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For Olivia
What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself.
—Ludwig van Beethoven
The Light Behind the Window
Unbroken night;
Darkness is the world I know.
Heavy burden;
No lights behind the window glow.
Softer day;
A hand reached out amidst the gloom.
Touching gently;
Spreading warmth across the room.
Twilight hours;
Shadows ebb and flow from you.
Secret longing;
Heart grows tender, beats anew.
Unbroken light;
Darkness was the world I knew.
Burning brightly;
Glowing with my love for you.
Sophia de la Martinières
July 1943
1
Gassin, South of France
Spring 1998
Emilie felt the pressure on her hand relax and looked down at her mother. As she watched, it seemed that, while Valérie’s soul departed her body, the pain that had contorted her features was disappearing too, enabling Emilie to look past the emaciated face and remember the beauty her mother had once possessed.
“She has left us,” murmured Phillipe, the doctor, pointlessly.
“Yes.”
Behind her, she heard the doctor muttering a prayer, but had no thought to join him in it. Instead, she stared down in morbid wonder at the sack of slowly graying flesh which was all that remained of the presence that had dominated her life for thirty years. Emilie instinctively wanted to prod her mother awake, because the transition from life to death—given the force of nature Valérie de la Martinières had been—was too much for her senses to accept.
She wasn’t sure how she should feel. After all, she had played this moment over in her head on many occasions in the past few weeks. Emilie turned away from her dead mother’s face and gazed out the window at the wisps of cloud suspended like uncooked meringues in the blue sky. Through the open window, she could hear the faint cry of a lark come to herald the spring.
Rising slowly, her legs stiff from the long nighttime hours she had been sitting vigil, she walked over to the window. The early-morning vista had none of the heaviness that the passing of the hours would eventually bring. Nature had painted a fresh picture as it did every dawn, the soft Provençal palette of umber, green, and azure gently ushering in the new day. Emilie gazed across the terrace and the formal gardens to the undulating vineyards that surrounded the house and spread across the earth for as far as her eyes could see. The view was simply magnificent and had remained unchanged for centuries. Château de la Martinières had been her sanctuary as a child, a place of peace and safety; its tranquillity was indelibly printed into every synapse of her brain.
And now it was hers—though whether her mother had left anything behind from her financial excesses to continue to fund its upkeep, Emilie did not know.
“Mademoiselle Emilie, I’ll leave you alone so you may say goodbye.” The doctor’s voice broke into her thoughts. “I’ll take myself downstairs to fill out the necessary form. I am so very sorry.” He gave her a small bow and left the room.
Am I sorry … ?
The question flashed unbidden through Emilie’s mind. She walked back to the chair and sat down once more, trying to find answers to the many questions her mother’s death posed, wanting a resolution, to add and subtract the conflicting emotional columns to produce a definitive feeling. This was, of course, impossible. The woman who lay so pathetically still—so harmless to her now, yet such a confusing influence while she had lived—would always bring the discomfort of complexity.
Valérie had given her daughter life, she had fed and clothed her and provided a substantial roof over Emilie’s head. She had never beaten or abused her.
She simply had not noticed her.
Valérie had been—Emilie searched for the word—disinterested. Which had rendered her, as her daughter, invisible.
Emilie reached out her hand and put it on top of her mother’s.
“You didn’t see me, Maman … you didn’t see …”
Emilie was painfully aware that her birth had been a reluctant nod to the need to produce an heir for the de la Martinières line; a requirement contrived out of duty, not maternal desire for a child. And faced with an “heiress” rather than the requisite male, Valérie had been further disinterested. Too old to conceive again—Emilie had been born in the very last flush of her mother’s fertility at forty-three—Valérie had continued her life as one of Paris’s most charming, generous, and beautiful hostesses. Emilie’s birth and subsequent presence had seemed to hold as much importance for Valérie as the acquisition of a further Chihuahua to add to the three she already owned. Like the dogs, Emilie was produced from the nursery and petted in company when it suited Maman to do so. At least the dogs had the comfort of one another, Emilie mused, whereas she had spent vast tracts of her childhood alone.
Nor had it helped that she’d inherited the de la Martinières features rather than the delicate, petite blondness of her mother’s Slavic ancestors. Emilie had been a stocky child, her olive skin and thick, mahogany hair—trimmed every six weeks into a bob, the fringe forming a heavy line above her dark eyebrows—a genetic gift from her father, Édouard.
“I look at you sometimes, my dear, and can hardly believe you are the child I gave birth to!” her mother would comment on one of her rare visits to the nursery on her way out to the opera. “But at least you have my eyes.”
Emilie wished sometimes she could tear the deep-blue orbs out of their sockets and replace them with her father’s beautiful hazel eyes. She didn’t think they fitted in her face, and besides, every time she looked through them into the mirror, she saw her mother.
It had often seemed to Emilie that she had been born without any gift her mother might value. Taken to ballet lessons at the age of three, Emilie found that her body refused to contort itself into the required positions. As the other little girls fluttered around the studio like butterflies, she struggled to find physical grace. Her small, wide feet enjoyed being planted firmly on the earth, and any attempt to separate them from it resulted in failure. Piano lessons had been equally unsuccessful, and as for singing, she was tone-deaf.
Neither did her body accommodate well the feminine dresses her mother insisted she wear if a soiree was taking place in the exquisite, rose-filled garden at the back of the Paris house—the setting for Valérie’s famous parties. Tucked away on a seat in the corner, Emilie would marvel at the elegant, charming, and beautiful woman floating between her guests with such gracious professionalism. During the many social occasions at the Paris house and then in the summer at the château in Gassin, Emilie would feel tongue-tied and uncomfortable. On top of everything else, it seemed she had not inherited her mother’s social ease.
Yet, to the outsider, it would have seemed she’d had everything. A fairy-tale childhood—living in a beautiful house in Paris, her family from a long line of French nobility stretching back centuries, and with the inherited wealth still intact after the war years—it was a scenario that many other young French girls could only dream of.
At least she’d had her beloved papa. Although no more attentive to her than Maman, due to his obsession with his ever-growing collection of rare books, which he kept at their
château, when Emilie did manage to catch his attention, he gave her the love and affection she craved.
Papa had been sixty when she was born and died when she was fourteen. Time spent together had been rare, but Emilie had understood that much of her personality was derived from him. Édouard was quiet and thoughtful, preferring his books and the peace of the château to the constant flow of acquaintances Maman brought into their homes. Emilie had often pondered just how two such polar opposites had fallen in love in the first place. Yet Édouard seemed to adore his younger wife, made no complaint at her lavish lifestyle, even though he lived more frugally himself, and was proud of her beauty and popularity on the Paris social scene.
Often, when summer had come to an end and it was time for Valérie and Emilie to return to Paris, Emilie would beg her father to let her stay.
“Papa, I love it here in the countryside with you. There is a school in the village … I could go there and look after you, because you must be so lonely here at the château by yourself.”
Édouard would chuck her chin affectionately, but shake his head. “No, little one. As much as I love you, you must return to Paris to learn both your lessons and how to become a lady like your mother.”
“But, Papa, I don’t want to go back with Maman, I want to stay here, with you …”
And then, when she was thirteen … Emilie blinked away sudden tears, still unable to return to the moment when her mother’s disinterest had turned to neglect. She would suffer the consequences of it for the rest of her life.
“How could you not see or care what was happening to me, Maman? I was your daughter!”
A sudden flicker of one of Valérie’s eyes caused Emilie to jump in fear that, in fact, Maman was still alive after all and had heard the words she had just spoken. Trained to know the signs, Emilie checked Valérie’s wrist for a pulse and found none. It was, of course, the last physical vestige of life as her muscles relaxed into death.
“Maman, I will try to forgive you. I will try to understand, but just now I cannot say whether I’m happy or sad that you are dead.” Emilie could feel her own breathing stiffening, a defense mechanism against the pain of speaking the words out loud. “I loved you so much, tried so hard to please you, to gain your love and attention, to feel … worthy as your daughter. My God! I did everything!” Emilie balled her hands into fists. “You were my mother!”
The sound of her own voice echoing across the vast bedroom shocked her into silence. She stared at the de la Martinières family crest, painted 250 years ago onto the majestic headboard. Fading now, the two wild boars locked in combat with the ubiquitous fleur-de-lis and the motto, “Victory Is All,” emblazoned below were barely legible.
She shivered suddenly, although the room was warm. The silence in the château was deafening. A house once filled with life was now an empty husk, housing only the past. She glanced down at the signet ring on the smallest finger of her right hand, depicting the family crest in miniature. She was the last surviving de la Martinières.
Emilie felt the sudden weight of centuries of ancestors upon her shoulders, and the sadness of a great and noble lineage reduced to one unmarried and childless thirty-year-old woman. The family had borne the ravages of hundreds of years of brutality, but the First and Second World Wars had seen only her father survive.
At least there would be none of the usual scrapping over the inheritance. Due to an outdated Napoleonic law, all brothers and sisters directly inherited their parents’ property equally. Many was the family who had been brought to near ruin by one child who refused to agree to sell. Sadly, in this case, les héritiers en ligne directe amounted simply to her.
Emilie sighed. Sell she might have to, but those were thoughts for another day. Now it was time to say goodbye.
“Rest in peace, Maman.” She placed a light kiss on top of the graying forehead, then crossed herself. Rising wearily from the chair, Emilie left the room, closing the door firmly behind her.
2
Two Weeks Later
Emilie took her café au lait and croissant out through the kitchen door and into the lavender-filled courtyard at the back of the house. The château faced due south, so this spot was the best place to catch the morning sun. It was a beautiful, balmy spring day, mild enough to be outside in a T-shirt.
On the afternoon of her mother’s funeral in Paris forty-eight hours ago, the rain had relentlessly fallen as Valérie was interred. At the wake afterward—held at the Ritz per Valérie’s request—Emilie had accepted condolences from the great and the good. The women, mostly of a similar age to her mother, were all in black and had reminded Emilie of a coven of elderly crows. A variety of ancient hats disguised their thinning hair as they’d tottered around sipping champagne, bodies emaciated by age, makeup plastered masklike to their sagging skin.
In their heyday, they had been regarded as the most beautiful and powerful women in Paris. Yet the circle of life had moved them on, and they’d been replaced by a whole new raft of young movers and shakers. Each of the women was simply waiting to die, Emilie had thought, feeling maudlin as she’d left the Ritz and hailed a taxi to take her home to her apartment. Utterly miserable, she had drunk far more wine than usual and woken the next morning with a hangover.
But at least the worst was over, Emilie comforted herself, as she took a sip of her coffee. In the past two weeks, there’d been little time to concentrate on anything other than the funeral arrangements. She’d known that she owed her mother at least the kind of send-off that Valérie herself would have organized perfectly. Emilie had found herself agonizing over whether to provide cupcakes or petits fours with the coffee, and if the creamy, overblown roses her mother had so loved were dramatic enough for the table decorations. Valérie had taken these kinds of subtle decisions every week, and Emilie had a newfound, grudging respect for the ease with which Valérie had handled them.
And now—Emilie turned her face up toward the sun and basked in its comforting warmth—she must think about the future.
Gerard Flavier, the family notaire, who looked after the de la Martinières legal and property affairs, was on his way from Paris to meet her here at the château. Until he divulged where the estate stood financially, there wasn’t much point in making plans. Emilie had taken a month’s leave from work to deal with what she knew would be a complex and time-consuming process. She wished she had siblings to share the burden with; legalities and finances were not her strong point. The responsibility terrified her.
Emilie felt the softness of fur against her bare ankle, glanced down, and saw Frou-Frou, her mother’s last remaining Chihuahua, gazing up at her mournfully. She picked up the elderly dog and sat her on her knee, stroking her ears.
“It seems there is only you and me left, Frou,” she murmured. “So we’ll have to look after each other, won’t we?”
The earnest expression in Frou-Frou’s half-blind eyes made Emilie smile. She had no idea how she was to care for the dog in the future. Even though she dreamed of one day surrounding herself with animals, her tiny apartment in the Marais Quarter and the long hours she worked were not conducive to looking after a dog who had been brought up in the emotional and physical lap of luxury.
Yet animals and the care of them were her day job. Emilie lived for her vulnerable clients, none of whom could express to her how they felt or where it hurt.
“It is sad that my daughter seems to prefer the company of animals to human beings… .”
The words epitomized Valérie’s feelings toward the way Emilie lived her life. When she had originally announced she wished to go to university and take a degree in veterinary science, Valérie had shaped her lips into a moue of distaste. “I cannot understand why you would wish to spend your life cutting open poor little animals and gazing at their insides.”
“Maman, that’s the process, not the reason. I love animals, I want to help them,” she had answered defensively.
“If you must have a career, then why not think about fashi
on? I have a friend at Marie Claire magazine who I’m sure could find you a little job. Of course, when you marry, you will not wish to continue working. You will become a wife and that will be your life.”
Although Emilie did not blame Valérie for being stuck in her time warp, she couldn’t help wishing her mother had taken some pride in her daughter’s achievements. She’d come out of university top of her year and immediately been taken on as a trainee vet by a well-known Paris practice.
“Maybe Maman was right, Frou,” she said with a sigh, “maybe I do prefer animals to people.”
Emilie heard the crunch of gravel under tires, put Frou-Frou on the ground, and walked around to the front of the house to greet Gerard.
“Emilie, how are you?” Gerard Flavier kissed her on both cheeks.
“I’m all right, thank you,” Emilie replied. “How was your journey?”
“I took a plane to Nice and then hired a car to bring me down here.” Gerard walked past her through the front door and stood in the vast hall, the closed shutters shrouding it in shadow. “I was happy to escape from Paris and visit one of my favorite places in France. Spring in the Var is always exquisite.”
“I thought it was better we meet here at the château. My parents’ papers are in the desk in the library, and I presumed you would need access to them.”
“Yes.” Gerard walked across the worn marble-tiled floor and surveyed a damp patch on the ceiling above them. “The château is in need of some tender loving care, is it not?” He sighed. “It’s aging, like us all.”
“Shall we go through to the kitchen? I have some coffee ready.”
“That’s just what I need,” said Gerard with a smile as he followed her along the corridor that led to the back of the house.
“Please, sit down,” she said, indicating a chair at the long oak table and walking over to the range to reboil some water.
“There aren’t many luxuries in here, are there?” said Gerard, studying the sparsely furnished, utilitarian space.
“No. But then, this was only used by the servants to provide food for our family and their guests. I’d doubt my mother ever put her hands in the sink.”
The Lavender Garden Page 1
