The Splendour Falls

by Susanna Kearsley

  Chapter 33

  …lift thine eyes; my doubts are dead,

  “What, no lectures?” Harry asked me, as we paused before the altar. Christian swung the iron gate shut and the sound disturbed my thoughts. I turned unfocused eyes toward my cousin.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “About how I shouldn’t steal things from historic sites,” he clarified. “You’re rather puritan about the subject, as I recall. You read me the Riot Act that day I nicked a pebble from Tintagel.”

  “That wasn’t a pebble, it was a building stone, and if everybody did that there wouldn’t be a castle left to…” I saw his smile forming and broke off with a heavy sigh. “Anyhow, I suppose I can’t talk, can I? I stole a coin from an offering plate, for heaven’s sake.”

  “You brought it back.”

  “And you said yourself you’re going to give the letters to the University of Paris.”

  “Right. Just as soon as I have a chance to look at them.”

  My gaze narrowed. “Harry…”

  “Well, have a heart! You can’t expect me to just turn the damn things over without looking at them first. Christ, I’m not a saint, you know.” His eyes flicked sideways to where Radegonde’s calm statue stood behind the altar, as if he half expected to be flattened by a lightning bolt. “Besides,” he went on, in a lower voice, “since no one else even knows that the letters exist, it stands to reason that no one will miss them for a few days, will they?”

  “A few days?”

  “Well, a month maybe.”

  “And then you’ll send them on to Paris?”

  “On my honor.” He swore the oath with hand upraised.

  Past redemption, I thought—that’s what Harry was. On his honor indeed. I smiled and looked away, out past the iron grille to where the gentle fingers of the breaking dawn touched softly on the bay tree standing sentinel beside the chapelle’s door.

  “Cold?” Harry asked me.

  “No.”

  “Then why the shiver?” And then he followed the direction of my gaze, and said quite simply: “Ah.”

  I turned around. “What do you mean, ‘Ah’?”

  “Just ‘Ah.’”

  He saw things rather more clearly than I liked, I thought. More clearly, sometimes, than I myself could see. I felt the color stain my cheeks and turned my head away again, looking back toward the bay tree and the man who sat beneath it.

  He was sitting comfortably stretched out against the outer wall, one leg drawn up on which to rest his injured hand. The hand hung stiffly, as though it hurt him, and I remembered Harry telling me how Neil had climbed the château walls to get inside. Actually climbed the walls. They must have been a good twenty feet high, even at their lowest point around the gates. Less than that on the inside, naturally, where the ground level was higher, but even so. He simply hadn’t wanted to wait, so Harry said, for the main gates to be unlocked. It must have been a different Neil Grantham, I decided, who’d shown such a lack of patience.

  It could not have been this quiet man, lost in a serenity so deep he scarcely seemed to breathe, with the faint light trickling through the bay leaves turning his hair a pale and softly radiant gold. He might have been Christ contemplating the sunrise over Gethsemene. All else was darkness compared to him, and though he neither moved nor spoke his very stillness drew the eye more effectively than motion—drew it and held it until I felt myself being pulled into the glowing center of its reverent, breathless peace.

  Harry watched me, eyebrows raised. “I like him, if it matters.”

  I faced him with a flat expression. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Right.” My cousin turned to Christian, with a smile. “Sorry to have kept you from your bed, but I really am grateful for this. And for these.” He patted the lumpy parcel wrapped with care inside his jacket.

  Christian shrugged. “It is no trouble. And now,” he announced, brushing his forehead with one hand, “I will make for everyone some coffee, yes? So much excitement in one night, it makes the head ache.”

  “Coffee,” Neil agreed, “sounds wonderful.” He rolled his head against the stone wall to smile at us, and moved to stand up, wincing a little. “It isn’t so much the excitement,” he explained, “as the drink. Bloody Calvados. I feel like there’s a herd of horses dancing on my skull.”

  My cousin laughed. “That’s age for you. You ready, Em?”

  No, I thought, I wasn’t ready. That was the whole problem, wasn’t it? I trailed along the cliff path after them, too busy with my own confusing thoughts to join the conversation. I had some vague memory of passing by the house where Harry had kept hidden, and of brushing through the fragrant clutch of pine, and then of starting our descent into the town, but I was still surprised to find myself upon the pavement outside Christian’s house, with all the houses round still shuttered tight against the pale and spreading light of day.

  I looked at Harry, and at Neil, and suddenly I felt a little stifled. “Actually,” I said, “I don’t feel much like coffee. I’d rather get some sleep.”

  Harry’s eyes were gently skeptical. “Oh, yes?”

  “Yes. I think I’ll just go back to the hotel.”

  Neil smiled at me, faintly, seeing too much, as he always did. I tried my best to make a graceful exit, but in truth it took all my effort not to break into a run as I wound my way through the narrow sleeping streets. Each window seemed to stare at me, accusing me of cowardice, and even when I reached the fountain square the elegantly entwined Graces looked less than approving. I wrapped my arms around myself defensively, moving across to stand at the fountain’s edge.

  Splendour, Joy, and bloody Beauty—they looked as stern as ever, those three faces. Unless… was that a quirk I saw, just there? I squinted through the tumbling rain of water droplets, glistening like diamonds in the slant of morning sun. No, I decided, it was nothing. And yet, I had the feeling that the statues were trying to tell me something.

  “It would never work,” I answered them aloud. I wanted to tell them that the fairy tales were lies, all lies, but it was difficult to say the words when above me Château Chinon rose resplendent in the sunshine, looking every inch the castle of a fairy tale. Difficult, too, to deny the existence of Prince Charmings when one had just last night come charging to my rescue. Damn, I thought. And happy endings? A sweet wind whispered through the leaves of the acacias, and I thought I heard Jim Whitaker’s voice asking me a second time, “Is happiness a thing we choose, I wonder?”

  I wondered, too, and found no answer.

  My hands were cold. I rummaged in my handbag for a pair of gloves and saw a flashing glimmer at the bottom, in amongst the jumbled clutter. Gloves forgotten, I reached in deeper, and closed my fingers round the two-toned coin. Not a French coin, but an Italian one—five hundred lire, to be exact. I seemed to see Neil’s eyes before me, watching me, quietly urging me to make a wish. Whenever you’re ready, he’d told me. Whenever you’re ready.

  It had been years since I’d performed the tiny ritual, yet in the end it came so naturally. I took a deep breath, kissed the coin, and sent it tumbling with a wish into the icy water of the fountain.

  I was so intent on watching it fall that I didn’t notice the cat, at first. The little creature had rubbed past my legs twice before I surfaced from my thoughts and looked down. The cat blinked up at me. It came into my arms without hesitation when I bent to pick it up, and nestled underneath my chin, purring like a motor-boat.

  Behind me, Neil’s voice warned: “You’ll get fleas.”

  I stiffened, then relaxed, not looking back. “I don’t care.” How long he had been standing there, I didn’t know—I hadn’t heard his footsteps. But I heard them now, crisp and even on the pavement as he came across the square to join me at the fountain’s edge. I went on looking at the water, and my hands upon the cat were almost steady.
Almost.

  Neil glanced into the water, too, then turned his quiet gaze on me. “I see you’ve used your coin,” he commented.

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t wish for the cat to find a home, did you?”

  I looked at him then, and saw that his eyes weren’t quiet at all. They were alive, intense with some unnamed emotion, and a question lurked within their midnight depths. Slowly, I shook my head.

  The question vanished and he smiled. “Thank God for that,” he said. “I thought you might have wasted it.” And then he raised a hand to touch my face, a touch of promise, warm and sure, and as I struggled to smile back at him he kissed me. It felt so very right, so beautiful; tears pricked behind my lashes as life flowed through all my hollow limbs, and I lost all sense of place and time. It might have been a minute or an hour later when he moved, slanting a thoughtful look down at the black-and-white bundle of fur in my arms. The cat stared back at him, a trifle smugly.

  “I suppose,” said Neil, “that this beast will have to come with us?”

  Just like that. I stared up at him. “I thought you said your landlady hated cats?”

  “Yes, well, she doesn’t much like other women, either, but I fancy she’ll get used to both of you. Even Austrian landladies,” he informed me, “recognize the hand of destiny at work.” His own hand felt very warm as he smoothed my hair back. “Still, we’d better see to it the little fleabag gets his injections. Have you named him yet?”

  I hadn’t really thought about it, but quite suddenly I knew there was just one name that would fit. “Ulysses,” I told Neil. “His name’s Ulysses.”

  A flash of understanding passed between us, and his dark eyes smiled down at me. “Right. Put Ulysses down, then, will you?”

  “Why?”

  “Just put him down.”

  The cat yawned grumpily as I lowered him to the pavement. A stiff breeze scattered the fountain’s spray around the three bronze Graces, and the cat leaped safely out of range, moving to resume his nap beneath the nearest bench. The fountain’s spray struck me as well, as cold as ice, but I didn’t really mind it. Neil’s eyes, his smile, his touch, were warmth enough. Maybe he was right, I thought—it might not be so difficult, believing. I lifted my own hand to touch his face, his hair, to bring his head lower. And in the moment just before he kissed me, I could have sworn that, past his shoulder, Splendour smiled.

  THE END

  Author’s Note

  If you walk the streets of Chinon, you will find each setting and each building mentioned in this story. Because of this, I wish to remind the reader that while the places may be real, the people who inhabit them are entirely fictional.

  To the Chinonais, I offer my apologies, for moving their gendarmerie. To Paul Rhoads, who became my guide, and to Dorothee Kleinmann, who shared her Chapelle with me, I give my heartfelt thanks.

  And to all my friends at the Hotel de France, both past and present, I dedicate this book.

  About the Author

  After studying politics and international development at university, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Susanna Kearsley worked as a museum curator before turning her hand to writing. Winner of the UK’s Catherine Cookson Fiction Prize, Susanna Kearsley’s writing has been compared to Mary Stewart, Daphne du Maurier, and Diana Gabaldon. She hit the bestseller lists in the United States with The Winter Sea, which was also a finalist for the UK’s Romantic Novel of the Year Award and winner of an RT Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Historical Fiction; RITA-nominated The Rose Garden, which also won an RT Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Historical Fantasy/Paranormal; and The Shadowy Horses. Her books have been translated into several languages, selected for the Mystery Guild, condensed for Reader’s Digest, and optioned for film. She lives in Canada, near the shores of Lake Ontario.