‘Hush, hush,’ he murmured into her ear. ‘I didn’t mean it. You won’t drown,’ and they thrashed about and held each other as though they were indeed floundering through deeper and deeper water, as though only their ferocious grasp on the moment could keep them alive. They made savage love, like tigers.
On the veranda, they lay in the warm dark with Bach’s cello suite flowing over them and stared at the Milky Way.
‘What is that star there?’ Cap asked.
‘That’s a pointer star. There are two of them. Draw a line between them and keep going and you’ve reached the Southern Cross.’
‘The Southern Cross is stunning,’ Cap marvelled. ‘Why haven’t I ever noticed it before?’
‘Can’t be seen north of the equator.’
‘The fault, Ti-Loup, lies not in our stars but in ourselves.’
Ti-Loup laughed. ‘I can see Father JG frowning. I can hear him saying Inappropriate, Mademoiselle Melusine.’
‘I would never have believed I’d miss him, but I do. And Papa and Ti-Christophe.’
‘Ti-Christophe and Grand Loup are here,’ Ti-Loup said, stroking his dogs.
8.
There was a send-off for Cap in the pub. Everybody in Dayboro came. Ty-Lew shouted drinks all round. ‘She’s coming back,’ he promised. ‘And she’s coming to stay.’
‘Sort of,’ Cap explained. ‘I’ll be working in Sydney but I’ll be coming up every weekend.’
‘How did you two meet?’ someone asked.
‘Oh, you know these American women,’ Ty-Lew said, ‘the way they backpack around the world. Opal fields, cattle stations, the Outback. We met decades ago. Didn’t expect to connect again.’
‘Here’s to the lovers,’ someone said, and much beer was consumed.
‘I wish I could drive you to the airport,’ Ti-Loup murmured. ‘But what if I’m stopped? What if I’m asked for my licence?’
‘I have to return the car anyway,’ Cap said. ‘And this isn’t cut and dried yet, you know. I have to see if Sotheby’s will agree. And I have some appraisal trips already set up for the next month. Some Lilith Foundation trips.’
‘You’re not going to keep doing this, are you? After you transfer to Sydney?’
Cap thought of saying: You sound like Simon and Mrs Cabot. ‘I’ll have to think about that,’ she said.
In November 1995, Cap obtained a transfer to Sotheby’s in Sydney for a year. The New York house agreed to be vague about location. Travelling on private appraisals was their formulaic response to all inquiries.
‘Travelling out of the country for a year?’ Simon said when she told him. ‘Travelling where?’
‘Sotheby’s promised the clients they wouldn’t say.’
‘So how do we stay in contact?’
Cap studied the New York skyline beyond her apartment window. ‘We can’t,’ she said.
‘Is this what I think it is about? Is this your way of breaking up?’
‘Yes,’ she confessed.
‘But why?’
‘Not because I don’t love you. And not because we haven’t been happy together. But I’m not cut out to be a Cabot and you should be free to find someone who is. You’re too nice to free yourself so I’m thrusting freedom upon you.’
‘I’m not going to accept this,’ Simon said.
‘That’s why I’m not giving you a choice.’
The meeting in London was not quite what Cap thought it would be. The encounter was full of covert threat and menace and it seemed unlikely that she would be invited to the palace in Zimbabwe. In Shanghai, she learned that Chinese officials who sensed the wind turning had multiple ways and means of getting their paintings and capital out of the country before they fell from the Party’s grace. They squirrelled away assets anywhere from Hong Kong to Switzerland to the Caymans. The defector let her know, subtly, that since she was now in possession of sensitive information she would do well to ensure that her lips were forever sealed.
Sotheby’s is scrupulous about client privacy, she assured him.
She flew from Shanghai to Sydney.
The stunning beauty of Sydney overwhelmed her. She found a small studio apartment in Balmain and could see the harbour from her windows. She had an office in the heart of the city. She did not need a car. She could go wherever she needed to go on foot or by train or by harbour ferries. She fell in love with the Opera House. She loved Circular Quay. She loved taking the ferry to Manly. She felt as animated and elated as she had felt on the first day she stepped inside the chateau. She had passed through some invisible membrane and entered a hitherto-unimaginable new world.
She was astonished to find how many collectors in Australia owned or wished to buy paintings and antiques from the era of the French baroque. She was abashed to learn of the extent of such collections owned and on display in art galleries and museums. She discovered Aboriginal art. She felt awed and excited. All this she did as Lilith Jardine.
On Friday evenings, she flew to Brisbane and rented a car. She drove to Dayboro and slept in a loft with Ti-Loup. She turned back into Cap, the gardener’s daughter, the woman who loved to bury her hands in rich soil.
‘Now I’m the one secretly escaping,’ she told Ti-Loup. ‘Climbing out of my Sotheby’s window on Friday nights. Climbing back in on Monday mornings.’
‘Do you ever wonder,’ Ti-Loup asked one night, ‘what Michel Monsard and his father did with the bodies?’
Cap flinched. ‘I try not to. But I still have nightmares.’
‘So do I.’
Once a week, from Sydney, Cap spoke by telephone to the countess. She never said where she was calling from. The countess said that all was well. The lawyer had worked something out. However, she said, the Vanderbilt lawyers claimed the letter from Decatur, Georgia – or, rather, the photocopy of that letter – was a cut-and-paste fraud. They were still suing her. The trial was due to begin early in 1996 but the lawyer whom Cap had hired had assured the countess there was nothing the Vanderbilts could do. They could not evict her because all penthouse expenses were now being paid.
‘Where are you, Melusine?’ the countess would ask. ‘When are you coming back?’
‘When you need me, ma marraine,’ Cap replied. ‘Whenever you need me. But until then, I’m on the road.’
She called the Goldbergs from time to time and gave them the telephone number of the Dayboro pub. ‘If something urgent comes up,’ she said, ‘call this number and say you have a message for Cap. Don’t forget to allow for the time difference. Day is night. If you wake Brendan O’Sullivan in the middle of the night, he’s going to be surly.’
One Monday, due to weather-delayed flights, Lilith Jardine was late getting back to her Sydney office. The receptionist at Sotheby’s told her: ‘Your cousin from America was here this morning. He wanted to know where you were.’
‘My cousin?’
‘The one who collects Aboriginal art. He’s here to buy and he wanted to see you. I told him you left town every weekend. I asked him to leave a number but he said he’d call back.’
‘Which cousin?’ Lilith asked. ‘What was his name?’
‘He didn’t leave one.’
No one called back that week. Cap took particular precautions the following weekend. She rented a car, drove north to Newcastle, left the car at the airport and flew to Brisbane from there. She decided to say nothing to Ti-Loup. She did not want to spook him or trigger nightmares. She was confident she could cover her traces. On Monday morning she told the Sotheby’s receptionist: ‘I don’t have an American cousin. But there’s a man in New York who’s been stalking me. I may need a restraining order. Can I ask you to divulge nothing whatsoever about me?’
‘Oh my God!’ the receptionist said. ‘Of course. That’s awful. I told him nothing. The only thing I said was that Europcar picked you up at the office every Friday but we didn’t know where you went. You asked me to reserve those cars for you.’
‘Yes,’ Lilith said. ‘You’ve been very helpf
ul. Please don’t tell him anything else. You didn’t give him my Sydney apartment address or phone number, did you?’
‘Of course not,’ the receptionist said, shocked. ‘We would never give out information like that.’
In early March 1996, on a Sunday, Brendan was awakened by a phone call. It was five o’clock in the morning. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ he said. ‘Who the hell is this?’
‘This is Myriam Goldberg in New York. I apologise if I got the time zones wrong. Can you ask Cap to call me? Tell her it’s urgent.’
Sean drove out to the farm and passed on the message. Later, when Cap called New York from the pub, Myriam told her, ‘The New York Post has announced that the Vanderbilt claimant will appear in court next week.’
‘What on earth does that mean?’
‘We don’t know. No one knows. The countess is in quite a state.’
‘I’ll book flights immediately,’ Cap said. ‘I’ll fly tomorrow if I can. I’ll be there.’
To Ti-Loup she said: ‘I think we finally know why that TV crew tricked you. I think I know how that video will be used.’
When the video was shown in court in Lower Manhattan, Cap was in the balcony and the countess was at her side. As the camera panned down towards the loop of the river and the pasture and the cattle and the house with its loft and its wide veranda, Cap had a profound and disturbing sense of violation. The serpent had slithered into Eden. Do you realise how naked you are and how exposed? the serpent hissed. You cannot keep any secrets from me. I know everything. I will track you down and exhibit you to the world.
Cap felt her godmother’s shock like an earth tremor moving along the balcony seats. The countess gripped Cap by the wrist and her grasp was fierce. ‘It is Gwynne Patrice,’ she whispered to Cap. ‘He has changed, but I know him.’
When her own name was mentioned by the interviewer, the countess gave a small stifled cry and slumped against Cap just as Gwynne Patrice and his horse jumped the fence. ‘I am so cold,’ she whispered to Cap. ‘It’s freezing in here. I have never felt so cold in my life.’
She lost consciousness then.
Cap had to summon an officer of the court and an ambulance was called. Reporters with microphones were jostling the stretcher at the ambulance doors and one of them jabbed a mike in the patient’s face. The paramedics pushed him aside and a policeman grabbed him.
‘She’s had a stroke,’ the paramedic told Cap in the back of the van. ‘I think we’ll make it, but you know, there’s always damage. We won’t know for a few days how much.’
The countess was discharged several days later, her body paralysed on the right side. She could speak but only with difficulty. It took intimacy and intuition to translate what she said.
Cap placed a phone call to the Dayboro pub. ‘Get Ty-Lew to call this number,’ she said.
‘We’re in a war zone now,’ Brendan told her. ‘That video made news here. The place is crawling with reporters and TV crews, but so far we’ve managed to bamboozle them. We’ve sent them to the Black Stump and back. But I tell ya, I dunno what to make of this, Cap. He’s always seemed true blue Aussie to me. He isn’t really one of those fat cats, is he?’
‘He really isn’t,’ Cap said.
When Ti-Loup called the Fifth Avenue apartment, Cap told him: ‘Your mother had a stroke when she saw the video in court. I’ve hired nurses for round-the-clock shifts but I’m not going to leave her. I’ll come back when I can.’
‘I’m under siege,’ Ti-Loup said. ‘I’m going underground.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Got a safe house.’
‘Where? Where will you be?’
‘I’ll leave breadcrumbs,’ he said. ‘You’ll find me.’
Most of the time, Cap sat at her godmother’s bedside and held her unresponsive right hand. She kept the penthouse filled with the music of the French baroque. She read aloud from both Molière and Racine. Sometimes, when she was reading Molière, she thought she saw a half-smile on the left side of her godmother’s lips.
One day, in her strangled way, the countess sought to make something clear to Cap. I would like to be buried in St Gilles, she said.
‘I will fly back with you,’ Cap promised.
The end came suddenly. Someone entered the bedroom and Cap turned to speak to the nurse, but it was not the nurse. It was Celise. ‘How the hell did you get in here?’ Cap demanded.
‘I’ve brought flowers,’ Celise said. ‘I only came to see how poor dear Isabelle is doing.’ She leaned over the countess and kissed her forehead. The countess flinched violently.
Cap called down to the doorman and security arrived within minutes. Celise was escorted from the room.
Cap pressed her godmother’s good hand against her own cheek. ‘Ma marraine,’ she said. ‘Gwynne Patrice is alive and well. I have seen him. He sends you his love and he wanted me to give you this.’
She took both of her godmother’s hands, the live one and the dead one, and cupped them between her own. With her left hand, she held that frail cradle of flesh and bone together and she took the pearl and jade rosary from her pocket with her own right hand. She let the rosary fall like slow water into those trembling palms. With her good left hand, the countess pressed the rosary against her lips. Tears streamed down her cheeks. I knew it, she tried to say. I knew it.
She died smiling with the pearls pressed to her lips.
In the cavernous church in St Gilles, a handful of villagers who remembered the countess had gathered. Cap was relieved that no members of the Monsard family came. Marie-Claire was there with her husband, who still did not remember who he was. Father Boniface had long since passed on and a new young priest chanted the service for the burial of the dead. The Goldbergs had accompanied Cap on the flight that took the coffin on its last trip home. The night before the funeral Cap had the coffin draped and displayed in state, as it were, in the grand salon of the chateau, now stark and empty of furniture. With Marie-Claire and the Goldbergs, she kept the last watch.
Within the medieval stone church, the chant of the priest reverberated back from the high Gothic vaults: Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. Requiescant in pace. Amen.
Eternal rest, grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her. May she rest in peace. Amen.
9.
Cap and Ti-Loup lay in the loft looking up through the skylight at the stars.
‘I was afraid you wouldn’t be here,’ Cap said. ‘When you said you were going underground, what did you mean?’
‘I meant exactly what I said. When I lived in the shack, I dug out a cellar. It’s under the back porch and I used it as my cold storage room. I can lift a whole section of porch floor and disappear.’
‘How big is it?’
‘Not very big. Big enough to hide in for a few hours if I see a reporter or a camera. The problem is the dogs. They’ll give me away.’
‘They’ll follow the breadcrumbs.’
‘I still have to work that part out.’
‘Can I see your safe house?’
‘I’ll show you tomorrow.’
‘You can’t hide very long in a hole in the ground.’
‘The Goldbergs did. It’s bigger than the space they hid in when your mother drove them to St Gilles in the laundry van.’
‘My mother,’ Cap sighed. ‘And my godmother.’
‘Shh,’ Ti-Loup said. The dogs nuzzled him, sensing need.
‘I was holding her hand when she died,’ Cap told him. ‘I gave her back her own rosary, the pearls and jade. I told her you’d sent it. She died smiling.’
‘I’m glad you did that. Now I can miss her. I’m free to miss her.’
‘Your mother and I were holding Papa’s hands when he died,’ Cap said. ‘No one should die alone. There should always be someone holding your hand when you die.’
‘I know I should feel grief and remorse but I feel free.’
‘We spent the night before the funeral
in the chateau, in the grand salon. It was strange to be back there, all those memories, all those ghosts. It’s a ruin. All the mirrors and the paintings have either gone to New York or been sold off. Part of the roof is falling in. I wanted to spend the next night in the gardener’s cottage, in the loft, but the ladder has rotted away.’
‘None of that seems real to me,’ Ti-Loup said. ‘It’s like a fairytale told to children, full of ogres and magic, signifying nothing. Once upon a time there was a chateau, and a princess who lived in the gardener’s cottage and a little boy who changed into a werewolf at night …’
‘I wonder if Father JG is still alive,’ Cap said.
‘Is La Boucherie Monsard still there?’
‘The shop and the sign are still there. I don’t know if the Monsards are still there. I couldn’t bear to go in or even ask. They didn’t come to the funeral, I’m glad to say.’
‘Did you go to the safe house?’
‘No. I asked the Goldbergs if they wanted to, but they said no, definitely not. They’ve sold their apartment, by the way. They’re moving to Florida this summer, a retirement village, Beth Shalom.’
‘I’m free,’ Ti-Loup said, as though trying out a phrase in a new language. ‘Free at last. Time for Beethoven’s Ninth.’ He filled the house with triumphal jubilation and they lay quietly on the mattress under the stars and floated with it. At the end of the symphony, Ti-Loup said: ‘But I’m not completely free. The Vanderbilt name is like bird lime.’
‘Even the Vanderbilt empire,’ Cap said, ‘will decline and fall.’
‘Whatever this is about,’ Brendan said, ‘the Aussie tabloids are smelling blood. They’ve turned into piranhas. We can send ’em off to Woop Woop and Bunyah till kingdom come, but they still circle back. It’s the limp and the scar. You’re not easy to hide, Ty-Lew. And another thing: people are being offered serious money. So far, no one’s cracked, but I don’t know how long it might be.’
‘This will pass,’ Cap said. ‘Next week they’ll find a body in Watsons Bay or there’ll be a juicy divorce. But until it passes, I suggest we hide Ty-Lew in plain sight in my unit in Sydney. Sean, can you manage the farm and the herd while we’re gone? Can you play dumb with the reporters?’
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