‘Sacré bleu, what a mouthful!’ Christophe le Jardinier laughs. ‘I’ll call you Petit Loup, the little wolf cub, because you’re the Vanderbilt whelp. Got Petit Christophe’s old coveralls I can give you if you want to make yourself look decent for supper.’
A small amber puddle appears between the boy’s feet, under the hem of the blue dress. Gwynne Something Something Vanderbilt is mortified. Christophe le Jardinier tousles his hair. ‘Tiens!’ he says. ‘There, there, little man. You can wear whatever you want, c’est pas grand chose. Capucine, set an extra plate and a fork for P’tit Loup.’
‘He won’t eat our rabbits. He says you’re a poacher and his maman is going to snitch.’
‘Is she now?’
‘No, she isn’t,’ the boy quickly insists. ‘She said she won’t because –’
‘Exactly,’ Cap’s father says. ‘We have an understanding, your mother and I, and it goes back many years. Many, many years, from before you or Capucine were born. Your mother and I were children who played together. Ever eaten rabbit, P’tit Loup?’
‘No, Monsieur le Jardinier.’
‘A rabbit caught in a poacher’s trap tastes much better than a rabbit shot by a hunter because our traps don’t hurt them. The rabbits just lie there quiet with the shakes, same as you. When I check the traps, I break their necks quick as a wink. I don’t let God’s creatures suffer. That’s why a poacher’s rabbit tastes like heaven. No bullet fragments in their brains or their bodies to break your teeth. Here. Open your mouth and stick out your tongue.’
The little wolf cub obediently accepts a forkful and chews. He closes his eyes and breathes in. His eyelids flutter. He holds his breath. He breathes out. ‘It tastes like heaven,’ he concurs.
‘P’tit Loup,’ Cap’s father says, ‘no boy can be comfortable in a wet dress. Come with me.’
When the man and the boy return from the loft, P’tit Loup is wearing the torn and cast-off coveralls of Cap’s brother. He seems to have become someone else, someone else altogether.
‘You look bigger, P’tit Loup,’ Cap says. ‘It’s strange how much bigger you look.’
‘I am bigger,’ Gwynne Something Something Vanderbilt says.
‘Capucine, hang this blue thing in front of the stove to dry out. Now you listen to me, P’tit Loup. I have been gardener and viticulteur for your maman’s family for a very long time, for many years before you were born. Your mother knows she cannot do without me. So you will stay here tonight and I will speak to your mother tomorrow and you need have no fear.’
‘My maman …’ the boy begins nervously.
‘Do not worry about your mother. I will set her mind at ease.’
That night, Gwynne Patrice de la Vallière Vanderbilt lies on the mattress in the loft alongside Capucine. He has never been happier.
‘Do you see your father every day?’ he asks Capucine in amazement.
‘Of course I do. What do you mean?’
‘You have supper every evening with your papa?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘In New York,’ he says, ‘when we lived with my father, I only saw him to say goodnight. Just before bed.’
‘You didn’t have supper with your father?’
‘No. Never. My parents ate in the dining room every night. The servants waited on them. I had my supper in the nursery with Shannay. She was my nanny.’
‘But you see your maman every day.’
‘Yes,’ the boy sighs.
Cap tells him, ‘I wish I could see my maman.’
6.
Cap takes Petit Loup’s hand and almost pulls him across the courtyard of the butcher’s compound. The courtyard is cobbled and square and slopes slightly from all four sides towards the middle, which is marked by the great iron grid of a drain, three feet by three feet, a trapdoor to nothingness, all black. Four stone trenches, six inches wide and six inches deep, run from the corners of the courtyard to spill themselves into this gaping grated hole. Sometimes rain sluices down these small canals with such ferocity that a waterspout skyrockets up at the point of collision. Chantal, the butcher’s daughter, calls it the Witches’ Fountain.
More often, however – as now – the gutters run blood.
The courtyard is surrounded on all four sides by one-storey wings of stone. The front side, facing the street, is the shop where the villagers buy their meat. The entrance to the courtyard is through a stone arch at one side of the shop. The arch faces the street and frames huge oak doors bolted shut from inside. At right angles to the shop, on the left if one stands inside the courtyard with one’s back to the store, are the living quarters of the butcher and his family. Within this wing, one small room at the far end, with direct access to the courtyard, is set aside for an apprentice. (This room – at present and intermittently – is occupied by Petit Christophe.) The opposite wing, parallel to the living quarters, is for cold storage. Monsieur Monsard is inordinately proud of the fact that since 1950 he has not needed the daily delivery of blocks of ice, but now has mechanical refrigeration installed.
The fourth side, facing the back of the shop, is also refrigerated in a year-long chill and is the cutting room where sides of beef and pork and lamb hang from hooks on a steel ceiling track and jostle each other, pale as corpses in a morgue. This fourth wing also permits direct entry to the courtyard from the laneway behind the boucherie. It is through these huge double oak gates – directly opposite the entrance from the street – that the live cattle arrive, terrified, via wooden ramps, shunted from farmers’ carts into the narrow walled chute that is their corridor to death. There, hugged by the sides of the movable stall, the animals feel the cold press of the stun-gun against their foreheads, their final sensory puzzle. Though their hearts are still beating and pumping blood, they do not feel the shackles attached to their legs, nor the winch that drags them into the cobbled square, nor the steel blade that slashes the trachea, nor the grappling iron that clenches one rear ankle and hauls them up and suspends them so that their slack tongues do not quite lick the stones.
The courtyard is the kill floor.
With its scaffolds for gutting, skinning, hanging and bleeding out, with its block-and-tackle devices, with its great ghastly hooks and leg irons that make possible the sawing of a carcass into halves and quarters, the yard resembles a torturer’s chamber.
Gwynne Patrice etcetera etcetera tugs his hand free from Capucine and vomits into one of the drains.
‘Monsieur Monsard will give you hell,’ Cap warns. ‘I’ll have to get P’tit Christophe to sluice that into the drain before he sees.’
Outside the chateau courtyard, Gwynne Patrice is such a timid child. Cap finds it difficult to understand. Inside the chateau walls, he is a pompous little king of the world and ridiculous. Outside, he is like a mouse quivering between the paws of a cat. He is afraid of everything, even though he is still wearing P’tit Christophe’s old work clothes. He exasperates Cap. ‘You eat sausage, you eat roast beef,’ she says scornfully. ‘Where do you think it comes from?’
Gwynne Patrice etcetera wipes his sleeve across his mouth and turns away from the blood and vomit in the stone canal. ‘It comes from the butcher’s,’ he says meekly. ‘Can we go home now?’
‘This is the butcher’s,’ Cap explains, ‘and no, we are not going home. We just got here. My brother lives here.’
‘Maman will be worried about me. She will be frightened.’ The boy has not been home since he climbed out of his window the night before. ‘I don’t want to make her sad.’
‘Papa will look after that. Your maman trusts him.’
‘He can’t make her un-sad. I have to go.’
Cap grabs hold of his wrist. ‘Monsieur Monsard cuts the meat for the chateau. He’ll give us lamb cutlets and lamb shank and you can give them to your maman and she’ll be happy.’
The boy frowns, slightly horrified. ‘Our cook brings our meat. Maman will be very upset if I –’
‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘I touch raw flesh,’ Cap tells him, hands on her hips. ‘I touch liver, calf’s tongue, pig’s intestines. I make sausages and rillettes. I skin rabbits. You better stay away from me, Gwynne Patrice Whatever Whatever.’
‘I don’t mean you,’ the boy says miserably.
‘Monsieur Monsard gives us scraps for sausage meat and Ti-Christophe gives him fruit from the orchard and some wine.’
‘That is our fruit and our wine,’ Gwynne Vanderbilt says, pulling free, trying to reassert himself. ‘Petit Christophe does not have the right.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, shut up! Okay. These are your cattle, your pigs, your sheep, even your rabbits. They all come from the chateau or from farmers who rent their land from the chateau. They all end up on your table, as well as on ours, as well as on every other table in the village. You should know how they get there. Don’t you understand anything at all?’
‘No.’ The boy says this so softly that Cap can barely hear. He crosses the cobbles, stepping delicately to avoid moist lumps of fat and gristle, wet clots of blood. He leans his forehead against one of the stone walls. He is whispering something, possibly praying.
‘What? I can’t hear you,’ Cap says.
‘I think I don’t understand anything at all.’
‘But don’t you want to? Don’t you want to watch Ti-Christophe cut up a steer?’
‘I think I don’t want to,’ the boy says.
‘Fine,’ Cap says. ‘Go and recite the rosary with your mother. Me, I’m going into the cutting room. You’ll have to go home by yourself.’
‘Wait! Wait!’ the boy pleads, running after her. ‘I don’t want to go home on my own. I want to watch P’tit Christophe. I do.’
Cap turns, frowning, and crosses her arms. ‘If you embarrass me,’ she warns, ‘if you cry or throw up, I’ll make you walk back through the village by yourself. And I’ll get Papa to tell your maman that you snitched on her.’ The boy’s eyes widen with such shock and he looks so appalled that Cap promptly relents. ‘I won’t tell Papa,’ she promises.
‘I didn’t snitch on maman. How did I snitch on her?’
‘You said she’s always sad.’
The boy looks stricken. ‘I shouldn’t have told you.’
‘I won’t tell Papa,’ Cap repeats. ‘But you do have to help me carry the guts and brains and the other stuff that Ti-Christophe will give us.’
The boy shudders but nods.
‘There’ll be chunks of bone and cartilage and liver and intestines, and we have to scoop it all up with our hands.’ Cap feels the buzz of a slightly sadistic frisson.
‘Okay,’ the boy whispers.
‘All right, then,’ she says. ‘Follow me.’
The great wooden doors to the cutting room are kept closed, but light pours down through a window in the roof. Cap pulls the boy inside and closes the doors again. She pushes her way through hanging sides of beef, through dangling forequarters and hindquarters, as though pushing aside clothes in a closet. The oak floor is pale gold and bleached clean. ‘No blood,’ she points out. ‘That’s all drained out in the courtyard before the sides are brought in. No slaughtering in here. I don’t like to watch it either. Here, it’s just boning and cutting.’
The boy almost smiles.
‘Ti-Christophe,’ Cap calls out. ‘I brought the boy from the chateau. Papa gave him your old coveralls last night and he slept on your mattress.’
Petit Christophe’s left arm is extended high above his head. His left hand holds a clawed boning hook which is plunged deep into a fatty shoulder of steer. The hook steadies the forequarter while Petit Christophe traces a deep slow curve with the boning knife which he holds in his right hand. His concentration is intense. He may or may not be aware of his visitors. The long slim blade follows the curve of the breastbone and feels for the joint of the foreshank. There the blade pauses. Petit Christophe is so close to the carcass he might be caressing it with his cheek. He seems to be listening, to be thinking, to be sensing his way towards the soft spaces between the bones. He finds the seam, plunges deep with the blade, and suddenly the foreshank is hanging loose and he is cutting a path through the brisket towards the ribs. He pauses, sets down his knife, tugs on the boning hook and pulls the foreshank free. He holds it up like a trophy, admiring.
He is startled by the watching children.
‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ he says. ‘What do you think of this?’ he asks Cap. ‘Great stewing meat. Great osso bucco.’
‘This is the boy from the chateau,’ Cap says. ‘His name is Gwynne Something Something Vanderbilt.’
‘My name is Petit Loup,’ the boy says emphatically. He is mesmerised. ‘How did you cut through the bone?’
‘I never cut through the bone,’ Petit Christophe says. ‘My knife feels for the spaces between the bones. Here.’ Petit Christophe hoists the boy onto his shoulders. ‘Now I’m going to separate the chuck from the rib. Do you see this seam of fat?’ Petit Christophe runs his forefinger along a line of suet. ‘Do you see that? Feel it. Press it.’
‘It’s soft,’ the boy says. ‘Like a pillow.’
‘It’s a laneway between the bones. I’m going to mark it with my boning knife, like this, see? Now I’m going to cut, following the line of the bone, and you are going to pull on my boning hook. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘You see how the chuck is coming away? It’s just falling away.’
‘It’s like a peach,’ the boy says, amazed, excited. ‘When you bite and it comes away from the pit.’
‘Exactly,’ Petit Christophe says. ‘That’s exactly what it’s like.’
‘I want to be a butcher,’ the boy says fervently, ‘when I grow up.’
In the outdoor bar at the boathouse restaurant, the waiters have stopped serving lunch. Cap is drinking her second glass of wine and has eaten a chicken salad. People have come and gone or moved inside. In spite of the afternoon sun, the temperature is dropping. Cap huddles into her jacket and pulls the white envelope from her pocket again and reads the note.
You are being watched and monitored. Be at the Loeb Boathouse in Central Park, in the outdoor bar, at 1 p.m.
It is now two-thirty p.m.
Cap signals her waiter. ‘I guess I’ve been stood up,’ she says ruefully. ‘Can you bring my check?’
A messenger boy on a bicycle swoops into the patio and brakes at Cap’s table. ‘Are you Lilith Jardine?’
‘Yes.’
‘Delivery for you.’ He hands her a brown manila envelope. It is addressed to Lilith Jardine, Loeb Boathouse Outdoor Bar. ‘You have to sign for it.’
‘I’m not going to sign for this,’ Cap says calmly. ‘You can take it back.’
The messenger boy is flummoxed. ‘Keep it anyway,’ he says. ‘I don’t give a damn.’ He swings one leg over his bicycle.
‘I think I’ll have another glass of wine,’ Cap tells the waiter when he brings her check.
‘Bad news?’ the waiter asks, nodding at the envelope.
‘Don’t know yet,’ she says. ‘But I guess I’m about to find out.’
7.
Over breakfast in the gardener’s cottage, Christophe le Jardinier tells his daughter: ‘La comtesse wants to see you.’
‘Is it because I took Ti-Loup to the butcher’s?’
‘I don’t think so. How would she know?’
‘From the servants. From gossip. And because Ti-Loup was missing for one night.’
‘Turns out she wasn’t aware. She has breakfast brought to her room and doesn’t see her son before lunch. She and I had a little chat when I delivered the vegetables this morning.’
‘She doesn’t know he spent the night here?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘So why does she want to see me?’
‘Maybe she isn’t used to being confronted on the church porch. In public.’
‘Have I m
ade trouble for you, Papa?’
‘Right from the start.’ The gardener laughs. ‘Trouble is what makes life interesting. And you are the kind of trouble I wouldn’t want to live without.’
‘Papa, during the Occupation –’
‘Ah. Shh.’ Cap’s father places his fingers against her lips. She notes that he winces, that his body instinctively curves and slightly folds inwards, cradling itself against – what? The memory of a blow? Heartburn? Anguish? ‘Don’t speak of it,’ he says. ‘Different kind of trouble. The kind we can do without.’
Cap closes her own fingers around her father’s wrist and removes his hand. ‘Please, Papa, tell me what happened. Otherwise I will have bad dreams. I do have bad dreams, but they will be worse –’
‘There’s nothing to tell. The Boche came, they made threats, I didn’t give them what they wanted, they let me go. That’s all.’
‘What did they want?’
‘Betrayals. Names. I wouldn’t give them any names.’
‘Did some people betray –?’
‘Yes. Some people did. We shouldn’t blame them. The Gestapo had very persuasive methods.’
‘What happened when there were betrayals?’
‘You know what happened. You saw the husband of Marie-Claire. Someone betrayed him.’
‘The butcher?’
‘Maybe. Possibly. I don’t know. We have no proof.’
‘And someone betrayed you.’
‘Apparently.’
‘What happened to you, Papa?’
Her father spreads his arms, palms up. ‘I was lucky. As you can see. In fact it was la comtesse who saved me, although she doesn’t understand that she did. She never knew enough to betray. She’s smart enough not to know a lot of things.’
‘But what happened?’
‘What happened is what happened. I survived. We don’t need to speak of this, Capucine, because it’s done with. It was before you were born. You must treat la comtesse with respect.’
‘Ti-Loup said she called me a wild thing.’
‘You are a wild thing, like your maman.’
Cap can scarcely breathe. ‘I am like my maman?’
The Claimant Page 18
