’s different.’

  ‘She’s amazing.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your girls loved her, too.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does Aimée like you as much as you like her?’ I thought I probably already knew the answer to this, but it would be good to hear it in Gray’s words. He took a sip of wine before answering.

  ‘Yes. Think she does. Actually, Lu, I think we are both in love.’ I glanced at him. Either he was blushing or the last of the sunset was reflecting in his face.

  ‘That’s wonderful. Here’s to love.’ I raised my glass and clinked it against his.

  ‘So … what next?’

  ‘That’s the problem. I don’t know. I don’t know how to do this next bit.’

  ‘Hmm. You’ve had too many years of keeping girlfriends at arm’s length,’ I said, gently.

  ‘Yeah.’ There was a sadness, a regret in his voice as he answered me.

  ‘I do understand why,’ I said, shuffling my chair a little so I was facing him. ‘You wanted what was best for the girls. So they didn’t have to suffer a stream of potential stepmothers, like you did.’

  ‘There’d probably only have been one.’ He pressed his lips together for a moment. ‘I messed up with Leanne.’

  ‘That’s in the past, Gray. Don’t go fretting about that, now. Think about the future instead. You’ve a real chance, here with Aimée.’

  ‘I’m scared I’ll fuck it up, Lu.’

  He sounded like a frightened adolescent. I put my hand on his knee, and he grabbed it with both of his. ‘You won’t. Just … follow your heart. Wherever it leads.’

  ‘But the girls … need stability …’

  ‘They’re grown up. They don’t live with you any more – they’ll make their own stability. All they want is your happiness.’

  ‘And you lot …’

  I grinned. ‘We are also grown-up. You might have noticed. We can cope if you bring Aimée here for a night. We can cope if you stay away at hers for a night. We can cope if the two of you go away on a holiday together.’

  ‘A holiday …’ he said, as if the idea ha
d never occurred to him before.

  ‘Yes – holidays with your partner are a good way of finding out how compatible you are when you are together twenty-four seven.’ It felt like I was coaching a teenager in his first relationship.

  ‘We can also cope, Gray, if you and Aimée decided you wanted to live together.’

  ‘What, here?’ He seemed horrified.

  ‘Or at hers. Either. There are ways we could make it work. Not that I think you should rush anything, but …’ I squeezed his hand and made him look at me as I continued. ‘You must understand that whatever you choose to do is OK by the four of us. I know I speak for us all. You mustn’t let our living arrangements get in the way of your long-term happiness with Aimée. Just keep that in mind, as your relationship progresses, all right? Don’t use us and our shared château as an excuse not to get close to her.’

  ‘I think I used to use the girls as an excuse,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, you’re right, you did. But no need to any more.’

  ‘You’re so wise, Lu. Should have listened to you years ago.’ I had tried, when he was with Leanne, but we were in our thirties back then and we all thought we knew everything, and Gray was not good at taking advice.

  ‘There you go again, trying to change the past. Gray, you gorgeous boy, you can only shape the future.’

  ‘I can, that,’ he said, and now there was laughter in his voice. We clinked glasses once again. I shivered – it was dark now and a chill breeze had got up. ‘Shall we go inside? They’re watching Mamma Mia.’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘Again. Third time this month, isn’t it?’ It was Steve’s favourite film, and if the rest of us said ‘don’t mind’, it was inevitably the DVD that got put on.

  ‘He’d watch it three times a day if we let him,’ Gray said, as he followed me back inside. I smiled to myself. I hoped our little heart to heart had done some good.

  The next day I spent more time reading the books Pascal had lent me. They were really helpful, though it took me a long time to read and fully understand the short sections they contained that mentioned the village or the château. The château had originally been built in the seventeenth century, with a large addition built by a Gustav Aubert in the early eighteenth century. I noted his name down – was he Pierre’s grandfather perhaps? I’d be able to check on the church records – but then I remembered I had a photo of the Aubert tomb. I opened that up on my laptop and zoomed in on the image. Yes, a Gustav Aubert was listed, above Victor Aubert and Pierre. So almost certainly Pierre’s grandfather, judging by the dates.

  But what interested me more than when the château was built, was the news that the fire that had totally destroyed the large newer wing happened in 1794. Right around the time Pierre died, during the time of the Terror. Had he perished in the fire, perhaps? And Catherine alongside him? If so, surely her remains would have been found?

  The books held no clues. One stated only that the only remaining part of the château was the older, original wing with its tower. The other went into a little more detail, saying that it had been owned by the Auberts but became State property in 1794 after the fire. Pierre was mentioned briefly in this one, as having been the last Comte de Verais and as having died during the Terror. I already knew all this.

  So at least now I knew the year the château had burned. None of the books gave any hints as to what had caused the fire.

  I decided to take a closer look at the grounds, and the remains of the burned-down wing. Since moving in we’d always taken it a little for granted – there were a few low walls, some flattened gravel areas (including our pétanque pitch) but I’d never actually tried to work out the layout at all. I had a photo of the painting of the château in its heyday – the one where the top window of the tower was missing. One of Pascal’s books contained a grainy reproduction of that painting too. I studied it closely, noting where the additional wing joined onto the still-existing building, then headed outside to look more closely.

  It seemed odd – we’d lived here for months and only now was I investigating in detail the outside of the building. Other than the tower, and that odd extra window, and general glances upwards now and again, I’d never paid a lot of attention to the fabric of the château. But, as I turned right out of the front door and followed the wall around, now that I was looking for clues I could clearly see where a wall had been dove-tailed into the existing one, where remains of mortar that would have sealed the gap between new and old were still attached, and areas of blackened stone on the side of the château where the other wing had been. Also a patch of lighter stone at ground floor level – where I guessed a doorway had been knocked through to link the old and new sections, and then filled in after the fire and the demolition of the burned sections. It seemed amazing that just one wing had burned. Perhaps the fire had spread into the older parts, but just not damaged it so much, leaving it salvageable.

  I followed the wall of the château around and looked more closely at our pétanque pitch. It was the size of a large drawing room, and the low stonework that surrounded it were clearly the remains of the room’s walls. I realised that a recess along one long side, that now housed a bench, had originally been a fireplace. And the gap in the walls we used as an entrance was a doorway. Beyond, I could trace a few more walls but then the stables and garages had clearly been built over the old remains. Actually, now that I looked closely, I realised the back wall of the stables, that was made of stone, had probably been part of the château wing. It too had black marks as testimony to the fire.

  I fetched an A4 pad of paper and a pencil and had a go at sketching the floor plan of the remaining bits of wall. My mind kept running on the fate of Catherine and Pierre. Had they been in one of these rooms when the château burned? I shivered as I walked across the pétanque pitch. Where we played our games and drank and laughed, one or both of them might have died a hideous death. It was a sobering thought.

  My other ongoing project was tracing Catherine’s descendants. The family tree had become pretty unwieldy, and I had resorted to transcribing the lot onto some online software. That had taken ages. And the weather had been good, so Felix of course wanted lots of walks. Steve was working his way through the château on his renovation project, and we’d all needed to chip in to help strip old wallpaper, sand the walls, and paint them. Not to mention the English classes which took up quite a bit of my time – preparing plans and taking the lessons. So for a while I’d made no further progress with the research.

  Until a day came when the others were all out, choosing paint for Steve and Manda’s bedroom which was the current one being worked on. Gray was out with Aimée, and Phil had gone along with Steve and Manda for the ride. Felix had had a walk and was lying contentedly on his dog bed, so I decided to push on with the research. There were a few lines of descent I had yet to follow to the end – either to living descendants or until I got stuck, whichever came first. The one I chose to work on first petered out quickly. Just one more generation on from where I’d left it, brought me to a family with just one son who’d died in 1944, fighting for France’s liberation. Next, I chose a line that had originated from Jeanne Aubert. She’d had a number of grandchildren born in the 1850s and 60s, and although I’d come to dead ends with most of these, there was one strand still going – a family who’d stayed in the area. One of their daughters, I then discovered, married a man named François Baudin. I gasped as I read the name. It was a surname I knew. But perhaps it was a common one? There could be hundreds of Baudins around. It would surely be too much of a coincidence if this Baudin had any connection to the one I knew.

  As though he’d read my mind, Felix came over to nuzzle at me, placing his head on my thigh. ‘What do you think, boy?’ I asked him. ‘Could your previous owner be descended from the Auberts? And wouldn’t it be amazing if he was?’

  Next step – look for children of François Baudin. The marriage was around 1925, so I was looking for children born after that date, in the area. I was working
quickly, fired up now, impatient to find out if there was really a connection. Moving forward from 1925 looking at birth records I found a string of children born to François, including a few who had sadly died as young children. It took a while to work through them all, and I kept telling myself none of them would be ‘my’ Baudin. But then, as I was about to give up for the day, I found a boy born in 1937 and named Jean-Paul. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. This was him!

  ‘There he is, Felix! I’m thinking we will have to pay him a visit, won’t we?’ Monsieur Baudin had been a long time in hospital, with bouts of sickness complicating his recovery from the hip fracture, but Aimée had said he was very soon going to move into a nursing home where I would be allowed to bring Felix to visit him at last. I’d been to the hospital a couple of times to report on Felix’s progress, but despite pleading with the nurses there I had not been allowed to take Felix in. Monsieur Baudin had had to be content with the many photos of the dog I had on my phone.

  But now there were two reasons to see him as soon as he was discharged – to take Felix and to talk about his ancestry. I couldn’t believe it. A descendant of the Auberts, still living locally, and someone I already knew!

  Chapter 26

  Pierre, 1794

  Pierre knew he needed to run, and not be seen, as he hurried back to the château. With luck the mob would have discovered it apparently empty, and would have gone in search of them elsewhere – at the priest’s cottage if they’d questioned Madame Bernard. If the château was deserted, he’d be able to slip inside and up to the tower room to rejoin Catherine. When they would be able to leave for good, he didn’t know. Neither did he know when they’d be reunited with their children. How he would break this news to Catherine was another unknown, but the most important thing was that the children were safe.

  He kept telling himself this as he hurried through the village, keeping out of sight, and on to the high path back to the château that he’d taken with Claudette and the children only minutes before.