The Splendour Falls

by Susanna Kearsley

  My throat had begun to hurt. “Why not?”

  “He was too smart, your friend. Too clever. But I didn’t know how clever until yesterday, when we met quite by chance upon the road, just outside there.” A nod in the direction of the sturdy château gates. “He asked me questions, then, about Didier. About when Didier was working for the lawyer. Now, if the other boy had asked me, I might just have thought he asked from curiosity—he likes Martine, that one. I’d not have thought it strange. But this boy Paul, his questions made me curious myself. And so I sat with him, offered him a cigarette and asked him why he wanted to know about my brother-in-law. Do you know,” Armand said, unable to keep a trace of disbelieving admiration from seeping into his voice, “he’d worked the whole thing out: the blackmail, the struggle by the stairs, the whole thing. Blackmail, he said, was the only thing that could explain how Didier got all his money, and more than likely the blackmail was connected to Didier’s days as a lawyer’s clerk. Your friend, he told me he thought Didier had not been by himself that night, that someone else was with him, maybe someone who had pushed him down the stairs…” Armand broke off and shook his head, incredulous. “Too clever, that’s what this boy was. Oh, he didn’t know that it was me, of course. And he didn’t bring the Englishman… your cousin… into it.”

  “Yes, well, he wouldn’t have,” I told him. “Paul had promised, on his honor, that he wouldn’t tell anyone else we were looking for Harry.”

  “On his honor,” Armand echoed, with a faint and distant smile. “Then I should have had him promise me he wouldn’t talk of Didier at the hotel. I couldn’t let him do that, couldn’t let him talk of blackmailers and lawyers… it was too dangerous.”

  I didn’t understand, and told him so.

  “Because of Neil. Because he would remember, maybe, Brigitte’s will. He would ask questions. It was too dangerous,” he said again. The last word seemed to echo from the ruined walls around us, and I turned my head away in time to see a shadow moving past the gaping window of the Moulin Tower. The shadow vanished as I looked, and yet I caught the motion at the corner of my eye. And underneath the window, as the wind swirled fiercely by, the heavy wooden door creaked further inward on its ancient hinges, beckoning.

  I judged the distance silently, between the tower and myself, and knew that with a running start I might just make it. I could bolt the door behind me. I’d be safe then, till they came to find me, if they came at all…

  Behind us, in the high and narrow confines of the clock tower that guarded the château’s entrance, the great medieval bell began to toll the time. Half past seven. Hunching deeper in my jacket, I swung my troubled gaze around to watch the outline of the ringing bell. “Who’s that coming now?” I asked Armand.

  And when he raised his head to look, I ran.

  I heard him swear; I heard him pounding close behind me, but I ran as one possessed and when I reached the door I still had time to turn and slam it shut behind me. The only problem was, there was no bolt. Not on the inside. “Damn,” I breathed. I couldn’t hope to hold it, by myself. Already I could hear the scrape of steps upon the stone outside, I saw the heavy handle start to turn…

  My eyes were not adjusted to the darkness, and I stumbled as I dragged myself across the barren room to where the ghostly suggestion of a staircase curled its way upwards against the wall. The door crashed open behind me.

  “Emily! For God’s sake, don’t be stupid. I won’t hurt you…”

  I had reached the stairs. With one hand trailing on the curved stone wall to guide my steps, I started up. The stone felt damp and full of dirt—the smell of it burned sharply in my nostrils, but I was climbing far too rapidly to register the full range of sensation. I burst with trembling legs into the upper chamber, open to the sky, and groped my way around the wall in search of some place, any place, to hide. The gathered clouds, tinged still with crimson, gazed down at me with pity.

  The light was nearly gone now, and the wind seemed everywhere around me. It had a voice, that wind, half human and half demon, that numbed the mind and turned the soul to stone. I’d reached the end, with nowhere left to go. A slash of brightness showed in the wall a few feet on and with desperate hands I clawed my way around to it. I found a window… well, an arrow slit—a crumbling gaping arrow slit my height and width, with jagged edges framing an impressive view across the roofs of Chinon’s old and peaceful heart.

  In ages past an archer would have stood here, poised with watchful eyes to hold the castle keep against all challengers from the darkening hill below. And nearly eight centuries ago a frightened girl of fifteen years might well have stood in this same spot, watching the spreading fires of the rebel barons camped around the château walls. I could almost see the fires myself, tonight—the rue Voltaire below me was a blaze of light, and I fancied that I saw a line of torches winding up the cliff. Oh, God, I prayed, please let him come.

  “I’m coming up,” Armand announced, below me. He was on the stairs. “Do you hear me, Emily? I’m coming up. Don’t move.”

  I slid away, along the wall, and pressed myself into the dripping stone. Armand moved very slowly, with deliberate purpose. His steps fell loud upon the worn stone. “Please, Emily, I promise I won’t hurt you. I could never…” His voice trailed off, and clearing his throat he tried again. “Just don’t move. The walls are weak in places, they’re not safe. Please…”

  I could see his outline now, at the top of the stairs. A few more steps, and he would be beside me. Panic froze my limbs, keeping me anchored to the stone while Armand edged his way toward me, past the arrow slit.

  Then, in one flashing second, my whole world seemed to explode. The sudden stab of brilliant light came slashing through the arrow slit like lightning, and caught Armand full square upon the face. He tried to move and turned against the wall, and, frozen still, I heard the horrifying sound of grinding mortar giving way, and watched while Armand lurched to one side, out of sight. The light that had so blinded him kept shining, unconcerned, upon the settling dust and pebbles. It reflected even on the thick clouds moving low above the sharp and ragged edges of the roofless chamber I stood in.

  And then I realized what had happened. The sunset, now, was nearly over. They had turned the floodlights on.

  Armand hadn’t fallen, not completely. With one hand he kept a death grip on the stone ledge where the arrow slit had been. Half stunned, I sidled round and watched him while he scrabbled for a foothold. He couldn’t find one, but he managed to bring his other hand up to strengthen his grasp. And there he hung, suspended, muscles straining as he gathered all his energy to pull himself back up and in.

  His fingers clung mere inches from my feet—I could have stepped on them, kicked at them, sent him to his death. It would, I thought, be no less than the man deserved. He’d killed Paul, hadn’t he? But even as I thought of Paul I knew I couldn’t do it, for in my mind I saw again Paul’s gentle face, his dark eyes gazing out across the darkly flowing river, and I heard again his voice telling me sadly: “People hate too much, you know?”

  I knew.

  And anyway, I thought, it was a sin to hate someone on Yom Kippur. I slowly crouched and braced myself with one hand against what remained of the wall, and stretched the other hand to take firm hold of Armand’s wrist. He raised his head to look at me. With all the floodlights angled up behind him I could only see a darkened outline of his face, I couldn’t see his eyes, and yet for some strange reason I believed I saw him smile at me. He turned his own hand slightly in my grasp until his fingers closed with mine. And then he just let go.

  They told me later that when Armand fell, my group of would-be rescuers had only just arrived within the château grounds—that Harry was, in fact, still causing some kind of disturbance at the entrance booth. But somehow, when I spun away from the gaping, light-filled hole, Neil was there to catch me, his solid body shielding me from danger while his arms came rou
nd me strongly, firmly, warm as life itself.

  I clung to him while, overhead, the clouds burst forth a final brilliant streak of golden red, as if the gates of heaven themselves had briefly opened, and closed again. My trembling stilled; the wind seemed to fall silent, and some weight I didn’t fully understand, a melancholy ages old, was lifted from my sobbing chest and drifted like an answered prayer into the darkness.

  “It’s all right, don’t be frightened, now,” Neil said, his mouth moving down against my hair. “I’m here.”

  Chapter 31

  …the long fantastic night

  With all its doings had and had not been,

  And all things were and were not.

  Inspector Prieur proved to be a decent man. I’d thought as much the moment I’d first met him, when he’d come walking across the château yard, calm in the midst of the confusion, and gently coaxed me out of Neil’s protective hold. He’d looked like someone’s grandfather come down for sports day, with a vacuum flask in one hand and a dark wool blanket in the other. “You must be cold,” he’d said to me. “I’ve brought you coffee.” And then, when I was ready, he’d begun to ask me questions, but even that had been relaxed—less an interrogation than an undemanding chat. When it was finished, he had looked at me with understanding. “There is a child, they tell me. A little girl.”

  “Yes.”

  The old inspector, weary-eyed, had fixed his gaze upon the Moulin Tower. “It can be difficult, a case like this. It can be difficult to prove. The suspect dead, and just one witness—no real evidence. And if the witness should rescind his statement, or refuse to testify…” The sentence hung unfinished, and he had raised his shoulders in a philosophical shrug. “Sometimes, the scales of justice find a level of their own, without our help,” he’d said. “And sometimes, in seeking justice, we don’t always serve it. Do you understand?” Not trusting my voice, I’d nodded carefully. “Good. Then I will see what I can do. There will be rumors, you understand; talk around the town. I can’t stop that. And if, when she is grown up, she chooses to come looking for the truth, then she will find it. But perhaps,” he’d said, his gray eyes very kind, “she will not look. It is better, I think, for a child to keep her heroes.”

  A decent man, I thought again. I had blinked the tears back, smiled at him. “Thank you.” And suddenly I’d felt a crawling sense of déjà-vu. A memory of a younger man in uniform, much larger, who had smiled at me in just that way… “I’m sorry,” I had said. “This may sound foolish, but I wonder…”

  He’d looked pleased. “Your father said you would remember. I told him no, that you were such a little girl in those days, but he was very sure.”

  I’d blinked. “My father?”

  So he’d kept his promise, after all. He’d promised me he’d ask his friends in Paris to inquire after Harry, stir around, but I hadn’t expected him to do anything. I certainly hadn’t expected him to send a chief inspector straight to Chinon. Harry’d put it rather well, I thought: Your father’s got a network strung through Europe that would put our Secret Service men to shame. I was just a bit surprised he’d actually remembered.

  I’d felt an old and automatic need to apologize to the inspector for the trouble he had gone to on my family’s account; for the interruption of his holiday; for everything. He’d merely smiled, and shrugged it all aside.

  “Your father is an old friend,” he had told me. “He was worried. And when Andrew Braden worries, it is rarely without reason.” Then against a blurring backdrop of black sky and brilliant lights he had tucked the blanket tighter round my shoulders, and left me with the vacuum flask of strong reviving coffee.

  I could have done with that coffee now, I thought, as I nestled deeper into the cushions of my seat in the hotel bar and stiffened my jaws to smother a yawn.

  For the second time that week, the bar of the Hotel de France was blazing light long after its official closing time. One would have thought it was the cocktail hour and not past midnight. How far past midnight I could not be sure—I seemed to have lost my wristwatch—but when last I’d asked Jim Whitaker the time he’d told me it was going on for one, and that had been before Monsieur Chamond brought out the second bottle of Calvados.

  We were well down in that bottle now. Monsieur Chamond had abandoned his bartending duties to settle on the stool beside his wife, leaving Thierry with the job of keeping all our glasses full. Thierry, for his part, was deep in some debate with Christian Rand, and had filled his own glass rather more often than ours. It was a smashing Calvados, well-aged and mellow, resplendent with the golden warmth of apples from the finest fields of Normandy. After going twenty-four hours without food, that warmth had spread through all my aching limbs, and I’d long since given up my efforts to make sense of what was going on around me.

  François was there… now, that was strange. I wanted several times to ask him how and why he came to be there, but my tired brain kept stumbling on the question, and no one else seemed interested, so I just let it pass. I was having enough trouble getting used to seeing Harry lounging opposite among the potted palms, his lean face animated while he chatted on to Neil as though the night had been a normal one, like any other. My cousin’s health had greatly improved, I’d noticed, since the gypsy woman Danielle had left us to go round to the police station, where her brother and the Chief Inspector were still sorting out the matter of official statements.

  I didn’t doubt they’d get it sorted. Certainly everyone here had entered the conspiracy of sympathetic silence. Oh, we could talk about it now, between ourselves, but come the morning I knew even Thierry, facing questions from his friends, would simply shrug and shake his head and say: “A tragic accident” like the rest of us. He felt cheated by Armand’s death, I could sense that—it had robbed him of the chance to take his personal revenge upon Paul’s killer. But even Thierry couldn’t transfer all that hatred to Lucie Valcourt. A child shouldn’t suffer for her father’s sins.

  Martine, I thought, would see she didn’t suffer. Martine had looked like a different person, up at the château, her face composed and elegant, expressionless, while she’d listened very quietly to Inspector Prieur’s explanations. And then with equal calm she’d asked him: “And my niece?”

  “One of our officers is with her now. We haven’t told her anything.”

  “I see. Thank you.” She had nodded. “Thank you very much. I will take care of her.” Lucie was in good hands.

  Beside me, François stirred and said something to Jim. I pulled my thoughts back just in time to catch the final sentence. “…am looking forward,” he was saying, in his musical English, “to showing you, while you are here. Perhaps your wife—”

  “My wife will not be staying,” Jim said quietly. “She’s going on to Paris, and then home.”

  I’d thought it odd that Garland hadn’t joined us, but at some point between my third and fourth glasses of Calvados it had ceased to be important. Now I looked at Jim and thought: He told her, that’s what happened. He told her about Martine.

  Jim shrugged. “But I’ll be here for quite some time, I think. As long as I’m needed.”

  Christian made some comment, low, in German, and I saw a warm approving smile flash across Neil’s face, his dark eyes crinkling at the corners. I quickly looked away again before he caught me staring. Not that it would have made a difference if he had, I told myself. Unless of course he’d turned that smile on me, and then… and then…

  I sighed. Well, that was the whole problem, wasn’t it? I didn’t know just what would happen then. I only knew I’d been avoiding him since we’d come down from the château, feeling uncertain without knowing what I wasn’t certain of. It all came, I supposed, of having someone charge to your rescue like a bloody-minded prince out of a fairy tale; of having someone take you in his arms the way a lover might, as though you really mattered.

  I felt my cousin watching me, his
blue eyes frankly curious, and with a silent curse upon all men I sipped my drink, ignoring him.

  It didn’t work. Instead, he turned his curiosity on Neil. “My cousin was convinced you were the culprit,” he said cheerfully.

  Neil raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

  “Mm. Something about Nazis, I think, and diamonds. I’m afraid I didn’t follow it all, but then she never does make sense when she’s upset.”

  “Ah,” said Neil.

  François looked on, benevolent. “My fault, I think. The photograph…”

  “God, yes.” Neil grinned. “Wherever did you dig that up? It’s quite a damning likeness, that.”

  Christian swiveled round upon his stool, addressing Neil in a mild voice. “I am very angry with you. All these years you are a German, like myself, and I am never knowing this.”

  “Half German. My mum’s pure English, through and through. Dad moved to England when the war was over, and she met him there.”

  Madame Chamond frowned prettily. “Except your name,” she said. “Grantham. It does not sound a German name.”

  “Dad wasn’t very proud of being German in those days. He took the name of the place he moved to first, in Lincolnshire.”

  “Oh, right,” said Harry, smiling. “I’ve gone through Grantham dozens of times on the train. It’s on the main line north to York, isn’t it?”

  Neil nodded. “Mum and Dad still live there, actually, and my brother Ron.”

  I tried to recall what he’d told me of his family. “The painter?”

  “No, the chemist.” Again the grin. I had to look away. “Michael, he’s the painter, lives in London. Then there’s Isabelle. My sister,” he explained, as Jim and François both reacted. “So you see, he didn’t quite forget.”

  Jim Whitaker frowned thoughtfully. “But he didn’t come back for her, did he, like he promised?”