Olivier shrugged. ‘Monsieur le Curé did all that.’
‘To no avail, I take it.’
‘I’ve heard nothing. But feel free to make enquiries, if it passes the time for you. I’m in no great hurry. You’re a woman. You can turn your ear to kitchen gossip in any number of houses. My own hunch is if the infant was left, it’s because his mother wanted to leave him. Wanted him dead. Infanticide. Which is a crime, so she’s never turned up. Never will. I’ve saved him. Given him new life. That makes me his father. His father in life.’
Marguerite watched him with something like amazement. This startling passion of Olivier’s for a waif made her think he had undergone some kind of hypnosis.
‘Yes, kitchen gossip, you’re right. It’s a good place to start.’ She was about to ask him about the changes in staff she had noticed when the door opened and a man burst in without a warning knock.
‘I spied you at the window. I was hoping…’
The speaker stopped as he took in Marguerite’s presence. He was a young man of middle height with the strong build of a peasant, but with none of the manner. He had a poet’s light brown hair, slightly long, which he raked back to reveal a high brow, and soft, pursed lips, redder than a woman’s, against skin that wore an indoor pallor. His jacket was of coarse wool, his collar slightly frayed, yet all worn with an air that shouted insouciance rather than penury. He took in Marguerite with a candour that earlier in her life would have brought a vivid flush to her cheek. Shyness battled with assertion in his speech.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know you had visitors.’ He bowed in Marguerite’s direction.
‘My wife, Marguerite de Landois. Paul Villemardi.’
The man extended his bow.
‘You’ll take tea with us, Monsieur Villemardi? Olivier has told me of your work here.’
‘I have also been explaining about the infant.’
‘So you haven’t given him a name yet?’ Marguerite asked.
The two men looked at each other.
‘I wanted to consult with you first. Of course.’
‘Of course.’
Another maid she didn’t know came into the room with a newly heaped tray. The girl simpered a little as she stepped in front of Villemardi.
‘Did you find what you wanted at the quarry?’ Olivier asked.
‘In part. Some of the slabs had too much red resin. Some were fine. We can start on that bust now. Did Olivier explain, Madame?’
Marguerite was rather taken aback by the casual use of her husband’s first name by this young man.
‘No, no. I hadn’t.’ Olivier intervened. ‘Monsieur Villemardi is doing a bust of me, Marguerite. Several works, in fact.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes.’ Villemardi paused, then, with a provocative look in her direction, lowered his voice and raced on. ‘I learned something rather shocking on my way back here.’
‘Really?’ Olivier’s interest was all simulated.
‘There was a suicide. On the tracks.’
Olivier interrupted. ‘Marguerite’s already mentioned it. Who was it?’
‘That’s just it. No one seems to know. Some despairing tramp, from the sound of it.’
‘Inebriated, no doubt.’ Oliver was callous in his contempt. ‘Mistook the tracks for a bed.’
Marguerite interrupted. ‘There can be reasons, apart from drink, for not getting on with life, Olivier.’
Paul Villemardi met her eyes with his velvet-brown ones.
‘It’s odd, isn’t it, that no one has identified him. You know how everyone knows everyone around here.’
‘He might have travelled in from elsewhere.’
‘A pilgrim,’ Olivier offered with new interest. ‘Yes. Perhaps he was doing the pilgrim’s route. From Montoire. On his way to Tours.’
‘A despairing pilgrim, then. Evidently our dear curé’s benediction did nothing for his mood. That won’t please our local saint.’
‘Your sarcasm is inappropriate, Paul.’
Marguerite looked from one man to the other. It was the first time she had heard Olivier take an interest in pilgrims, let alone in the local site. He had never been a pious man. Quite the contrary.
‘I’ll see if I can find out more about him tomorrow,’ she said to cut the tension that now pervaded the room. ‘I need to look up some people near Montoire.’
‘What on earth for, Marguerite? Who?’
She arched an eyebrow. ‘It’s for Mlle Branquart, Olivier. I told you. The young woman who’s come with me.’
Olivier picked up the poker and jabbed at a log.
‘She’s from the region.’ Marguerite looked at Paul Villemardi, who was raking the tousle of hair back from his face again. He might know something. She rushed on. ‘She’s fretting about her sister. She has answered none of her letters for some five months. Nor has the family where she was in service. The poor girl is distraught. I promised I’d look into it.’
‘She’s probably gone off with a man.’ Villemardi laughed. ‘She may be only too glad to leave a snooping sister behind.’
‘I don’t think so. No, I really don’t think so.’
‘Well, you’ll tell me where you’re going, Marguerite. You are not, I stress, not, to get involved in any unseemly activity here.’
‘Unseemly? Really, Olivier. You exaggerate.’
‘I don’t want to hear news of any of your escapades from the wrong quarters.’
‘Then I shall tell you everything in great detail before I undertake any.’
Her irony was light, but her heart sank. Out of sight might mean out of mind, but once she was in his proximity, Olivier grew invasive. He wanted to know exactly where she was and what she was up to at every minute, and to be assured that it didn’t have a negative impact on the family name. It was the stifling contradiction of his tyrannical need for possession and his distaste for her that had contributed to the unhappiness she didn’t like to remember.
Villemardi was playing with a cigarette box he had taken from the table. ‘Olivier will explain why the need for discretion matters above all else, Madame. If he hasn’t already.’
‘That’s quite enough, Paul.’ The rebuke came with the sting of a lash. But the presence at the door softened Olivier’s face. He leapt up to usher in the wet nurse.
Despite the cold, the woman glowed with some inner fire that made her cheeks and forehead damply pink. There was a robust heaviness to her movements. Around her neck on a ribbon she wore what looked like an amulet, in the shape of a naked child. She held the larger, clothed bundle comfortably in her arms.
‘He’s asleep, Monsieur.’ She curtsied in Marguerite’s direction.
‘That’s all right, Celeste, we’ll be very quiet. Madame wanted to see him.’
Marguerite stood. The wet nurse came towards her and with a single smooth gesture deposited the bundle in her unprepared arms.
Long, dark lashes shadowed porcelain smooth cheeks. The button nose crinkled as if taking in a new scent. His own was moist and milky.
Marguerite cradled the baby to her. Its small face burrowed close, nuzzled her bosom. Something like regret tugged at her. It made her sit down and position the child a little less intimately in her lap.
Olivier hovered over her. A glance revealed a face she didn’t recognise. Was it pride she read there? As if she and the babe together had been transformed into prize possessions, a holy pair that he had magicked from the air. Or a tableau he had just purchased from a favourite dealer.
‘Beautiful, isn’t he?’ His voice preened. His lips were slightly wet. ‘I was led to him, you know. I felt it.’
She passed the child to him.
He held him up at an arm’s distance but with a kind of rapture that encased the two of them in an impermeable capsule.
It came to her, like the ominous fluttering of a crow’s wings, that some deep, enigmatic bond had grown up between him and the child. Some potent magic. As if the chance finding of the babe had turned Olivier i
nto a saviour, allowed him to see himself as such. Yes, in the mirror of the infant’s innocent eyes, he was good, a hero, indeed a paragon. The potency of that illusion of goodness would be difficult to battle, even if she were to find the child’s blood parents.
Paul Villemardi was shifting from foot to foot, his shoulders hunched. The man seemed even more uncomfortable than she was in the presence of Olivier’s intense communion.
Marguerite moved towards the table and poured out more tea. She addressed Villemardi softly. ‘Did you by any chance hear anything on your journey to the quarry about women who had suddenly left the area, Monsieur, or about lost or abandoned children?’
It took Villemardi a moment to rouse himself from his absorption and recognise that the question was directed at him.
‘Women … No, no. But then I didn’t think to ask.’ His gaze flew a little fearfully towards Olivier.
A knock at the door followed by Martine’s entry stopped him from saying any more.
The young woman looked around her with the timid awkwardness of a child forced into adult company. Olivier’s expression of goodness metamorphosed into one of cold assessment, followed by barely veiled contempt. Villemardi’s all but professional appraisal of a possible model was hardly better. Marguerite’s introductions did nothing to ease matters. She had wanted Martine to meet everyone, to feel at home. But after a few stilted moments the girl fled, pleading tiredness and correspondence to catch up on. Was it the time in service that had made her so incapable of conversation?
‘I don’t know why you brought her here, Marguerite. You’re always picking up waifs and strays. I thought you would have learned by now.’ Olivier’s complaint came almost before Martine had shut the door.
Marguerite stared pointedly at the babe the wet nurse was now holding. She didn’t bother to reply.
THREE
The kitchen at La Rochambert was a large, rectangular, vaulted room in the basement of the house directly below the principal dining room. Rows of copper pots and pans glistened on the whitewashed stone walls. Game and curing hams hung from ceiling beams at one far end. The centre of the space was dominated by a double row of ovens and a vast bain-marie. These were flanked on two sides by long, solid tables of unpolished oak, at one of which two kitchen maids, despite the early hour, were already peeling and chopping vegetables and fruit for the day’s soups and tarts. Arched windows looked out on kitchen gardens. Beneath them stood sinks and a stretch of marble-topped counter that gave way to rows of preserves, jars of dried mushrooms of all shapes and sizes, and a giant cold store fed by ice kept in the nearby underground cistern.
Marguerite was perched on a stool by a wall-side table next to the bread oven from which Madame Solange had just extracted a brioche and an assortment of crusty rolls. Two of these quickly found themselves on Marguerite’s plate and, with a hunger reminiscent of an outdoor childhood, she heaped plum jam on to them and let Madame Solange pour scalding milk into her bowl of coffee. She had come down to the kitchen early, knowing that the housekeeper would be here sipping her café au lait before giving the staff their instructions for the day.
She was a placid woman with plump cheeks and a fan of wrinkles around her mouth. But when she tied her capacious white apron over her severe grey dress, she looked not so very different from the kitchen maid Marguerite remembered from childhood. Later, she had become cook and had married Henri, the gamekeeper, and Armand had come along, as stout and smiling as his mother. More recently, Madame Solange had taken on stature and learned to purse her lips into severity. She had moved out of the kitchen to oversee the smooth running of the household. But she still kept an eye on matters culinary. Olivier liked his table just so.
‘How have you been keeping, Madame Solange? And the family?’ Marguerite asked.
‘Not so bad, Madame. Monsieur le Comte keeps us busy. Particularly of late.’
‘Oh?’ Marguerite left the question in her voice low key. She knew better than to try and press a loyal Madame Solange too early. Whatever came out would have to come unwittingly.
‘Of course, what with the foundling. And with Monsieur Villemardi here … I imagine the sculptor likes his food?’
‘That, too,’ Madame Solange said with no particular change of tone, though the sudden plunge of the knife into the brioche she now sliced alerted Marguerite to some unhappiness.
The woman lowered her voice so that it was inaudible to anyone else in the kitchen and rushed on. ‘And we’ve had our share of visitors. All these new contacts of Monsieur’s from Vendôme and Blois and Montoire, the whole region. They sit over the lunch table and discuss matters for hours. Wages and schools and farming and the church. The new curé comes frequently, too.’
‘A new curé?’
‘Yes, Père Benoit. But perhaps you didn’t know. Old Père Philippe died in … when was it, over a year ago, must be. Now we have this new man.’
‘You don’t like him?’
Madame Solange stiffened and averted her gaze.
‘I didn’t say that, did I? No. No. Far be it from me … I just miss Père Philippe. You know how it is. This new man is young, cuts quite a figure. He appreciates Monsieur le Comte’s hospitality. And his cellar.’ She stopped herself, then raced on. ‘Yes, forgive me for saying it.’ She crossed herself hurriedly. ‘But he does like a good bottle. So do the others. Monsieur is always discussing the neighbouring vineyards. He’s not so interested in the cattle now. But you know that.’
Olivier had put down a substantial cellar in the years he had spent at La Rochambert and had developed something of a passion for inspecting the vintages of the valley.
‘It wouldn’t surprise me if next year Monsieur decided to give another hillside to vines.’
‘Our Cheverny, I trust. It’s excellent. But everything else is running smoothly? You’ve had no problems with suppliers or staff?’
‘Has Monsieur been complaining?’
‘Oh no … It’s just that …’ Marguerite made a vague gesture and looked out at the kitchen garden. Only the rosemary sprouted as glossy and green as ever in the dull cold.
‘It’s true. Two of the maids left and one of the coachmen. One after another. Through the summer. I don’t know much about the coachman, but one of the girls was from near Château du Loir, the other further away, from Blois. You probably didn’t notice them when you were last here, Madame. Silly little chits. One of them had been here under a year, the other just over. And I can tell you they both had good mouths on them. Not shy, no. No respect, this generation of girls. I had trouble replacing them.’
Madame Solange shook her head with an air of despair. ‘Yes, one of them wanted a place in Paris, the other decided she just wanted a change or maybe it was to be closer to her brother. Something like that. I think Monsieur Villemardi gave her a lift to her new post.’ She paused significantly, then, when Marguerite didn’t comment, rushed on. ‘He was going to visit his family who’s from that area.’
‘You have the girls’ new addresses, I imagine, Madame Solange.’
‘Only for one of the girls.’ The woman’s face grew canny. She lowered her voice. ‘So you think as I do, Madame?’
Marguerite didn’t answer.
‘About the baby, I mean. Poor little mite. He could be one of the girls’. Why not? The timing is possible and they were forward enough. Little hussies. Even with my Henri. It would have to be the one who stayed in the region, though. A stupid idea putting a child in the river like that. He could have died of cold. Probably what she intended. If one of the Messieurs didn’t find him, then good riddance to the little blighter. It would be altogether in character. These girls always get away with murder, if there’s no mistress in the house…’ She clapped her hands over her mouth. ‘I’m sorry Madame, I didn’t mean … You know me.’
‘It’s all right,’ Marguerite smiled.
Candid eyes sought out Marguerite’s face. ‘I wish Madame were here more. That’s the only reason I let my words run away w
ith me. And I don’t think it’s right to keep that infant here. I don’t. And don’t you go getting soft on him. You never know what kind of blood he might be carrying. We don’t want any degenerates here. Like that tramp who threw himself on the track.’
‘No, no. Of course not.’ Marguerite patted the older woman’s hand and suddenly had an image of the dead man’s dangling limbs cloaked in woollen trousers. Was he a tramp? Thinking back, the clothes were dirty, but the quality … She shook herself.
It didn’t surprise her that Solange already had distinct ideas about the railway death. Nor that notions of degeneracy were table talk in the kitchens of the provinces. The church had made enough of a play about the double doom of alcohol and syphilis. Not that what she had against keeping the babe was anything to do with all that.
Throughout the night a parade of weeping women had invaded her mind. So many bereft Madonnas, trapped by poverty or social norms, but who didn’t really want to give up a child or have a stranger take their place. She had to find out.
A distraught girl closer to home was on her conscience, too.
‘There’s something else I wanted to ask you about, Madame Solange. Do you know of the Tellier family in Troo?’
‘Tellier? It rings some kind of bell, Madame. Let me think. Tellier … Tellier. From Tours, aren’t they? Merchants. Yes. I don’t know that they spend all that much time around here. But maybe … She screwed up her face as if her nose had caught a whiff of a bad smell. ‘No, no. I’ll ask my husband. His brother works that way.’
‘So you haven’t by any chance come across a girl called Yvette Branquart in the area?’
‘Yvette Branquart…’ Madame Solange reflected. ‘Is she related to that young Martine you brought with you?’
Madame Solange missed little. But there was no more information she could provide. She promised, however, to keep her ears open.
In the growing bustle of the kitchen, there would be a lot to listen to.
The light peering through the heavy curtains of her small sitting room wore the dull, dirty grey of an old sewer rag. She looked out the window at the sullen landscape and turned to her desk. It was still too early to head off with Martine. She would write to the chief inspector, partly in response to the letter he had sent her as a New Year greeting while she was still in Paris, but also to invite him to the château. He had indicated he might follow her, after all. She reread his letter as ammunition against gloom.
Sacred Ends Page 3
