Petit Christophe is a man now, fourteen years old and earning money, with a room of his own at the butcher’s. He seems to avoid coming home. Cap misses him. She misses his help chopping wood and lifting pots. She misses his company, his stories, his laughter, his easy joy. He used to tell stories that made their father laugh. Sometimes Cap can make her father laugh when she mimics the village priest and the women who go to mass, but her father does not laugh so often now. Papa wants to believe what the nuns told him, but Cap knows what everyone else believes. People disappeared without trace back then. No one wanted to know how they died.
And now Petit Christophe has gone too.
Peeling potatoes then dropping them into the boiling water, she rubs her eyes with the back of her hand. Tomorrow, she will visit the butcher’s. She will reproach her brother: You haven’t brought us any meat for a week.
She knows why.
Chantal, the butcher’s daughter, is a year younger than Petit Christophe. Capucine has seen them kissing over the block where her brother cuts tenderloin from rib. Her brother and the butcher’s daughter had just come in from the killing yard and were both smeared with blood. She watched as Chantal ran a finger through a red splat on her wrist then drew a crimson X on her brother’s lips.
Cap could tell that her brother was hot and bothered.
His bone saw hung by a rope from his belt. His boning knife was sheathed at his waist. He grasped it by the handle and laid the flat of the blade, soft, against Chantal’s forehead, then against her chin, then against one cheek, then the other. The fierce point of his boning knife nicked one cheek. Chantal crossed herself and kissed Petit Christophe on the lips.
Capucine also crossed herself.
3.
‘P’tit Christophe,’ Cap whispers. ‘Are you awake?’
‘Mmm,’ he mumbles.
‘Do you know why the American boy wears a blue dress?’
‘Because his maman is crazy.’
‘He said it’s because he’s a gift from the Virgin Mary.’
‘They are both crazy, the boy and his maman, and they are both fat cats, gros richards.’
‘Where do they come from?’
‘They come from here. La comtesse married an American soldier just after the Liberation. She married him here in St Gilles. I went to the church with Papa. The whole village did. After the wedding, they went to America and now they’ve come back.’
‘The American soldier too?’
‘No. He stayed over there. People say he packed them off and shipped them out. He didn’t want a son in a dress and a crazy wife in his place in New York.’
‘P’tit Christophe,’ Cap ventures, ‘were our mothers crazy?’
‘No. Well, a little, maybe. Crazy brave, maybe.’
‘Do you remember your maman?’
A long silence ensues. Cap can hear the heavy breathing of her brother.
‘Ti-Christophe?’
‘Hmmm.’
‘Are you awake?’
‘No.’
‘Do you remember your maman?’
Petit Christophe sighs heavily and lifts himself to lean on one elbow. ‘Cap, don’t ask these questions. It’s like picking a scab. You start bleeding all over again.’
Cap curls herself up very tight and small on her straw mattress. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I won’t ask you anything more.’
Cap is certainly not asleep but she has floated to somewhere else when her brother says into the darkness, ‘I think I remember her. I’m not sure. I was only four when she joined the Resistance. Papa joined too, but he stayed here and ran the safe house. My maman and your maman were on the move all the time. They were escorts. People came and went in the dark.’
‘Were you scared?’
‘All the time, even when I was asleep. The Germans were right there in the chateau. I had bad dreams every night.’
‘I’m afraid to ask Papa about my maman.’
‘Papa’s afraid to remember.’
‘I think about her all the time.’
‘Same for me.’ Petit Christophe punches his pillow into a ball and buries his face in it. Just when Cap fears he may be suffocating himself, he rolls over and stares at the underside of the joists and the roof tiles above. ‘This is what I think I remember,’ he says. ‘Maman on one side, Papa on the other, sleeping in front of the fire. I think I can smell my maman. I think this was every night until I was four, and I think something happened then, but it might be a dream I keep having.’
‘What happened?’
‘I remember they lit four candles and let them burn on the windowsill all night long. I remember they said, Bon anniversaire, Ti-Christophe. I think she left the next day. She went to London with de Gaulle just before the Germans took Paris.’
‘Why didn’t she take you with her?’
‘That’s a question I never stop asking.’
‘Do you ask Papa?’
‘Never. I ask myself. Papa told me Maman was parachuted back behind enemy lines when I was five, so she came sometimes at night.’
‘What was her name?’
‘Her name was Maman. After London, Papa says her name was Fleur, but that was her code name. No one ever used real names, not even with each other. It wasn’t safe.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘She was escorting four people to Chinon and Papa was supposed to meet them there and then bring them here. That’s what the escorts did, you know? They met people at one safe house and took them to the next one. The escape route was from Paris to Tours. There was a safe house in a convent in Tours. After that, fishermen took people in rowboats down the Loire by night to the fishing village of La Croix. There was a safe house there. Then escorts took them after dark through the forest to Chinon. After that, sometimes they came by night in rowboats up the Vienne to St Gilles and sometimes they came in farmers’ carts or trucks. Sometimes Papa picked them up in Chinon, sometimes the escorts brought them here. They stayed in our safe house. Papa rowed them across the Vienne by night and they went to the safe house in Loudun. That’s the way they kept going, safe house to safe house until they got to Spain and then Portugal. From Portugal they took whatever ships they could pay for, to Shanghai, to New York, to wherever. The Gestapo got my mother in Chinon and we don’t know what happened after that.’
‘Did you meet my maman?’
Petit Christophe does not answer for some time. Cap keeps her eyes tightly closed until, when she opens them again, she can see in the dark. She can see the heavy oak beams and the slate tiles in the thick black over her head. She counts the tiles.
‘I think so,’ Petit Christophe says at last.
‘What was she like?’
‘I’m not sure what I remember. It’s like the way you remember dreams. Papa used to say, I’m going to Chinon to collect a package. He took me with him sometimes and we brought people back. Sometimes he’d say: I’m expecting a package from Chinon. I remember one time three people came here in a laundry van. Papa took two of them to the safe house and I think the other one was your maman and she stayed here for the night.’
‘Here? In our cottage?’
‘Yes. Up here in the loft.’
‘My maman slept up here?’
‘In your bed. Papa slept up here too and they laughed a lot. I had to sleep by the stove downstairs and I listened until I fell asleep.’
‘Was she pretty?’
‘Your maman? Yes. Very beautiful. Papa was afraid the German officers would see her and if they saw her, they’d take her. We could hear them singing and drinking in the chateau like the noisy barbarians they were. That’s how close we came every day to being gutted.’
‘Did she look like an angel, my maman?’
‘Yes. She did.’
‘Did she have wings?’
‘She didn’t have wings, but she acted as though she did. She wasn’t afraid of anything, Papa says. But she was not as beautiful as you, Cap.’
‘Am I beautiful?’
‘Yes.’ Petit Christophe sighs. ‘It’s not such a good thing, Cap. It’s dangerous. If any boy touches you, you have to tell me.’
‘No one’s going to touch me,’ Cap protests. ‘I don’t even like boys, except for you. But where is my maman now?’
‘We don’t know. Nobody knows.’
‘What is her name?’
‘Her code name was Lilith. Papa never knew her real name and she didn’t know his. Her base camp was the convent in Tours. She was the escort to Chinon and mostly Papa met her there, but the last time he went to meet her she didn’t show up and Papa never got another message from her.’
‘Did he find out what happened?’
‘No. Papa kept driving to Chinon but she wasn’t there. No one knew where she was. No one would talk. Back then, no one would say anything to anyone. No one ever saw anything. It was near the end of the war, we knew the Americans were close but German troops were closer, and everyone was still afraid. Finally Papa couldn’t stand it and he drove the truck all the way into the cathedral in Tours and he took me with him. He asked the priest if he knew Lilith but of course he didn’t use her code name. He described her. The priest said the woman was a laundry maid in the convent but she was in a state of sin.’
‘What did he mean?’
‘He meant she had a big belly. That turned out to be you.’
‘Did you see her?’
‘Papa wanted to but the priest said it would be too dangerous for the nuns. He told Papa that the wages of sin were punishment. He asked Papa if he wanted to make confession, and Papa said yes. He asked me if I wanted to make confession, and I said no. I don’t know why but I didn’t like him. Papa made his confession and we drove home. I asked Papa if Lilith would come back and Papa said he hoped so and she would bring us a present when she came. The priest said the present would be Papa’s act of contrition.’
‘What’s an act of contrition?’
‘That was you. The priest brought you in a basket. I remember that day. I was eight maybe nine years old. It was after the Liberation. Papa took you from the basket the way he candles eggs in the henhouse.’
Cap buries her face in the pillow. She sees the gentle way her father lifts eggs from warm straw, she sees his thick gnarled fingers, the delicate way he holds each egg above candle flame, the way he studies the dark fertile spots, the way he slides the fragile sheath of unborn chick back under the hot cushion of mother hen.
‘If the priest brought me, why didn’t he bring my maman?’
‘He told Papa that your maman died in childbirth and that’s what Papa believes. That’s what he wants to believe. But Marie-Claire told me the Gestapo took her. The nuns hid you until they couldn’t hide you anymore.’
‘My maman is dead?’
‘Cap. Cap! Don’t cry.’ Petit Christophe crosses the loft and takes his little sister in his arms. He strokes her hair. ‘Listen,’ he says. ‘I know they got my maman but she is with me all the time inside my head. She’s here in the loft. And so is yours.’ He tightens his arms around her. ‘Can’t you feel her?’ he asks.
Cap weeps silently into his shoulder. ‘I wish I could,’ she says. ‘I don’t even know what she looked like. Does Papa have a photograph?’
‘No,’ Petit Christophe says. ‘No one in the Resistance carried photographs. Too dangerous. They could be used to destroy the will. But Papa says every time he looks at you, he sees your maman.’
4.
Drifting across the park and the lake, Cap can hear the bells of the Church of St Thomas on Fifth Avenue at West 53rd, and from two blocks further south, the bells of St Patrick’s on the east side of Fifth Avenue at East 51st. Both churches have a bearing on the trial of the Vanderbilt claimant. In the Episcopal church of St Thomas, on 6 November 1895, Consuelo Vanderbilt, great-granddaughter of the Commodore, became the most unwilling and desperately unhappy bride of the Duke of Marlborough, dragooned into the match by her mother. Fifty years later, Lady Isabelle de la Vallière, equally desolate French bride of Lawrence Gwynne Vanderbilt, sought comfort by attending daily mass at St Patrick’s Catholic Cathedral.
Cap knows she is not actually hearing those church bells, which is not possible from the Ramble. What she is hearing are the bells of the village church in St Gilles where she sits between her father and her brother. The village church is cavernous. Built in the twelfth century, it can hold a thousand people but fewer than thirty attend mass on Sunday mornings. Father Boniface presides and two boys from the village serve at the altar. In the past, Petit Christophe has been an altar boy, but Petit Christophe no longer goes to confession and he walks out of the nave after the act of consecration but before the sacrament is offered to the faithful. He has not explained why. His father has not asked. When the priest visits the gardener’s cottage and asks for Petit Christophe, Cap’s father explains: ‘My son doesn’t live here anymore. He has a room at the butcher’s establishment.’
The priest says: ‘I visited Monsieur Monsard. The butcher claims he does not live there, he lives here.’
‘The butcher is mistaken.’
‘But Petit Christophe sits with you on Sunday mornings at mass. He comes every week.’
‘Yes. We are a close family.’
‘And yet he does not take the sacrament. And he has not made confession for more than a year. What is the reason? And why does he still attend the mass?’
‘You will have to ask my son,’ Cap’s father says.
‘Do you know what sin is lying heavy on his heart?’ the priest wants to know.
‘I believe that is between my son and God. It is not my business.’
‘It is mine,’ the priest says.
‘Then you must speak to him.’
‘Father Boniface is looking for you,’ Cap whispers to her brother in church.
‘I know.’
‘Why are you hiding from him? And why don’t you sleep at home anymore?’
‘It’s too complicated,’ her brother whispers back, ‘to explain.’
‘Look!’ Cap murmurs, excited. ‘Look! It’s the boy from the chateau and his mother. We never see them at mass.’
‘They have a private chapel in the chateau. The priest goes there.’
‘Why are they here today?’
‘Because it’s the Feast of the Annunciation.’
From her catechism and her preparation for First Communion, Cap knows the meaning of the feast. It marks the anniversary of the Angel Gabriel’s appearance before the Blessed Virgin to tell her that a child has been miraculously conceived in her womb. Cap closes her eyes and imagines the rush and swish of gigantic luminous wings. How alarmed the Virgin Mary must have been. Was this how Gwynne Something Something’s birth had been announced? I’m a gift from the Virgin Mary. That’s why I wear blue.
Capucine and Petit Christophe watch as the countess and the strange boy in his sky-blue shift walk down the centre aisle, genuflect, cross themselves and move into the front pew. The countess never lets go of her son’s hand. Father Boniface bows towards them, which causes Petit Christophe to mutter something angry under his breath. Cap casts a quizzical eye at her father, who shrugs. ‘The priest does what he has to do,’ her father murmurs. ‘He has to answer to the bishop. We only have to answer to God.’
Cap keeps her eye on the lamp suspended above the altar. A foggy red-gold shimmer comes off it. God is in that shimmer and the thought fills her with awe, especially since God is happy to snap his fingers at the difference between a countess and her gardener, between the gardener’s daughter and the son of the chateau. She mumbles the Latin in the wake of the congregation and the priest. Though she does not know many of the words or the meaning of them, she knows their music and the music thrills her.
Kyrie eleison …
Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto … in saecula saeculorum. Amen.
Two pews in front of Cap sit Monsieur Monsard and Madame Monsard and their daughter, Chantal, and Chantal’s older brother, Michel. Cap st
udies Chantal’s dark curls and the blue ribbon in her hair. She studies Monsieur Monsard. There are black hairs beginning to turn grey which are matted like wires, or perhaps like stiffened cat’s fur, that run from the butcher’s collar to the top of his neck where the dark nest of his head hair sits. His neck hairs are coiled like very fine charcoal-grey springs and Cap can see the skin of his neck between the spirals. His skin reminds her of a chicken that has been plucked.
The priest is lifting the chalice high above his head. The altar boy is ringing the bell. The priest drinks the wine that has now been turned into blood. He drinks all of it, every last drop, though Cap sees a tiny crimson thread trickle down his chin. The priest catches the trickle with his hand and licks his fingers. If he does not do this, the mass will not be valid. This Capucine knows.
One by one, the members of the congregation are to file out from the pews to kneel in front of the priest. La comtesse and her son go forward first and everyone else waits, as though to receive the host at the same time as the chatelaine and the heir to the chateau would be presumptuous. The countess is dressed in black and wears a black veil edged in lace that covers her head and her face. Her cheeks are pale, like twin moons floating behind a gossamer rain cloud. A long double string of pearls chinks very softly against the buttons on her bodice as she walks. She looks very distinguished and very graceful. She glides like a black swan across the dark surface of a tarn. The boy in the blue shift keeps his eyes on his feet. His mother holds his hand tightly and they kneel side by side before the priest.
Cap can see only a quarter-profile but she imagines the boy’s mother with her tongue stuck far out for the host. Cap’s mind wanders to the idea of the tongue, such a strange part of the body. She experiments with moving her own behind and in front of her teeth, with poking it into the fleshy pockets on each side of the soft pink cavern where her tongue is leashed. She nudges Petit Christophe so that he can see the odd protrusion in the middle of her left cheek. From his perspective, she thinks, it would look like a cork popping out of a champagne bottle. He grins, then gives her an admonitory frown, and presses the popped cork with his thumb. Her tongue, this strange thing which she shares with animals, birds, even whales, settles back into its bed between her teeth. Petit Christophe has told her that the tongue of a whale weighs more than an elephant.
The Claimant Page 16
