by Ben Tripp
IV
The first impression was of a deep and teeming coral reef. A blue, milky darkness hung in the air, crepuscular as the sea, churning with slow dust, relieved by thin straight fillets of sunlight that knifed through the broken slats of the shutters. These picks of light fell upon colors and forms of exquisite, mesmerizing beauty, bright as exotic fish peeping amongst the stones of a sunken temple. The rooms were cavernous, hung with heavy textiles; the marbled green walls rose up into murky heights from which gold winked on coiling baroque plasterwork. Crystal chandeliers caught what light there was like vast jellyfish trailing their poisoned limbs.
Sax expected a liveried footman in periwig and dog-skin breeches to pad across the room and thrust open the shutters at any moment, and then he would go mad with the glory of it all. If this was some sunken treasure in a cave beneath the sea, Sax was going to need an air supply; already he was unable to breathe. And this was just the first room. His fear was forgotten.
“Blimey,” Gander said, putting it all in words. “We’re fucking made, mate.”
V
Jean-Marc propelled them into motion. He had a fistful of legal-looking forms on a clipboard in case anyone happened by and would handle the confrontation if the impostor lady of the house showed up to argue with them. Nonetheless he wanted to get moving as fast as possible.
Despite the avarice that consumed Sax, he felt a rare tug of guilt, as well. This ought to have been a national historic site, despite his loathing of such conventions. It was a time capsule, perfect in every detail. This interior was in absolutely original condition, as if shut up on a July afternoon in 1830 when word came from Paris that les misérables were rising up in arms again, and the noble family of the house decided to toddle off to Austria until things quieted down—never to return. Every single thing here was valuable. The modern age had imposed no mass-produced rubbish. It was all crafted by hand.
That didn’t stop Sax beckoning a couple of men to follow him. They moved into the dark depths of the immense rooms, looking for case goods that might contain anything of value. They wheeled hand trucks laden with flattened cardboard boxes from piece to piece, starting in the two gigantic salons on either side of the entrance hallway.
First, they would empty the rooms through which one must pass to get to other rooms. It reduced breakage. The rest of the men fanned out through the mansion on their various missions, Jean-Marc barking orders in his tanned smoker’s voice.
Sax was beyond fear. Maddened with lust for every single object that passed before his eyes, the value of all of it together ringing up ever higher in his mind, he knew that he could die in this place and they would have to pry his fingers from whatever object he fell across on the way down. He wanted to take it all with him. He didn’t want to sell it. He wanted to live here, the queen of the castle, sprawling amongst silken pillows with the music of the sparkling Loire outside.
The first of the heavier pieces went out the doors, an Italianate console from the entrance hall, parcel-gilt ebonized mahogany, three thousand dollars, the down payment on an average American house at the time. There was a mirror to go with it, and two golden wall sconces, and a brace of Louis X fauteuils, gilded, with richly embroidered upholstery that had to be original to the chairs. Meanwhile Sax and his assigned laborers, Grigor and André, had emptied out a Napoléon I secretary and a couple of chinoiserie bombé chests filled with packets of ribbon-bound letters, mostly dated from the reign of Louis XV.
When they took down the tapestries in the entrance hall, quantities of thick, choking dust filled the air. The men had to open several windows, despite the increased possibility they might be observed. When the sunlight streamed in, the place lit up like a silver bowl full of fire.
It was simply too much opulence. Sax knew what he was. A Visigoth or Hun set loose in a Roman treasure house. An invader, obscene in his lust for wealth, ignorant of value, thinking merely of price. He required only a bloody sword and a belt of human thumbs to complete the picture. He hated himself. But he wouldn’t hate himself once the sale of this stuff began.
Sax entered the grand salon. Above the fireplace, which was a marble fantasia large enough to park a sports car inside, there was a portrait in a golden frame chased with cherubs and serpents. Sax thought he had seen the likeness somewhere before.
The style of hair and dress placed the picture around 1650. He might have been looking at an original Sébastien Bourdon; it had very much the same transparent brushwork and crisp color Sax associated with the French master. Bourdon was a contemporary of Rembrandt and Vermeer, amongst others. It was a great age for portraits.
The painting depicted a woman, beautiful, cold, and pale, her cobalt-blue dress wrapped loosely around her bosom, shoulders exposed beneath a tissue of lace; her hands lay in her lap like pet doves. The piled-up white hair did not appear to be a wig—too white for such a young face, but not out of keeping with the eyes, which were like pools of ink. A hint of the abyss in them, watching.
Sax thought the artist had feared his subject in some way: there was haughty menace in the posture of the head. The woman stood beside a stone balustrade; the landscape behind her was chilly and leafless. There was a plate in the frame of the picture. Sax approached to read the legend. He was looking at Therese Minette Vrigne du Pelisande Magnat-l’Étrange.
Sax’s reverie was interrupted by a strangled cry from upstairs. All activity stopped, the workmen frozen in place. They listened for another sound. When nothing came, Jean-Marc hooked a thumb up the grand stairs.
“Sounds like Hector met with an accident,” he said.
Two of his cronies thumped up the stairs to investigate. At this moment, Gander emerged from the salon opposite Sax’s, crossing the echoing marble floor. Sax had resumed emptying cabinets; his hands were full of two-hundred-year-old letters. This was no time for a chat.
“Pardon me, Mr. Saxon,” Gander muttered in his thick Scouse accent. “Summat up.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Sax said, impatient to get on with the looting. He was beginning to understand how the Mongols felt when they reached Europe. So much pillage, so little time.
“Shegeezer’s ’mongst the premises, reckon,” Gander said, whispering slightly.
“Speak English, you great melon,” Sax hissed, impatient to get on with the work.
“What I mean to say, sir, things has been gone through, like. Recent habitation, as might be.” Gander was cutting his eyes around now, as if there were unseen lurkers watching them. “We ain’t alone.”
Sax looked all around, irrationally expecting this would be the moment some rogues chose to leap out at them.
“Look, Gander. I thought we’d established that several persons, families perhaps, have been selling this stuff off in small amounts for a very long time. Of course somebody’s disturbed things. They’ve been picking it over.”
“Not like that, sir. I found a letter on a desk in there. The ink was fresh, sir.”
“How fresh?”
“Wet, Mr. Saxon.”
“O sweet-bosomed Jesus on the tree,” Sax said. Adrenaline sprayed into his bloodstream like nitrous oxide into an engine. His heart hit ninety miles per hour in under a second.
“We ain’t alone,” Gander repeated, meaning someone was home.
VI
Jean-Marc picked up the letter Gander had found and peered at it in the dim salon, angling it toward the entrance hall doorway, from which most of the light came. He touched the ink with his finger and rubbed the finger on his thumb.
“It is fresh,” he said. Sax and Gander stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him, huddled around the desk on which the letter had lain. The penmanship was exquisite, light and swirling but firm. Distinctly old-fashioned. A feminine hand.
“We must have frightened her off in the middle of writing,” Sax observed, unnecessarily. “She may have run for the police, don’t you think? Les
flics?” Fear had switched places with avarice. He was clammy with sweat, his coveralls humid. His fingers were trembling like aspen leaves, rattling the packet of ancient letters he still held in them. He thrust the letters into his pockets to conceal his fear. Jean-Marc was shaking his head.
“I don’t think she’s gone anywhere. We’re not burglars; we’re a removing company. She would confront us.”
“Besides,” volunteered Gander, “once the swag started going out the door, old bird should have come out wi’ talons bared, like.”
“Jean-Marc,” Sax said, “I think we should abort the operation immediately.”
“What have you got there?” Jean-Marc replied.
“Evidence of my guilt,” Sax replied, withdrawing the beribboned envelopes from his pockets. Some of them bore unbroken wax seals, embossed with signet rings to ensure the privacy of their contents. He held them up, revealing his quaking hands. Then his eye flicked between the new letter in Jean-Marc’s hand and the letters in his own. He fanned apart the old leaves of paper and plucked one out.
“Jean-Marc, observe,” he said, and handed it to him. Jean-Marc held the age-foxed document beside the new one, and his eyes, too, sprang from one to the other.
“Dieu! It’s the same hand,” he said.
“Lumme,” Gander said.
“I think what we have here is not an impostor. I think the lady of the house is the rightful heir, descendant of the originals,” Sax said, his voice hissing like a kettle. “Handwriting runs in families, you know.”
“No,” said Jean-Marc. “I know my forgeries. Made them during the war. This is the same, identical hand.”
Sax was not just terrified now. He was exasperated. “Then we’re up against a very, very old woman indeed,” he said. “Hundreds of years old. Ridiculous. Let’s get out, shall we? The pieces we’ve already got will more than pay for this dreadful excursion, I think.”
Sax turned on his heel and strode toward the entrance hall door, aiming for a decisive, masterful effect. He realized it appeared he was walking with an egg in his pants; he had simply never mastered manly striding. Shoulders sagging, he abandoned the attempt. Instead he looked back to Jean-Marc and Gander, who had returned their attention to the newly written letter and missed his entire performance. They were muttering amongst themselves.
“Please, can we go now?” Sax said.
“This letter,” Jean-Marc said, “did you read it? It’s written to a dead man.”
“What?” Sax was rapidly losing his grip on reality. Only the sound of one of the laborers dropping something valuable in the hall kept him rooted in the world around him. If things could still bounce down the stairs, he was not yet insane.
“This is a love letter to a dead man, telling him what she did the past few days. She calls him ‘my dear deceased.’ Those other ones. Who are they written to?”
Despite himself, Sax turned the bundle of letters over in his hands.
“This one . . . Alastor. Erm, Alastor this one as well. These are all Alastor. Now let’s go away and we can discuss this over a nice bottle of wine each.”
“There’s a demon called Alastor,” Gander said, unhelpfully.
“There’s one called Asmodeus, as well,” said Sax. “Namesake. My mother was mad. Let’s leave, now.”
Gander marched off flat-footed into the entrance hall.
One of the workmen entered the salon to report, in obscenity-laden French, that Hector, the one who had cried out upstairs, was nowhere to be found, and the other two men who went to look for him had also disappeared, and furthermore there was a nice old chair with the leg off that had gone down the stairs. Did they want to bring it to the truck anyway?
As far from Sax’s mind as the original project was, he remembered to keep up the illusion and not to bark orders to the man in good French. Instead he told Jean-Marc in English to have the men assemble outside so they could come up with an emergency course of action. Jean-Marc told the laborer to go find the other men and he’d be with them in a few moments.
Nobody seemed to feel the same urgency Sax did. He was certain he could hear the police approaching down the drive. When he peered between the shutter slats, he saw only some pigeons looking accusatorily up at the trucks. Every moment that passed brought them closer to discovery. If the woman had simply confronted them at the door—but no, she’d done what any sensible woman would do when presented with a wrecking crew of ill-smelling voyous. She’d gone for help, and help would come. This couldn’t be the first attempted raid on this place. It was impossible. So they were racing against the clock.
Jean-Marc was still standing there in the gloom, examining the specimens of handwriting. Sax didn’t think he was taking the situation seriously. Then Gander returned with one of the cardboard boxes full of old correspondence from the chests they’d cleared in the other salon.
“All addressed to this bloke Alastor,” Gander reported. He seemed now to be answering to Jean-Marc. Fine. Let the he-men gather and speak amongst themselves and exclude the lapin pédale.
Gander was pulling out random letters. “There’s some dated with the Republican calendar, care of Alastor. Now here’s to Alastor, March sixth, 1820. Alastor, January tenth, 1833. Alastor, June of 1841. All the same writing.”
Jean-Marc, confused, looked to Sax. There was something uncanny before him that Jean-Marc could not grasp despite the evidence of his senses, like a creature born underground that sees the sky for the first time. The man couldn’t believe that the same woman had been living in this house since 1835. Even an expert on forgery could be wrong; he must be mistaken about the handwriting. And yet—
Sax’s impatience exploded. He marched over to Gander and knocked the box of letters down, spilling the thick pages across the floor.
“Damn it, man! Both of you! We’re leaving. We’re leaving now.” Sax turned again for the salon door, and for once he walked with the steady gait of a cinema cowboy. He threw an angry glare over his shoulder and stepped into the foyer—just as a high, agonizing scream came whistling from the upstairs hall. Jean-Marc charged past, thrusting Sax aside, and Gander was close on his heels.
“You wait outside,” Gander said to Sax on his way up the stairs.
If Gander hadn’t said this, Sax might very well have gone outside on his own. As it was, he suffered a flash of pride. He wasn’t going to be told what to do by his subordinate. He ran up the stairs after them, albeit whimpering out loud. It was dark upstairs. Broad archways led to long, windowless corridors stretching to the east and west wings of the house. Dust coiled lazily in the sepia gloom like cream at the bottom of a cup of strong tea. The air was fetid, as choking as a velvet rag.
There were boot marks in the dust in both directions. Jean-Marc had run east, Gander west. The rest of the men were clomping up the stairs. Sax followed Gander, plunging into the darkness after his assistant manager’s fast-receding back.
VII
The darkness became impossible. Gander lit a wooden match and held it low to the floor, sweeping it back and forth. He hurried onward, burned his fingers, and lit another. Then he stopped, raising a hand like a slab of beef ribs to halt Sax in his tracks.
“Claret,” he said. Blood. Gander held the match over a strew of glistening red beads in the dust. The boot prints they’d been following ended at a doorway. The blood was at the foot of the door, which was firmly shut. Gander hissed through his teeth and shook the match out. Rather than light another one, he reached for the doorknob. Sax’s hand shot out and held Gander’s in place.
“Don’t,” Sax said. At the other extreme of the corridor, which was as long and high as the aisle of a cathedral, the Frenchmen were bashing doors open at random and rushing into the rooms. A little light fell into the hallway then, but dim and blue, as though cast through a bank of snow. There must have been twenty bedrooms along the corridor, and innumerable smaller chamber
s between them; many of the doors did not open directly into the hallway but into secondary corridors that linked together suites of rooms. Sax wanted to shout to the others, warn them. But he didn’t know of what. And he couldn’t bring himself to raise his voice in that place, which was more tomb than house. Instead, he whispered to Gander.
“Do not open this door.”
“But, sir,” Gander said, and Sax felt the massive paw flex on the doorknob. Sax renewed his own grip.
“Don’t. Something is going on.”
“Aye, bloke’s bleedin’ to death on other side of this door,” he said.
“Where the hell is everybody?” Jean-Marc shouted in French. Then he repeated it in English. Of his ten men, only five remained in the cavernous hallway. The rest were lost somewhere in the warren of rooms on either side.
“No one go into any of the rooms!” Sax shouted in French. No point in maintaining he didn’t know the language—or in being quiet. “There’s blood here. I think we’re being attacked.”
As if to punctuate Sax’s statement, there followed a scream from one of the rooms—a raw, throat-tearing howl of fear and pain.
“There,” said Jean-Marc. He drew a small, flat automatic pistol from his jacket. Two of the men beside him produced blackjacks from their pockets. The three of them ran to a doorway even farther down the hall.
Sax addressed Gander again. “Now: let’s open the door slowly, and don’t be standing in front of it,” he whispered. “Someone must be in there. Secret passages and so forth, yes? We need to defend ourselves.”
Gander ignored Sax and threw the door open. He and Sax pushed themselves back against the wall on either side of it, then Gander risked a look. There was only a narrow, empty hallway, lined with old portraits. They went farther in, leaving the noise of the French contingent behind.
Sight and sound were swallowed up. There was a scrap of light to the left. Gander went to it and found another doorknob. He twisted it and shoved this door open, jumping back so that he collided with Sax.
