The Splendour Falls

by Susanna Kearsley

  I sympathized. I’d heard them myself, that morning. I’d heard a great many things, actually, from the tiniest rustle of a dead leaf scuttling across the asphalt to the quiet talk and measured footsteps of two gendarmes patrolling on the graveyard shift. Sleeplessness always heightened my senses.

  “They wake me every time, those dustmen,” Neil went on. “Most mornings I just drop off again, but this morning…” He shrugged, and fitted his shoulders to the worn back of the bench. “This is a lovely place, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, quite lovely.”

  “The whole town is, really. I always hate to leave it.”

  “Your holiday’s almost over, then?” Blast, I thought. I could hear the trail of disappointment in my own voice.

  “Next week, I think. I’m very nearly back to normal.” He flexed his hand to demonstrate. “Besides, I’m pushing my luck as it is. I’m not paid a salary to sit around and do nothing.”

  “But you’ve been practicing,” I argued in his defense. “Every day.”

  His eyes slid sideways, unconvinced. “Only for an hour or so.”

  “Isn’t that long enough?”

  “Back home my normal work day lasts six hours, sometimes more. I’m only playing at it, here.”

  “Oh. Well, it sounds nice, anyway. I like the sound of a violin.”

  He thanked me for the compliment. “But you’ll probably think differently in a few days’ time. Even Beethoven loses some of his appeal after the first hundred playings. I’m getting rather bored with him myself, but then I’m only using him for exercise. I know that piece like the back of my hand.”

  “You ought to choose something else, then. You’re learning something by a new composer, aren’t you?”

  “I’d never subject the hotel guests to that.” The midnight blue eyes crinkled a second time. “It’s not the nicest piece to listen to, in my opinion—the composer doesn’t much like harmony. No, I only listen to the tape of that one, to learn it better, and even then I have to watch my step. The first time I put that tape in Thierry’s monster hi-fi I nearly cleared the hotel,” he admitted with a grin. “Sounded like the whole bloody orchestra was playing in my room, it was that loud. I kept it turned low, after that.”

  My mouth curved. “I’m beginning to think you played the Salut d’Amour on purpose on Saturday, so the ghost would break poor Thierry’s hi-fi.”

  He looked at me with interest. “I did play it on purpose, actually. But not to upset the ghost.”

  I didn’t respond to that, but he didn’t look away. “You’ve just surprised me, Emily Braden. Some people might recognize Bach, or Mozart, but to spot old Elgar takes a certain depth of knowledge.”

  “Yes, well,” I glanced down, flushing, “my mother quite likes classical music. She was always dragging me to concerts. I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have, but I do remember what I liked.”

  “You’ve put that in the past tense, I notice. Don’t you go to concerts anymore?”

  I shook my head. “Terrible, I know, but I never seem to have the time, these days. My mother goes often enough for both of us. Her boyfriend,” I explained, with a dry smile, “is a conductor.”

  “Oh, really? What’s his name?”

  I told him. “Do you know him?”

  “I know of him, yes. We’ve never met.” His eyes were mildly curious. “So then your father—”

  “—lives in Uruguay.”

  “I see.” He looked away again, but I had the distinct feeling that he did see; that he saw rather more than I wanted him to. I tried to steer the conversation back to neutral ground, by asking him which orchestra he played with in Austria—which didn’t help much, as I didn’t recognize the name.

  “That’s what everyone says,” he assured me. “We’re not exactly the Vienna Philharmonic, but we’ve eighty-six members and we hold our own. And speaking of conductors, ours is just this side of brilliant.”

  “You like living in Austria, then?”

  “Very much.”

  “No desire to move back to England?”

  He raised his shoulders in an almost Gallic shrug. “If you had the choice of living in Austria or Birmingham, which would you choose?”

  “If I were a violinist?” I smiled. “I’m not sure. Birmingham has a cracking good orchestra.”

  “And if you weren’t a violinist?” He asked the question quietly, and slid his serious eyes to mine, and all of a sudden I felt I’d been tossed into deep water, over my head. I found I couldn’t answer him, even in jest, and after a long moment he calmly looked away again, toward the river. “Damned noisy this morning, those ducks,” was his only comment.

  The silence stretched. I was just beginning to think I couldn’t bear it any longer, that I’d have to invent an excuse and leave before I did something foolish, when the cat, apparently deciding that I’d suffered long enough, woke from its nap and stirred. Arching its back in a reluctant stretch it dropped gracefully from my lap to the gravel path and stalked off without so much as a backward look, melting like a shadow into the grassy riverbank.

  I watched it go. “Time for breakfast, I suppose,” I said. Standing up, I brushed my hands against my legs to clear off the clinging strands of cat hair, suddenly aware of the rattling hum of traffic from the boulevard behind us. It seemed a harsh intrusion, in the scented stillness of the Promenade.

  “I’ll walk back with you.” Neil rose and stretched as the cat had done, and fell into step beside me.

  The red gravel path led us into the modern world, where cars and lorries lumbered noisily up and down the boulevard. All along the far side of the street the shopkeepers were running through their daily ritual of opening up, polishing windows and scrubbing down awnings and sweeping the pavement in front of their stores.

  We kept to the river walk. There were plane trees here, too—not as ancient or peaceful as those of the Promenade, but nearly as tall, and the breeze blowing through them was idle and cool. It had blown the mist from the murmuring river that danced past in sharp sparkling ribbons of light, and the pavement was dappled with shadow and sunlight, both shifting in time with the whispering leaves.

  Despite the bustle of the boulevard, no one seemed to hurry on the river walk. Several people had stopped to lean against the low stone wall and watch the yellow kayak I’d seen earlier come smoothly stroking by on its return trip. Further on a young man struggled up a flight of steps in the sloping river wall, fishing rod in one hand and creel in the other, looking well satisfied. And further on still, not far from the steps where Paul usually sat, a little girl skipped down the cobbled boat launch toward the chattering ducks. They let her come quite near, indeed—so near that the older man lounging some distance behind her stirred in mild alarm. Raising his voice, he called her back a few steps from the swift-flowing water.

  Beside me, Neil smiled. “Just like her mother. She has no proper sense of danger.”

  My head jerked round before I remembered that he would know Lucie Valcourt. Lucie could hardly have remembered him from his visits to the house—she wouldn’t have been more than four years old herself when her mother died, and three more years had passed since then. But she obviously knew Neil now, and knew him well. When she came dancing back happily up the ramp to say hello, she greeted me in singing French but spoke to Neil in clear, if halting, English, “Good morning, Monsieur Neil,” she said. “I feed the dukes.”

  “Ducks, love. And yes, I see that. No school today?”

  The dark curls swung from side to side, emphatically. “No. It is Wednesday.”

  “Wednesday already?” He raised his eyebrows. “You know in England, children go to school on Wednesday.”

  Lucie wrinkled her nose at the thought. It was an expression, I decided, that must have crossed many a French face down through the ages—the civilized person pondering the ways of the barbarian. Eve
n her comment, that she would not like to live in England, was hardly without precedent.

  François turned his dry indulgent gaze on Neil. “But in England, a man like me would have some rest,” he said, also in English. “Instead this little one, she takes me every Wednesday for a walk, like a dog.”

  “I feed the d…ducks,” she chimed in, careful with the new pronunciation. She thought of something, looked at me. “Mademoiselle, you would like also to feed the ducks? I have much bread.”

  If anybody else had asked me that, I’d have said no, but then I’d never learned the knack of saying no to children. Neil stayed behind with François, and Lucie lapsed into French again as she led me down the broad boat launch, her small feet bouncing on the cobblestones. “Monsieur Neil is a friend of yours, Mademoiselle?” she asked, and then without giving me a chance to answer, “He was a friend of my mother’s, too. He lives in Austria. Last summer I went there with Aunt Martine, and he came to visit us. He speaks German,” she informed me, “but he can’t speak French. I heard him try to, once, with Aunt Martine, and he got all his words mixed up. It was funny. Do you like him?”

  “Yes, I do. He’s a very nice man.”

  “Is he your boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” She bounced a little higher. “He is very pretty, I think. Prettier than my papa.” With the candid eyes of childhood she looked back at Neil who stood, arms folded, talking now to François. “But he is not perfect.”

  I smiled. “No?” If Neil Grantham had a flaw, I certainly hadn’t been able to find it.

  “No.” Lucie shook her head. “He has a space, a little space, between his teeth, right here.” She bared her own front teeth and pointed to the spot. “He says it is to whistle with.”

  “Ah.” Fortunately, I was spared the need for further comment. We had come nearly to the bottom of the ramp now and Lucie tugged at my sleeve, her voice dropping to a solemn whisper. “François says it is not good to scare the ducks.”

  I took the hunk of bread she gave me and began to throw out crumbs in my best non-threatening manner. It was rather like dropping a chip in Trafalgar Square. From everywhere, it seemed, the ducks came flapping. A small Armada of them massed in the shallows of the river while others tumbled over one another on the cobblestones, adding their full-throated pleas to the general mayhem. They fluttered, they splashed, they begged and demanded and, like the pigeons of Trafalgar Square, they didn’t show the slightest fear of people. How had Neil put it, exactly? No proper sense of danger…

  “…and this one, this is Jacques,” said Lucie, pointing out her favorite birds among the bunch, “and that one with the funny legs I call Ar-ree.”

  The bird in question did have funny legs, quite long and skinny, together with a rumpled and disheveled look that reminded me instantly of my cousin. Something unseen broke the surface of the water beside us and sent a spreading wash of ripples out, unstoppable and oddly sinister.

  The gawky duck stared at me and I tossed a crumb toward it. “Why Ar-ree?” I asked, casually.

  “It’s an English name,” she told me, with a proud upward glance. “My Uncle Didier, he has an English friend… well, he’s dead now, of course, but his friend is called Ar-ree. Last week he came to feed the ducks with me, and he said this duck looked just like him.”

  I tore the bread between my fingers, with a jerking motion. “Harry?” I checked. “Was his name Harry, Lucie?”

  “Yes, Ar-ree. It’s such a funny name. Are many people in England called this?”

  “Quite a few.” I frowned, thinking hard. Her Uncle Didier, she’d said. I put the names together in my mind—Didier Muret and Harry. Didier and Harry, here. “Was it last Wednesday that he came to feed the ducks with you?”

  She nodded. “François had a headache last week, so he couldn’t walk with me. But after lunch my Uncle Didier said he could take me out, instead. He’s dead now,” she said again, quite matter-of-fact. “He’s not as nice as François. François always lets me stay here a long time, and then we have an ice cream. But Uncle Didier had his friend to talk to last week, and he didn’t let me give the ducks all my bread. He was in a hurry, he said.”

  A duck flapped against my foot and I took an absent step sideways, flinging down another scattering of crumbs. My bread was very nearly finished. “Your uncle’s friend, did he look anything like me?”

  “Yes, very English,” she said, squinting up at me to check. “But his nose was not so straight.”

  “I see. What else do you remember about him?”

  “He was very funny, and he likes to feed the ducks, like me. And he can make his ears wiggle.” Which obviously raised him above the level of the common man, in her opinion. I looked down at the scruffy little duck with the long ungainly legs, and tossed him my last breadcrumb.

  He really did remind me of my cousin, that duck. And if Lucie had her story right, then Harry had been here, in Chinon… Harry had been here.

  I wasn’t given time to ponder this new piece of information. Lucie grabbed me by the hand and pulled me back up the ramp to where François and Neil waited, chatting like old friends. Neil laughed at something François said, and turned to look at me. “Still standing, are you, after that attack? We couldn’t see the two of you for feathers, from up here.”

  Lucie looked up at him, her brown eyes curious. “Monsieur Neil,” she asked, in careful English, “do your ears move?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  The tone of his voice penetrated my troubled fog of thought, and I smiled in spite of myself. “I think she’s asking if you can wiggle your ears.”

  “Oh. Of course I can.” He crouched to Lucie’s level, and demonstrated. I leaned against the low wall, next to François. I wanted to ask him about Didier Muret, but I couldn’t summon up the courage, so I tried to slide into the questions sideways.

  “She is,” I said in French, “a lovely child.”

  “Yes. I’m very fond of Lucie.”

  “She talked to me a bit about her uncle. She seems to be taking his death well, for one so young.”

  I felt the brush of his eyes and he lifted his shoulders. “Didier Muret,” he told me, cryptically, “was not the sort of man one mourns. And anyway, she didn’t know him well.”

  “Was he a historian?” I kept the question lightly curious. For after all, I thought, we only had Victor Belliveau’s word…

  “A historian?” He turned that time, to look at me directly. “No, Mademoiselle, he was a clerk—a lawyer’s clerk—when he worked at all.”

  “Oh. I must have got it wrong, then.” The doubting flooded back, and what had seemed so certain moments earlier now hovered in the realm of the improbable. Why would an unemployed lawyer’s clerk, who reportedly read no English, be interested in a British article on Isabelle of Angoulême, I wondered? It simply made no sense.

  François looked back at Neil and Lucie, his weary eyes softening. “She is just like her father sometimes, very charming. And she doesn’t take no for an answer.”

  The child was giggling at the moment, a delighted and infectious sound. “Again,” she commanded, and Neil sighed in mock despair.

  “They’ll fall off, you know, and then you’ll be sorry.”

  But he wiggled his ears again, anyway, and was rewarded with another fit of giggles from his appreciative audience. It was a difficult sound to resist. So it was odd that François’s smile faded, the lines on his face deepening as though something had pained him.

  Concerned, I touched his arm. “Are you all right?”

  I saw the shiver, hastily suppressed, and fancied for a moment that his gaze seemed faintly questing on my face, but when he spoke he looked himself again.

  “Yes, I am fine, Mademoiselle. I am an old man, that is all. Sometimes I see the ghosts.”

  Chapter 20

  Thro’ her this matt
er might be sifted clean.

  I didn’t go straight back to the hotel. Instead I turned along a narrow street and went in search of the smaller square where Martine Muret kept her gallery.

  It wasn’t difficult to find. A few acacias grew here as well, draped over cobbled stone, well pitted and grown dark with age. The sun shone warmly, cheerfully, upon the clustering of leaning shops and houses, reflected in the gleaming glass front of the little gallery.

  Even without Christian’s paintings hanging in the window, I believe I would have known the place belonged to Martine. It looked like her, somehow—so smart and neat and elegant, with everything in perfect order. But Christian’s oils clinched the matter. They stood out from the other paintings easily, the bolder brush strokes and exquisite play of light and shadow lending them a warm, romantic feel. Stepping closer, I peered with interest at the softly swirled self-portrait Paul had mentioned. Christian, I thought, had a master’s touch. He’d shown himself no quarter, tracing every jutting outline of his sharply contoured face, the pale eyes gently somber and the golden hair uncombed.

  He’d breathed similar life into his landscapes. I saw the walls of Château Chinon shiver under storm clouds, and the idle spreading peace of fields flecked liberally with grazing cows, but my favorite of his paintings was the one that showed the river.

  He had painted it at sunset, not far from the steps where Paul often sat. The steps themselves were plainly there, beneath the looming silhouette of Rabelais, and on the placid water three ducks drifted round a weathered punt, moored close against the sloping wall, while further off the gleaming arches of the bridge stretched like a golden thread from shore to shore. The only thing missing from that picture, I thought, was Paul himself, sitting halfway down the steps with his back to the traffic above, reading Ulysses and smoking an illicit cigarette.

  It wasn’t often that a painting so transported me, and when Martine herself came out onto the doorstep to greet me, she had to speak twice before I heard her.