And I am happy, in a way, because I know that at last I am fulfilling my ambition. I am passing on learning. My account will be studied and used by doctors and students at the university. I have become a teacher.
Chapter 19
We steeled ourselves and called Sabine, invited her for a drink that evening.
At six, I set a scented burner on the fireplace, and a light cinnamon trail rose, overlaying the random bursts of diverse scents that had come and gone since our return.
Sabine arrived, intent and eager for information and bringing light footprints of figgy mud over the threshold.
Dom poured some wine, and together we told her the truth about Rachel. The truth that Rachel had been sick and the truth that she had died in a clinic in Switzerland. Not quite the whole truth, but as much of it as necessary.
Sabine shook her head slowly from side to side, seeming to restrain herself from saying what she really thought. “I knew it . . . I knew that something had happened to her . . .”
She threw me a beady glance, as if she thought I was holding back or dissembling. Well, I had been holding back, but only about how little I knew of Dom’s wife, and how uneasy that had begun to make me, and because I felt disloyal to Dom.
I looked over at him now, willing him to dispel her lingering suspicions.
“I should have said, before now. I’m sorry,” he said.
There was a charged pause.
Silently, I urged him on.
“She didn’t know either—not at first,” he said, meaning me. He put his hand over mine. He began with a stutter, then continued. “This has been a difficult time for me. Perhaps I shouldn’t have come back here. But can you begin to understand why I did not want to talk about my wife’s death?”
Sabine put her head on one side. “Of course. Of course I can . . . but—”
“And Rachel . . . she wasn’t well, she used to say things she didn’t mean,” I said. I looked steadily at Sabine, trying to communicate what, in particular, Rachel had not meant.
Neither of us was going to say it.
“I’m sorry if I appeared to mislead you,” I said. “I overreacted and . . .”
“It wasn’t her fault,” said Dom firmly.
From the way she raised the side of her mouth, it seemed that Sabine was about to air some other discrepancy, but she let it go.
“Lieutenant Severan and Adjutant Grégoire were here this morning,” I said, changing the subject to one I knew would interest her. “I gather there’s a new theory as to the identity of at least one of the bodies here.”
Sabine was keen to tell us her own stories. More wine was poured, and she explained how her family and Marthe Lincel’s had been intertwined for generations.
“My grandmother Arielle was a childhood friend of Bénédicte Lincel, the younger sister. Her family, the Poidevins, were tenant farmers here at Les Genévriers. Well, as you probably know, the farm gradually failed, the tenants all left, the son of the family left, Marthe was in Paris with her perfumes. Then there was only one old lady living here. That was Bénédicte.
“She was on the point of ruin. She was advised to sell off some land, but selling the farm was the only way forward for her. Much land had already been sold, or let to another farmer for his goats.”
I thought of the fields below, owned now by the village’s most prosperous farming family, a clan destined for success from the moment the third son was born, and then, almost excessively, blessed by the births of the fourth and fifth. The view from the back of the cottages is now another neighbor’s wheat field, and his vigorous golden crops roll right up to our chins, or so it feels. All that came with the hamlet were the scrubby woods, the garden, and the steep orchard terraces.
“Bénédicte needed Marthe’s help, and urgently. But the sisters had gone their separate ways, or rather, many years before, Marthe had cut Bénédicte out of her life after some argument. So we tried to contact her on Bénédicte’s behalf, and got nowhere. Everywhere we tried ended in a dead end.” Sabine laughed drily and took a sip from her glass.
“So,” I said, suddenly understanding, “when a talented journalist came looking for local stories, you put her onto Marthe and gave her all the help you could. You even encouraged me to take up where she left off.”
Sabine smiled. “We all wanted to know what happened to Marthe. Bénédicte made us promise to find out what happened to her sister, where she was if she was still alive. It was always possible a fresh mind would turn up some fact we hadn’t found, see the story from a different viewpoint.”
We all seemed to think about that one.
“When the police ran forensic tests on the bodies, and announced the age the woman would have been when she died, and the length of time she had been in the ground, they came around to everyone in the village, asking if anyone had any clues as to who she was. My grandmother, my mother, and I dug out old diaries and with those and what we could piece together from memory . . . It turned out that the woman was the age Marthe Lincel would have been when she was last known to be here, which also fit approximately with the time when Bénédicte last saw her.”
“And Bénédicte is dead—the police said there were no relatives,” said Dom.
“She died in 2007. She had been living with us for some years by then. She couldn’t stay here alone.”
“So they can’t be sure it is Marthe Lincel.”
“No. It’s all circumstantial evidence.”
“Who was the other girl, the young one?” I asked.
“No one knows, poor soul.”
A noise against the window made us all jump. It was a hornet, so big it clunked its head against the glass trying to reach the light inside.
“What do you do about these?” asked Dom.
“Find the nest,” said Sabine.
“The police found bloodstains here in the kitchen,” I told her. “They thought they were relatively recent, but it turns out they must have been here for decades. If they’d only asked I would have told them.”
“Dark stains on the floor tiles—and then some like droplets?”
We nodded.
“I tried to scrub them,” I said. “I never had any idea they were . . .”
“It’s not a happy story,” said Sabine. “You may not want to know.”
Of course we did.
“Bénédicte and Marthe . . . their father shot himself. It was the first act in the family’s downfall.”
We showed her to the door and she was gracious. She might even become a friend, I felt, at some stage, if we decided to stay.
I remembered, just as she was leaving, standing in the open doorway. Raindrops threaded through basil and lemon verbena in the pots at the top of the steps, making an infusion of pungent leaves.
“If you would still like me to, I will translate the research Rachel left with you on the flash drive for safekeeping,” I said. “If that’s okay with Dom.”
Chapter 20
In the end, it was Rachel who led us to the answers.
This was among the files on her flash drive.
Marthe Lincel’s most famous scent was a runaway success in the early 1950s, Rachel wrote.
Lavande de Nuit starts as a winter-white scent, and turns into summer on the skin. The first burst of powdery sweet heliotrope and white iris develops a sharper note of wild cherry, drying down to a milky almond base with a signature flourish of the unexpected, in this case, a bracing dash of hawthorn. After a few hours of warmth, it pulsates with wild herbs and lavender in sunlight. A faint mist of caramelized hazelnut and vanilla emerges, and finally a deep, smoky lavender. It is one of those scents that seem alive on the skin, subtly incubating, insinuating its personality, and leaving an enchanting trail.
It is still made today, in bespoke quantities, by the Musset boutique, now part of the huge BXH luxury-brand empire. The original elegant frosted glass flacon has been replaced, and the composition using modern commercial ingredients is heavier on the vanilla notes,
which were such a joy when they unfurled more slowly, like the telling of a secret. But it is still a wonderful perfume, one of the greats, even if it is only available these days as part of a library of classics maintained by a small but highly regarded Parisian house.
The perfume was born, like Mme. Lincel, in Provence, in the hamlet where she was born and where she lived until she went away to Manosque. It still stands: Les Genévriers (The Junipers) is a hillside farm overlooking the great blue ridge of the Luberon chain to the south, and the wide sweep of the valley to the west.
Old buildings can weave their own magic, and this one has a powerful presence: for all its failing structure, left to rot for years now, the unsafe walls and skewed lintels, it has a monumental quality. It must have been like Cold Comfort Farm in winter.
This part of Provence is a country of contrasts, the searing heat and the bone-biting cold; the golden days of heat and the violent storms; sweetness of the soft perfumes that pulse in the sun and the treacherous changes of mood. The wind is the pacemaker of the day’s rhythms, from the summer zephyrs that sustain the spirit to the savage howling of the mistral.
These days, Les Genévriers lies abandoned. Spectacular views roll out from all four compass points: views that Marthe would not have seen since she was a very young child. It seems encased in another era, one with a tragic air. Once you know Marthe’s story, and that of her family, it’s hard not to feel that the tightly shuttered windows echo her sightless eyes and the way those who were left turned their backs on the world.
For the biggest mystery is Marthe herself. What became of her? How did her story end? Where did she go when she left her boutique in Paris for the last time in 1973? No one knows.
According to the local administrators at the mairie in the village at the top of the hill, the property had been put up for sale many years previously but so convoluted is the inheritance division among family members—a regular complication of French property—that the legal tangle had defeated several sales. Now the last of the family to live there was dead.
Others claimed the property was haunted, that this was the reason it had lain not only unsold but uninhabited for so long. When I mentioned the name of Marthe Lincel, the woman in the grocery store nodded enthusiastically, and said, “Of course!” as did a small gaggle of customers waiting at the post office. But it transpired that it was the family name they knew, as everyone in the village knew the names of all the prominent families linked to the land, and not specifically of her renown as a perfumer.
Sabine Boutin, a local businesswoman, walked around the hamlet with me and did her best to put Marthe Lincel in the context of her family home.
“If you speak to anyone in the village, they will tell you that they remember the place from their childhood. This was the place where they could be given little jobs, like collecting walnuts or picking fruit in the orchard, helping with the drying or bottling of the tomatoes. Later, when it went to rack and ruin, their children came to explore and to play. It was considered a dare to steal into the vaulted cellar through the open wood store and defy the ghosts to play games and tricks around the pillars. It was considered the local equivalent of a forgotten castle in a fairy tale. After Marthe’s sister died, there was no one there, only spirits and mischief.”
I assumed the stories of hauntings started then.
“No,” said Sabine. “That was a much sadder story.”
Marthe Lincel was, by all accounts, an excellent student at the school for the blind in Manosque. After the inevitable difficulties of settling in away from home, she made friends and was remembered by all as kind, determined, and perceptive.
Then came the dark days of the Second World War.
Marthe’s younger brother, Pierre, was twenty-two when the war in France ended. He had joined the army but spent most of the previous two years marching around a parade ground in Marseille, having convinced the medical examiners that some problem with his sinuses would prevent him from being much use in combat.
Then, when it was over, like so many other young men, he could see no future in subsistence farming. Marthe’s memoir gives a picture of a cocky lad with plenty of different girlfriends, all giggly things wearing cheap scents and the sweet aroma of honey soap. He headed for a fruit-preserving factory at first, then worked at one of the new agricultural machinery plants. The family rarely heard from him. Much later, word reached the village that he had been killed in an industrial accident.
But there was an earlier tragedy.
Marthe left for Paris, her fortunes rising. But at the farm, it was another bad year. The weather veered from severe frosts to torrential rains through the early and late summer, which took the crops in the fields. One by one, the tenants were leaving. Without them, the work was doubly tough and demoralizing.
Then Cédric Lincel was killed by a shot from an old revolver he was cleaning.
Only the younger sister, Bénédicte, clung on with their mother.
Bénédicte was pretty and clever, they said, and had several local suitors but she never married, even after their mother died and she was free to live her own life. Instead, Bénédicte became a recluse. Those who visited the hamlet began to come away with unsettling stories: the family was cursed, and the tragedy foretold; spirits danced in the darkness and shared the rooms with the living; strangers materialized out of nothing; a mysterious and dreadful stench was emanating from the courtyard of the big house; lanterns flickered and died for no reason. An atmosphere of fear grew and took hold.
As Bénédicte aged, alone, the farm falling into ruin around her, the village children dared each other to venture there by night. Odd occurrences continued to be reported, but they were never convincingly anything more than rumor fueled by idiotic pranks.
One day, arriving at the farm with provisions, Arielle’s granddaughter Sabine found Bénédicte trembling and unable to speak coherently. Not until the doctor was summoned was she able to tell them of the horrors she had witnessed.
Chapter 21
The key to Bénédicte’s experience was in the other files on the flash drive: notes marked with precise library catalog numbers from the research archives of the department of ophthalmology at the University of Avignon. They led to an extraordinary collection of tape recordings made by Bénédicte herself in 1996, when she was seventy years old.
Terrifying though Bénédicte’s ordeal had been, it was never a haunting. There was an earthbound, though equally distressing, explanation.
Visual hallucinations such as these are known as Charles Bonnet syndrome, and it is almost certain that Bénédicte was suffering from this mysterious condition. Phantasmagoria, or visions, were a manifestation of a certain kind of progressive sight loss.
Charles Bonnet, a natural philosopher from Switzerland, was the first man of science to attempt to understand the visions from which his own grandfather was suffering, including a distressing parade of people, vehicles, and horses that were not actually there. In the eighteenth century, Bonnet developed the theory that these, along with moving landscapes, geometric patterns, and disembodied faces, were actually a symptom of macular degeneration.
Strangely enough, he discovered, even people with healthy sight could potentially experience these hallucinations if they were blindfolded for long enough. They seemed to be caused by lack of visual stimulation rather than madness, by the brain trying to make up for fewer impulses from the nerve cells in a damaged retina. When the brain does not receive as many pictures as it expects, it tries to compensate by drawing on the areas it has always used to process faces, surroundings, patterns, and colors.
But normally, the condition was an indication of age-related macular degeneration, one of the most common causes of blindness. And, unnervingly, visions most often occurred when the subject was in a state of drowsiness or relaxation, which would explain why Bénédicte was most often affected as she sat by the hearth to rest.
Was there a genetic predisposition in the sisters that was respon
sible for them both losing their sight? It seems likely. Like her sister, Bénédicte was to put her blindness to admirable use. She collaborated over several years with the eminent ophthalmologist Professor Georges Feduzzi at the university in Avignon to produce a scientific paper on the disease, its purpose not only to present research on a little-known condition, but also to reassure its terrified sufferers.
Chapter 22
That transcripts of the tape recordings made by Bénédicte Lincel were released is a tribute to Rachel, her persistence and genuine ability that she had no need to exaggerate for effect. All Sabine knew was that Bénédicte had been treated by a professor at Avignon University and that the bulk of the Lincel estate was bequeathed to the ophthalmology department there when Bénédicte died. Rachel did the detective work and had the intuition and persuasive skills needed to gain access to the archives.
I’m not certain how well she was able to translate the files. Well enough, I think, with the basics of the story already understood from Sabine. But, for whatever reason (her illness, most likely), she hadn’t managed to unravel the story in its entirety by the time she left the flash drive with Sabine; and though Sabine would have been able to read the files, the mixture of English and archive reference numbers meant nothing to her.
In the many hours of recordings, among the vivid first-person accounts of the onset of her blindness, her confusion and terrors, is her account of the last time she saw her sister and Marthe’s young apprentice, Annette.
There was never any proof that Marthe Lincel lived beyond her early fifties. The Musset boutique allowed their loyal clients to believe that Marthe had retired to her native Provence. Perhaps the Mussets, sadly and slyly misinformed by Pierre, genuinely believed that was the case. A quiet death would have been in the natural order.
Here, after my reading the transcripts of the tapes and much discussion with Sabine, her mother, and eighty-four-year-old grandmother Arielle, is what we believe happened to Marthe and Annette.
The Lantern Page 28
