The Splendour Falls

by Susanna Kearsley

  “Victor…” I tried the name, experimentally.

  “Was that the name your cousin mentioned, on the phone, do you think?”

  I shook my head. “I can’t remember.”

  “Because it sounds like this might be our guy, it really does. Apparently he’s been poking around the tunnels for years, making maps and things. Kind of a personal obsession. So if this Belliveau did write your cousin, then your cousin might have met with him when he was here in Chinon. Assuming, of course, that he was here. It can’t hurt to ask.” Paul checked his notes again. “He lives just outside Chinon, sort of. I’ve got the address, but there isn’t any phone number. The librarian doesn’t think he has a phone. Our Monsieur Belliveau is a true artiste—a little bit eccentric.”

  “But you said he doesn’t live far from here?”

  Paul shook his head. “Just up the river, past the beach. A fifteen-minute walk, maybe. Do you want to go there first, then? Or would you rather start by taking another look around the Chapelle Sainte Radegonde? I’ve got the key.”

  “How did you manage that?”

  Another shrug, more modest than the first. “I just went round to Christian’s house this morning, before breakfast, and asked him for it. Christian’s like Neil, he wakes up with the birds, and I figured he wouldn’t mind.”

  “Well, I’m most impressed, I really am. You’ve had a busy morning, Sherlock.”

  “Morning isn’t over, yet,” he reminded me. “So where do we start? The poet or the chapelle?”

  I took a moment to consider the options. The Chapelle Sainte Radegonde, I thought, was the more appealing prospect, and I was quite certain Harry had been there, but then again… I rubbed my thigh unconsciously, recalling the hellish climb along the cliffs, and the endless winding steps that led back down again.

  I smiled at Paul. “The poet, please.”

  ***

  The house of Victor Belliveau stood on the fringe of the community—a sprawling yellow farmhouse with an aged tile roof, set off by itself with a scattering of crooked trees to guard the boundary fence.

  Thierry had confirmed the man’s artistic status. “He was a famous man, this Belliveau,” Thierry had said in response to Paul’s casual question. “Not just in Chinon, but in all of France. I read his poetry at school, in Paris. But now he drinks, you know, and he is not so well respected.”

  His property reflected that, I thought. The yard was pitted and unkempt, and the stone barn, built long and low to match the house, was tightly shuttered up. And the rubbish! Peelings rotted everywhere among the weeds, and paper wrappers cartwheeled in the wind to fall exhausted in the rutted muddy lane before us.

  “Oh, boy,” said Paul.

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  “I guess poets don’t make much money, do they?” Paul strolled across the road and tried the fastening of Victor Belliveau’s gate. It was a long gate, stretched across what might have been a drive, and it was unlocked. One push sent it creaking back on its hinges. The sound spoke of loneliness and isolation, and I’d not have been surprised to see a snarling dog come slinking round a corner, but the only animal that came to greet us was a small black chicken. Keeping its distance, it turned a round and curious eye to watch us cross the lawn toward the house.

  It was a farmer’s house, square and sturdy. Great blocks of smooth pale stone framed both front windows and the door that stood between them, but the rest of the walls were made of rubble. Much more economical, I supposed. It might have been made quite a pretty house, if someone had cared enough to take the trouble. It only wanted some new roof tiles and a lick of paint on the sagging shutters, perhaps some curtains and a flowerpot or two to brighten things. But I could clearly hear the rattling of the cracked and graying tiles, and on the wall see places where the years had worn away the mortar so the dampness could creep in between the dirty yellow stones. The windows, staring out across the littered yard at the still and shuttered barn, had a blank and empty look.

  No one, I decided, had cared about this house for a very long time.

  I had already conjured up a vivid mental picture of Monsieur Victor Belliveau, and so I was completely unprepared for the sight of the man who actually opened the door to Paul’s polite knock. This was no unkempt wild-eyed poet, half mad with drink and raving in his solitude. Instead a tidy, dapper little man, with crisp gray hair and a shaven face that smelled of soap, looked back at us in pleasant expectation.

  Paul did the talking for us both, in flawless French. He didn’t tell the whole truth, mind. He was careful not to contradict the tale he’d spun for the librarian, about being a student working on a paper, only this time he did mention he was trying to find my cousin. “Braden,” he said. “Harry Braden. He’s from my university. I believe he was here in Chinon last week, doing research, and I thought he might have come to talk to you…?”

  Victor Belliveau raked us with a measuring look. “No, I’m sorry, he did not come here.”

  “Oh. You didn’t write him a letter, then?”

  “No.” Another long and penetrating look. “You say it is something to do with the tunnels, this paper you are writing?”

  “Well,” Paul scuffed his shoe against the step, “sort of…”

  “Then perhaps I can help you myself,” said Victor Belliveau, with a rusty smile. He pushed the door a fraction wider. “Please,” he told us, “do come in.”

  The French did not ask strangers into their homes as a matter of habit, and it would have been unspeakably rude to have refused his invitation. Feeling slightly guilty for intruding on the man’s privacy in the first place, I followed Paul across the threshold.

  There were only two rooms on the ground floor, a large square kitchen and a second room in which a bed, a coal stove and a sofa were the only furnishings. The far wall of the kitchen groaned beneath the weight of rustic bookshelves, stacked two deep in places, an intriguing mix of paperbacks and expensive-looking volumes leaning wearily on one another. The other walls were bare, with jagged cracks that ran from the ceiling like thunderbolts. In one corner some plant—an ivy branch, it looked like—had actually worked its way through the heavy plaster and been unceremoniously hacked off for its trouble. Still the rooms, while spartan, were surprisingly clean, and the tile floor had recently been swept.

  Victor Belliveau seated us in the kitchen, round a large scrubbed table spread with newspapers. “Would you like a drink?” he offered. “Wine? Coffee? No?” He shrugged and poured himself a glass of thick red wine. “I had some brandy here the other day, but I’m afraid it’s gone. They took it,” he said, jerking his head toward the window and the tangled yard outside. “Damned good taste, if you ask me.”

  At Paul’s blank look the poet smiled again. “I’m sorry, of course you wouldn’t know. I meant the gypsies,” he explained. “I have a family of them, usually, living on my land. That’s why the yard is such a disaster. Good people, gypsies, but they don’t believe in guarding the environment.”

  “Gypsies?” The word came out rather more sharply than I’d intended, and the bland and guileless eyes shifted from Paul to me.

  “Oh, yes. We’ve plenty of gypsies round here, my dear. Mine stay here several times a year. One’s never sure exactly when—they just turn up when the mood strikes, with their caravans. Not everybody likes them, but they don’t much trouble me.”

  “I see.” The scarred table felt suddenly damp beneath my splayed fingers.

  “But what was it you needed to know, about the tunnels?” he asked, his glass trailing moisture on the table as he leaned forward in his own chair, helpfully.

  Paul played his part extremely well, I thought. Having only just left school himself he made a most convincing student—even borrowed pen and paper to make notes, his face attentive, serious. I tried to listen to what Victor Belliveau was telling Paul about the history of the tunnels, but my mind kept wand
ering off to other things.

  Like gypsies, for example. Of course it was coincidence, and nothing more, that Victor Belliveau let gypsies on his land. There must be half a dozen other people living in these parts who had a gypsy caravan parked down their back lane. And besides, I reminded myself, the gypsy with the little dog who haunted the fountain square had nothing at all to do with me. Nothing at all.

  “…up to the Chapelle Sainte Radegonde,” Belliveau was saying, “but that has long since fallen in. One has to use imagination…”

  His mention of the chapelle set my mind wandering again, this time to Harry. Bloody Harry. I ought to have that printed on a T-shirt, I thought. He’d probably be quite amused by all the trouble I was going to, just because I’d found that King John coin. There was bound to be a simple reason why the coin was here and Harry wasn’t.

  “He died last Wednesday,” Victor Belliveau said, shrugging, and I came back to the conversation with a jolt.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “A friend of Monsieur Belliveau’s,” explained Paul, for my benefit.

  “Well, I knew him, let us say,” the poet qualified drily. “We were not friends. But this is why the gypsies left, you see. We’d had the police round a few times, asking questions, and gypsies don’t much care for that. Not that I was a suspect, or anything,” he said, smiling at his own joke, “but as I said, I knew the man quite well. It was a sad case. He drank too much.” He shrugged and raised his own glass, which I noticed had been filled again.

  Paul raised his eyebrows. “You don’t mean Martine Muret’s husband, do you?”

  “Yes, Didier Muret. You know them, then?”

  “Only Martine,” said Paul. “I never met her husband. Ex-husband, I should say.”

  “Ah, she is a lovely woman, Martine, don’t you think? I believe I wrote a sonnet to her, once. But she chose Muret. God knows why,” he said, smiling above his wine glass. “He was an idiot.”

  I frowned. “Didier Muret—that was his name?”

  “Yes, why?”

  Didier… I turned it round again, concentrating. It rang a bell, that name. I was sure it was the name Harry had mentioned—either that, or something very like it. It was a common enough name. There were probably dozens of Didiers living in Chinon. Still, I thought, it never hurt to try…

  “He wasn’t a historian, by any chance?” I asked.

  The poet laughed at that. “God, no. Didier? He took no interest in such things. He was a clever man, don’t get me wrong—he worked once for a lawyer, so he must have had a brain. But I don’t think I ever saw him read a book. Now me,” he confessed, “I have too many books.”

  Paul turned to admire the shelves. “There’s no such thing.”

  “I have some books, old books, about the history of Chinon, that make some mention of the tunnels. I’m afraid I can’t lend them, but if you’d like to look…”

  It was a good excuse to stand, to bring our rather pointless visit to a close, and I loitered patiently to one side as Paul leafed through the offered books with polite interest.

  It was too bad, I thought, that Harry hadn’t known about Victor Belliveau. My cousin would have coveted this collection of books—old memoirs, bound in leather rubbed bald at the edges; some odd assorted plays and books of poems; an old edition of Cyrano de Bergerac, a copy of a British history journal…

  I blinked, and peered more closely at the shelf. The journal was a recent one, with a revisionist slant. And there upon the cover, bold as brass, I read my cousin’s proper name: Henry Yates Braden, PhD.

  “What’s that?” asked Paul, behind my shoulder. I tilted the cover to show him.

  Victor Belliveau leaned in to look as well. “Ah, yes,” he said, “that talks about the tunnels, too. I had forgotten…” He looked a little closer, and his eyebrows lifted. “Braden… isn’t that the man you asked me about? The man from your university?”

  Paul nodded. “Harry Braden, yes.”

  “Then I’m sorry he didn’t come to visit me,” the poet said, his tone sincere. “I enjoyed his article very much. He has an interesting mind, I think.”

  I put the journal down again, frowning faintly. “I don’t suppose that Didier Muret would have read this article as well?”

  The poet shrugged. “I wouldn’t think it likely.”

  “Because he didn’t read much, you mean?”

  “Because he knew no English.” The poet’s smile was gentle. He walked us to the door and shook our hands. “You must come back again, if I can be of any help,” he said. But he didn’t linger for a good-bye wave. He closed the door behind us as we stepped onto the grass, and I heard the bolt slide home. The sound seemed to echo back from the abandoned barn opposite, where a padlocked door creaked in the slight wind as Paul and I trudged thoughtfully across the pitted overgrown yard.

  “He certainly didn’t seem a drunkard,” I remarked.

  “Yeah, well,” Paul smiled faintly, “that doesn’t mean anything. My Uncle Aaron soaks up liquor like a sponge, but you’d never know it. He only slurs on days he’s stone cold sober.” We’d reached the leaning gate. Paul pulled it open and stood aside to let me pass through first.

  I looked at him, curious. “Do you think he was telling us the truth? About not writing Harry the letter, I mean?”

  “Why would he lie?”

  Why indeed? I looked back one final time at the dismal yellow farmhouse, at the crumbling walls and sagging roof. The curtains of the kitchen window twitched and then lay still, and the only movement left was that of the lone black chicken, stalking haughtily across the yard through the long and waving grass. I felt a faint cold shiver that I recognized as fear, although I didn’t know its cause.

  “The chapelle, next,” said Paul, and slammed the gate behind us with a clang that sent the chicken scuttling for cover.

  Chapter 18

  Two plummets dropt for one to sound the abyss…

  Paul pulled the jangling ring of keys from the iron lock and swung the great door reverently, as though he hated to disturb the peaceful atmosphere laced with the songs of unseen birds and the whispering of wind in shadowed alcoves. Above the old baptismal font the bay tree rustled gently, while the wild flowers nodded drowsily along the edges of the empty grass-filled graves. Soft weathered faces watched us from each corner of the architecture, from every ledge and pediment and every vaulted niche, and in the shadowed aisle behind the tall black iron gates the pensive saints gazed through the bars as one stares at a lion in its cage.

  It should have been unnerving, having all those eyes upon me, but it wasn’t. Oddly enough, it was reassuring. I felt again that rush of pure contentment, of childlike wonder, and the sense of beauty stabbed so deeply that I had to blink back tears.

  “Wow,” said Paul. “It doesn’t lose its impact, does it, second time around?”

  I shook my head. “You’ve been here before?”

  “Yeah. It was one of the first places we discovered after the château. Simon read about it in a book, I think, and when he found out Christian had a key…” He shrugged, and left it at that, moving past me to the soaring grille of iron.

  “And what’s the word for this place, then? Secluded?” I guessed. “Sacred?”

  He grinned. “Sanctuary.”

  I recalled my own first reaction to the place, and felt an even closer kinship with this quiet young man I’d only met three days ago.

  The iron gates swung open, and we stepped into the cloistered aisle with its peeling frescoes and fragile-looking pillars. “Sacred,” Paul informed me, as he shuffled the ring of keys, “is just through here.”

  “Just through here” lay beyond the altar, beyond the second iron gate—the gate that Christian hadn’t had the key to yesterday. The tunneled passage in behind looked every bit as uninviting as I remembered, and even when Paul had successfully sprung the l
ock I hung back, hesitating, peering with a coward’s eyes into the darkness. “I haven’t brought a torch.”

  “A flashlight, you mean? That’s OK, I’ve got one.” It was a pocket torch, a small one, hardly any help at all, but he snapped it on and stepped into the passageway ahead of me. “I think the main switch is around here somewhere. Yeah, here we go.” A flood of brilliant yellow light dissolved the lurking shadows.

  I blinked, surprised. “Electric light?”

  “Sure. This place is kind of a museum, you know. They do take tourists through, during the summer, and I guess they don’t want people stumbling around. Here, watch your step.” He guided me over the uneven threshold. The passageway was filled on either side with artifacts and curious equipment, neatly laid out on display. Ancient tools for farming and for wine-making shared equal space with emblems of religion and broken statuary, the whole effect being one of wondrous variety. “This is where the hermit lived, originally,” said Paul. A few steps on, the passage turned and widened briefly in an arched and empty room of sorts, where more pale statues stared benignly down on us.

  My claustrophobia eased a little and I paused to draw a deep and steady breath. “Is this the sacred part?”

  “No. Behind you.”

  I turned, and saw what looked like another tunnel running down into the rock, its entrance barred by an ornate black metal barrier, waist-high, anchored in the scarred and worn limestone. Curious, I went as close as the barrier allowed, and peered over it at the flight of crudely chiseled stairs that steeply dropped toward a glowing light. It made me dizzy, looking down. “Like Jacob’s ladder in reverse,” I said to Paul, as he joined me at the railing.

  “It’s a well,” he said. “A holy well.”

  “But where’s the water?”

  He smiled. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

  I had no great desire to go still deeper underground, but neither did I want to seem a coward. And at least I trusted Paul to bring me safely out again.