Disturbing the Dark

by Wendy Hornsby

  Jean-Paul pulled out two chairs at the end of the big dining table while I poured two short brandies into wide-bottomed snifters and carried them over. I asked, “What do you know about archeology?”

  “Nothing,” he said. He swirled the brandy to warm it in his hand before he took his first sip. “But I know what I like, and I think this brandy is exceptional.”

  “It’s Antoine’s, the first distillation he made after he came back to the estate from California,” I said. “Hors d’age, old stuff.”

  “Speaking of hors d’age,” he said, opening Solange’s notebook on the table between us. “Let’s see what the young archeologist has to tell us.”

  Solange kept meticulous notes illustrated with very detailed pencil drawings. While most of her sketches illustrated the process of setting up a dig site and recording what was found, Solange had also illustrated the ordinary, daily life of the estate. The first series showed the potting shed that Olivia was using to store the tools of her trade. Besides the shed itself, an old stone building with a climbing rose covering one end, there were studies drawn of the tools arranged along the walls and on the scarred wooden potting bench, from big shovels and hoes to the finest dental picks and paintbrushes.

  There were several pages of what appeared to be lecture notes about setting up an archeological dig site, and then sketches of the process as it was undertaken. Before the excavation began, the area was mapped, grids were set according to map coordinates, core samples were taken of the earth, and so on. In the margins there were a few random drawings of little objects, fragments of some sort; they weren’t labeled.

  On another page, there was a series of little thumbnail sketches, each of them numbered. She had drawn the student camp, Grand-mère’s stone pile of a house, a detail of the compound’s stone wall, Antoine’s students among the trees in the apple orchard, the fromagerie, the kitchen garden and the garden gate, the old wall out in the pasture where Grand-mère had sent Olivia and her students when the gendarmes shooed them away from the skull discovery site. On the facing page, she had made a map of the estate with a key that located where each of those sketches belonged. The only random drawing was something that looked like a broken obelisk in the margin near the old wall. At the base of this very small sketch were the letters FeR, but it wasn’t given a location on the map.

  “She was a good draftsman,” Jean-Paul said.

  “Some of these are frameable.” I turned the page and found a sketch of the Volvo excavator next to Freddy’s sewer trench, with a recognizable Freddy at the controls. “Can you decipher what she wrote here?”

  Jean-Paul leaned closer, read, shrugged. “There are some academic references to published articles about the Viducasses, and some notes about Viducasse relics found in the area of Vieux-la-Romaine.” He looked up at me. “Do you know where Vieux is?”

  “South and east of here, I think. Near Caen? We saw the road signs on our drive in from Paris.”

  He nodded. “Apparently that was the chief settlement of these people your archeology professor is interested in. Rome conquered the Viducasses, in fact all of Normandy, in the first century. Solange believed that if either the Romans or the Viducasses were in this area as well, they would not have left anything that is recoverable in the vicinity of the sewer trench where Olivia had her students set up their study site. The soil there looked to Solange like accretion, land built up by the sea. She refers to the GPS coordinates of the castle at Pirou just down the road from here as a benchmark that defines where the coastline of your family estate was during the Viking invasions. According to her measurements, where the fromagerie sits now would have been on the ocean front, and the carrot field and orchard would be under water. Therefore, during the Viducasse period…” He shrugged, no need to finish the sentence.

  “I wonder what Olivia had to say about that.” I turned the page and found the first sketches of the skull. “I believe this is where ­Solange changed her mind about the value of the trench.”

  “At least they found something interesting.” Jean-Paul picked up our snifters and took them over to the sideboard for second shots. “I suppose Olivia was content to create a demonstration dig for her students.”

  “Two digs,” I said. The next few pages illustrated setting up a new dig near the old wall in the pasture. These sketches weren’t as polished as the earlier ones, as if Solange were distracted, or maybe just bored by what she seemed to think was futile exercise. In the margins there were random shapes that looked like angular doodles. One of them seemed to be a repeat of something I’d seen earlier, so I flipped back through the pages until I found it again, in the margin of the map sketches.

  “Look at this, Jean-Paul.”

  He set my snifter beside me and peered over my shoulder.

  “The archeology students arrived two or three weeks ago,” I said. “Early August. Look at the sketches of the climbing rose on the potting shed and at the plants in the garden.”

  “So?”

  “Solange was very meticulous. She made the little thumbnail sketches of various places on the estate in the same orientation you find them on the map. There are no holes or erasures, or drawings crammed in as an afterthought. It looks to me as if she had made a very careful survey of the estate right when she got here. She was looking at that old stone wall in the pasture before they began working along Freddy’s trench.”

  “Is it possible that she made the map first and then drew the sketches later?”

  I shook my head. “Look at the climbing rose on the potting shed, and at the asparagus in the garden.”

  He pointed to the feathery leaves of the asparagus. “Yes?”

  “It’s finished. Grand-mère pulled it out ten days ago and planted winter leeks. The roses on the potting shed have grown very leggy since this drawing was made.”

  He thought for a moment. “When did Olivia move her dig to the wall in the pasture?”

  “Day before yesterday,” I said. “The day before Solange died.”

  “Hmm.” He sipped his brandy as he studied the sketches and the map opposite them. “The wall in the pasture is, I assume, all that’s left of an earlier structure, yes?”

  “Probably.” I looked where he pointed.

  “See the way it was constructed? Look at the shape of the stone blocks and then at the pattern the stonemason used when he set them in courses. Now, compare that wall to the compound wall.”

  “It’s different,” I said. “The stone blocks in the old wall are uniformly square, and offset in the same way in every row. But the stones in the compound wall are of various sizes, some square, some rectangular.”

  “Describe for me the pattern you see.”

  “It looks like the rectangles are twice as long as the squares, but the same height. The pattern is square, rectangle, square, and then it repeats, square, rectangle, square.” I studied the sketch of the compound’s wall again. “The square stones are darker than the rectangles, so at a distance the wall looks like a bit like a checkerboard.”

  “That’s what I saw,” he said. “If I remember my school history, the sequence of known inhabitants of Normandy, after the Cro-Magnon, was first the Celts—the Viducasses and their cousins, or Gauls as the Romans called them. Then came the Romans, followed by the Franks, and after them the Vikings. The Vikings settled here and became the Normans, the north men. Every newcomer brought something to the region, destroyed something of the predecessor, and yet adopted something that was already here.”

  He leaned over and kissed me. “Have I bored you yet to sleepiness?”

  “Not at all.” I rested my head on his shoulder. “Tell me more.”

  “Stones darken with age.”

  “That’s profound,” I said, chuckling. “The conqueror destroys, and rebuilds.”

  “If he stays long enough, yes.”

  “Which conqueror took down the old structure in the pasture built from square stones,” I asked, “then combined them with newer rectangular stone
s and built the wall around this family’s compound?”

  He raised his palms and shrugged.

  “This is what I know,” I said. “It has started to rain and I am very sleepy.”

  “At last.” He took my hand and led me upstairs. To sleep.

  15

  The air on Sunday morning after a light overnight rain smelled so sweet, so fresh, that if I could have I would have bottled it to take home to Los Angeles. I was told that until I was two years old and was spirited away to America by my father, I had spent more time living on the estate in the care of my grandmother and my Uncle Gérard and Aunt Louise than I had with Isabelle and her husband in Paris. I do not remember more about the place than the cookies Grand-mère Marie hid in a special place for me to find, and the perfume in the air after a summer shower: ripening apples in the orchard, eau de cow grazing in pastures of sweet alfalfa, fresh-turned earth, herbs and flowers in the garden, a stock pot simmering at the back of a stove. Whenever I found that scent on the breeze, I knew that in this place I had once felt safe and happy.

  I was still standing in the middle of the compound, still woolgathering, when the family began to assemble for the drive into the village for church. Before mass, the priest would baptize Pierre Dauvin’s nephew. I had never met Pierre’s sister, the baby’s mother, or any of the rest of his family other than his teenage son Gus, but that apparently did not matter to my grandmother. Grand-mère was adamant that all of her family would attend not only the baptism, but mass afterward. Also, because Solange Betz had died while she was a guest of sorts on our family estate we were obligated to stay after mass for recitation of a rosary for her immortal soul. It would be a long morning.

  Transportation was an issue. Besides family, several of the students wanted to attend mass, and some of them wanted to par­ticipate in the rosary after. The sorting of people into cars became intricate. Antoine would drive the two grandmothers, along with Jacques and Julie Breton, in the Range Rover. Freddy was taking me, Jean-Paul, Olivia, and her student Raffi in the Jag. David was trying to figure out how to fit Casey, Zach, Taylor, and the other three archeology students into Antoine’s Mini when a large truck pulled in through the compound gate.

  The driver parked in the middle of the space, opened the back of the truck’s trailer, pulled down a ramp and backed a shiny silver BMW sedan into the compound. Jean-Paul walked across the gravel, signed some papers on a clipboard, and was given the keys to the car. After a handshake, the ramp went up and the truck drove out. The entire transaction took less than five minutes.

  Jean-Paul walked back to the clutch of curious onlookers. He said, “The driver got lost, or maybe he got drunk. He should have delivered the car yesterday.”

  Passengers were reshuffled. Jean-Paul and I claimed Casey, ­David, and Olivia in the BMW, leaving Zach and Freddy to distribute the rest of the students between the Jag and the Mini. With Grand-mère’s Range Rover in the lead, we were quite a caravan when we pulled out onto the village road. I looked around as we made the turn and saw no sign of the green Toyota, though not seeing it gave me little comfort.

  “Should have been delivered yesterday?” I said to Jean-Paul, running a hand over the BMW’s leather upholstery.

  He nodded. “I ordered the car before I left Los Angeles. I knew I’d need wheels when I came back to France. What do you think?”

  I said, “New and shiny.”

  David, from the back seat, opined, “Monster cool.”

  The village church was an ancient, dark, and narrow Romanesque structure. We all converged around the baptistery, a pretty side chapel with tall, Gothic stained glass windows that was obviously a later addition. The baptistery was small, and typically, had no seating, though chairs had been placed on one side of the font for Mme Dauvin, the baby’s great-grandmother, as well as my grandmother, Marie, and Ma Mère. As they were escorted to their seats, these four looked to me like the fairy godmothers, sent to watch over the new baby, and all the babies of the women who had survived a particular night more than seventy years ago. There was an interesting dynamic among that quartet, a closeness that went beyond long friendship. They seemed to communicate in a sort of private language that only they understood. And absolutely nothing that happened in that church that morning escaped their notice.

  The elderly priest came in from the sacristy, bringing the baby’s parents and toddler sister with him. They took their positions at the font. The rest of us clustered around wherever we found space to stand.

  A little flurry of activity and a baby’s whimper drew all eyes toward the back of the church. Grinning broadly, Pierre’s father, a tall, handsome, fair-haired man, had the honor of carrying his youngest grandchild to the priest, with the godparents following behind.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off M. Dauvin. Grand-mère had told me that he had been the first baby to wear the elaborate white silk baptismal dress his grandchild now wore. The garment had been sewn by the women of the village using silk from an American parachute recovered at the time of the D-Day invasion. This man, now a grandfather several times over, had apparently been a special baby, born in a difficult time. The four old women held hands as they watched him approach, with tears running down their smiling faces. There was something about M. Dauvin’s carriage, his height, and his coloring that made him stand out among the other men in the area. But that wasn’t all that set him apart. I just didn’t know what that other thing was, yet.

  The ritual of baptism was handled with much humor and affection. As if on cue, the baby cried when he was anointed by the priest, and cooed in the arms of the godmother during the blessing. The old priest was only at the beginning of his long morning, so he kept the service blessedly brief and to the point. He did the same during the mass that followed. In his homily, he spoke poignantly about the cycle of life, from the baptism of a tiny baby that preceded mass to the rosary for the dead that would follow, the full cycle of life. The priest looked up sharply when Gaston coughed. As if reminded of something, before the Our Father, the priest asked the congregation to take special heed of the passage that asked us to forgive those who trespassed against us, and to say a special prayer that morning for strangers who died among us. At the end of the request he checked with Gaston, who nodded. Apparently, this was the fulfillment of the request that Jean-Paul had conveyed, a quiet reference in honor of the war dead found in the carrot field. Before the benediction, he announced that all were invited to celebrate the baby’s baptism at the Martin family’s beach pavilion for lunch that afternoon, as if anyone needed reminding.

  When we were finally released out into the sunshine, I spotted Pierre talking with his father under the big oak tree in the church forecourt. I took Jean-Paul by the hand and told him we needed to be introduced to the grandfather. He seemed dubious, but came along. M. Dauvin, Anthony, was very gracious. He had retired some years earlier as the principal of the village collège, or middle school. Retirement was wonderful, he told us, but how he wished his dear wife had lived to share it.

  There was a line of people waiting to speak with him. We told him we would see him at the party that afternoon, and went to find our passengers. Pierre followed us.

  “Don’t worry about your friend, Guido,” Pierre said when he caught up to us. “There will be a hearing in the morning, a formality, and then I’m sure he will be released. There is no evidence to hold him further.”

  “Good news,” I said, resisting the urge to hug him. “Will he be free to return to the States?”

  “The hearing will settle that,” he said.

  Pierre went off to talk to others, and I looked around for my grandmother. I spotted her across the road in front of the mairie, deep in conversation with Ma Mère and Gaston. She looked up, saw me, and gestured for us to join them. Jean-Paul and I were halfway across the road when the old woman from the bakery who had torn up and spat upon the photographs that Erika von Streicher was showing around on market day, pushed past us and made straight for my grandmother a
nd Ma Mère, moving with a purpose as she waved the morning church bulletin over her head.

  “Élodie, Anne, look at this,” she said, thrusting the bulletin into Grand-mère’s hands. She pointed at something printed there and then, in a rapid stream of Norman-accented French that I could barely understand, let it be known that she was beyond outrage. She was so upset that I half expected her to rip up the bulletin and spit on it, too. Instead, still gesticulating and expounding, she turned and walked away toward the bakery.

  “What was that about?” I asked Grand-mère, looking over her shoulder at the bulletin. All I saw was the order of worship for the three rites of the morning.

  Ma Mère, the abbess, turned to me. “Her name was Betz?”

  “Solange?” I said. “Yes, it was.”

  Grand-mère said, “I thought there was something familiar about the child, but I did not remember the name,” she said. “It was so long ago, and they were in another village.”

  “Solange told me that her family had once lived near here,” I said. “Did you know the family?”

  The two women exchanged a look that told me they knew something they weren’t eager to talk about.

  Freddy walked up with a glum-looking Olivia during that very uncomfortable moment. He slipped his hand around Grand-mère’s elbow. “Olivia has a headache and would like to go home. I thought you might want a rest before lunch, as well.”

  “I would, yes.” She patted Freddy’s cheek. “Thank you, dear.”

  We exchanged les bises and the three of them headed toward the car park, leaving us standing with Ma Mère to wave them on their way. When they were gone, the abbess took my arm and said that she had a few things to take care of before the party: would we walk her home? Jean-Paul took her other arm and we started off toward the convent. We went the long way around, avoiding the crowd still milling about in front of the church.