On the low vaulted ceiling, angels surrounded a triumphant Christ. A Christ of the Apocalypse. The Christ who raised the dead. Her head arced in an awkward position. Backwards, like the dead man’s on the makeshift table in the field. He too had lost an eye, she remembered, and shuddered. Shuddered not only for him, but because she had an inexplicable sense that she was being watched again. Yet it was impossible that anyone could hide in the tiny chapel. It had to be as deserted as when she had come in.
She hurried out from those thick stone walls that oozed the damp of centuries. She made her way back towards the river’s edge, then stopped abruptly. There, half hidden by the trunk of an ancient chestnut, stood Martine. The bright blue of the beret on that golden head was unmistakable. Yet, the girl’s posture was odd. She seemed to be pressed into the tree’s trunk, her arms raised to ward off something frightening yet invisible. As she hastened towards her, Marguerite saw the reason for her fear.
Looming over Martine was the strange, giant youth they had seen at the Telliers’. He had edged close to her. He was running a finger down her cheek. It looked as if it might soon encircle her frail throat with only a little help from his thumb. The girl’s mouth was open, but no sound emerged from it.
Marguerite screamed for her. The youth leapt back. He enacted an odd little dance, his big feet shuffling back and forwards, his shoulders swinging, and then he was off before Marguerite could come close enough to speak. Despite his bulk and the unwieldy gait, he disappeared quickly downriver along a shrub-strewn path.
‘Are you all right, Martine? Did he hurt you?’
The girl stood mute, as if she weren’t altogether sure. Her words, when they came, were delivered in a cracked whisper, only gaining strength when Marguerite wound an arm through hers and led her back to the street.
‘He caught up to me before. I can’t stand him. I can’t. He scares me. P’tit Ours, they call him, but he’s more like a big bear. A very big bear. He was trailing me. He walks so softly, I didn’t hear. Despite his size. Then I thought he might want to tell me something about Yvette. That he had sought me out.’
‘And did he?’
‘I’m not sure. I don’t know.’
‘Just tell me what he said to you.’
They had crossed the bridge now and Marguerite could see their inviting carriage waiting on the corner of the square. Georges had lit the lanterns and the flame danced in its glass casing.
‘Take your time, Martine. It may be important.’
The girl didn’t speak again until the carriage began its slow clatter along cobbles.
‘The thing is, Madame, I didn’t understand him. Not really. Not altogether. He’s not always very clear. He said something about smells and flowers. I think he was talking about Yvette. I don’t know. He makes rhymes sometimes. “Pretty rose and flows,” he said. Then something about a sack in the back. And a strongman and fire and oil and a winged monster. I just don’t know.’ She shook her head. ‘Look, there he is again.’
The youth she had called P’tit Ours was standing in a narrow lane near a shop that bore a bold chemist’s sign: Tournevau, Fils. He was being addressed by an officious little man who was a head shorter than him and angrily waving an admonitory finger. The youth alternately cowered, his bushy eyebrows converging to a point on his broad forehead, then seemed about to hit the man.
‘Shall I ask Georges to stop?’
‘No,’ Martine almost shouted. ‘No, Madame. Not now.’
‘Do you know who the man talking to him is?’
‘I think he said something to me about an errand at the chemist’s. He certainly said chemist.’ She shivered, was silent for a moment. ‘He also said…’ she paused. ‘I’m sure he said it. A platter with breasts on it. Breasts like blancmange. Horrible.’
‘A platter with breasts. How bizarre.’
Martine shot a glance at her, then determinedly looked out of the window. The town had quickly given way to countryside, not at its loveliest here in the dirty light. But one field had produced a bright crop of garishly painted wagons of the kind fairground people used. In front of a red and white one, a woman squatted by a small fire. Beside her was a man with a large drooping moustache. He was wearing a tightly fitting trapeze artist’s garment beneath a heavy jacket. His bulk identified him as a possible strongman. Behind him, a juggler was practising his art. His back to them, a man with a white turban sat on a barrel. A goat poked its head desultorily round its side. Two wolfish dogs barked and barked.
Marguerite was tempted to ask Georges to stop, then thought better of it. She wasn’t with her artist friends now. The Paris ways that had become second nature to her would shock the locals. She couldn’t first rush off to stare into a desolate field, then go and address mountebanks, without the whispers somehow getting back to Olivier. But she would have to return.
How she wished Chief Inspector Durand were already here. Travellers always knew things. Nor did they usually share the hypocritical morality of the townsfolk. Could it be one of their band who had left an unwanted baby to float downriver? Or one of their number who was now lying unidentified behind Dr Labrousse’s surgery? Come to think of it, the giant youth had mentioned a strongman. His words might be baffling, but they were evidently not devoid of sense.
Martine must have been thinking along the same lines. ‘Maybe … I don’t know. Maybe he thought I was Yvette.’
Marguerite sat up very straight. ‘Thought you were Yvette?’
‘Yes, yes. We’re a lot like each other.’
Martine’s head was still turned to the window. She seemed to be talking half to herself.
Marguerite looked at the stiff little back, the nervously bunched shoulders, and wondered for a moment if she had perhaps taken on more than she had bargained in promising to help the girl. A vision of the trembling madwomen in the wards of the Salpêtrière hospital invaded her mind. There had been so many deaths in that madhouse. And before death, a living hell, a life with too many hurdles and pitfalls, exacerbated by the limited opportunities that were available to the poor creatures. On top of it all, they had to contend with the conflicting images of themselves flung at them by men. Priests, journalists, any man – even doctors – called on their virtue and simultaneously wanted to see it seduced into an easy virtue. One that suited only the opposite sex.
‘Do you think Yvette might have decided to go off with travellers?’ Marguerite asked just as Martine startled her with a half-heard sentence.
‘Yvette used to talk of breasts on platters.’
‘Breasts on platters. Really.’
‘Yes. Yes. She loved … she loves,’ Yvette corrected herself, ‘she loves stories of the saints. One of her favourites is Saint Agatha.’
‘Tell me,’ Marguerite murmured. Her education hadn’t stretched to the lives of the saints. Her provincial childhood had been far too unorthodox. And what she had heard, later, from a stream of governesses, had repelled her in its blatant physical violence.
‘Agatha was a beautiful and wealthy girl, Roman I think, who vowed her virginity to Christ.’ A blush rose in Martine’s face. ‘But she was forced into … into bad ways, then tortured. Her emblem is a dish with blessed loaves on it. They stand in for her breasts, which were…’
‘Removed,’ Marguerite finished for her when she hesitated. ‘These saints’ stories hardly seem salutary in our modern times. One always hopes they’ve been subject to a great deal of exaggeration. Like fairy-tales. Don’t you think?’
Martine’s features struggled with some difficult emotion. ‘My sister never thought so. She believed in the lives. Our mother read them to us. From when we were very little. They were her models in courage.’
‘I see. Is this what made Yvette so much braver than you?’ Marguerite’s image of the young woman, of both the sisters, had suddenly undergone a radical shift.
‘Yes, in part.’
‘And why do you think Yvette told P’tit Ours about the saints, or at least this particular s
aint?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know, Madame.’ Tears gathered in the blue eyes. ‘Perhaps she wanted to educate him. Before our aunt died, there was some talk that if we didn’t get married straight away, we might consider becoming teachers. There are all these new schools for girls. Yvette was very keen on that. Then, when we were left with nothing … well, maybe for Yvette talking to P’tit Ours was a way of being something of a teacher.’
‘Talking to him of breasts on platters,’ Marguerite said with an edge in her voice.
Martine leapt to her sister’s defence. ‘She wouldn’t have said it like that. That’s P’tit Ours … Or at least,’ she brought a handkerchief to her eyes, ‘at least that’s what I heard.’
Marguerite buried her hands more deeply in her muff. If this Yvette was silly enough to speak to an impressionable and unpredictable youth of private female parts, it was no wonder that Martine was so worried about her.
‘Do you think Yvette provoked P’tit Ours to anything with these stories, Martine?’ she made her question deliberately direct.
‘I don’t know … I don’t think so. She’s not like that. She’s like … she’s like Joan of Arc.’
‘And yet P’tit Ours, mistaking you for her, was stroking your cheek?’
‘He wasn’t, Madame. He wasn’t.’
‘I must have seen incorrectly.’
‘I think he wanted to. He was saying something I couldn’t understand about a horse. Maybe it was his horse. Héloise, he called her. He strokes her, I guess. He was showing me.’
‘You as Yvette?’
She nodded. Tears filled her eyes again. ‘I fear he doesn’t see all that well. He goes by smells. I smell like Yvette. I still have a little of the lavender water Aunt used to make. For both of us. Oh Madame!’ She gripped Marguerite’s wrist with unexpected force. ‘What have I done? What have I done?’
SEVEN
The next day, milky sunlight propelled her out of the house early. She asked Jeanne to tell Olivier she was going riding. One of the stable boys saddled her favourite stallion, a spirited chestnut who went by the name of Mohawk, and she set off across fields and valleys, exhilarated by the wind on her face and the galloping speed of her horse.
The riding wasn’t random. She had a destination. She was headed for an address in Château du Loir that Madame Solange had indicated, in search of the maid called Louise who had left the château at harvest time for a family in the area.
Marguerite had made discreet inquiries amongst the staff at La Rochambert about the character of the two young women who had left, one soon after the other. It was clear enough from the slight nervousness or flushes on the faces of the males that either of the two could have engaged in relations with a man there or elsewhere; in particular, perhaps, the man who had given notice soon after they had left. Though, of course, nothing was spoken. Only Madame Solange had been bold enough to presume aloud to a mistress she had known since childhood that one of these might have parented the foundling.
At the solid, double-turreted house in the riverside town, a great fuss was made of Marguerite’s impromptu arrival. But the girl, Louise, it turned out, had left long ago, having stayed at her new posting for a mere two months, before going off with a good-enough reference in hand to an unknown destination. No one had any idea where she might now be. What was more, no one, certainly not the pretty, fluttery mistress of the house, seemed to have any inkling whether the girl had been pregnant or not. You might, Marguerite thought to herself on the way home and not for the first time, begin to surmise such conditions were altogether invisible in the valleys, except where four-legged creatures were under consideration.
She returned to La Rochambert feeling well exercised but more than a little despondent. She had hoped for something from this particular expedition. She was now sorry that she had not accompanied Martine. It had been arranged that the young woman would go to her home town of Vendôme in the old barouche that morning and spend the day talking to family friends, who might be able in person to give her some better inkling of her sister’s whereabouts. Marguerite sensed, too, that seeing familiar faces would cheer Martine, perhaps even relax her a little.
She stabled her horse and wondered whether it would make sense to return to Dr Labrousse’s this afternoon, despite the fact that she hadn’t left him on altogether the best of terms, in order to elicit a list of midwives from him. The maids’ trail having gone temporarily cold, it would be a midwife who would be best placed to know of any children born in the area. And she didn’t want to involve their old family doctor, who would be sure to raise the matter with Olivier.
No sooner had she stepped into the house, however, than she was told Olivier wanted to see her immediately. The order conveyed urgency. Without changing her black riding habit or washing the perspiration from her face, she made her way to the library.
A cigarette in a silver holder in his left hand, monocle in his eye, Olivier was poised by the window of the long rectangular room. There was a man next to him, sitting at the heavy oak reading table. They were both examining a picture held up to catch the light.
Olivier turned as she came in.
‘Ah, Marguerite, there you are.’ He was all courtesy rather than impatience. It puzzled her.
The man beside him rose. He was wearing a fine black cassock, which fell so smoothly from trim belted waist and broad shoulders that for a moment portraits of Renaissance cardinals, more profane than sacred, flashed through her mind. A fine gold cross swung across his chest. The skin on the closely shaven face had the healthy firmness of a child’s. The solemn, grey gaze, the strong nose, the chin tilted in vanity, the smooth light hair, all seemed to hint at a man who might be more interested in power than sanctity.
‘Père Benoit has taken over the parish in the wake of Father Philippe’s death. I believe I wrote to you about it.’
The man bowed deeply.
Marguerite had liked the harmless old priest with his comfortable belly and sweet face. This man was of a different cut. He commanded the space around him in a way that made her wary.
‘Old Father Philippe was much loved in these parts. I knew him from my childhood.’
‘Indeed,’ Olivier cut her off. ‘Père Benoit has come to us directly from Rome.’ He named the site with a touch of awe that took Marguerite by surprise. ‘There have already been great improvements both to our chapel and to the church. New pews. A far better organ. Père Benoit has ideas for our little valley.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, Madame.’ The cleric cleared his throat and addressed her in a suasive, slightly pompous tone, one she had a vivid sense he cultivated for the minor but troublesome species amongst which the genus wife fell.
‘Your esteemed husband and I have had several conversations. I imagine he has told you. In the wake of the sad death of Monsieur René Fretin, I am convinced that were Monsieur le Comte to stand as our deputy, we would see him at the Assemblée. And I am not alone in not being able to think of a better candidate for the Catholic Party.
Marguerite veiled her astonishment.
Olivier had swollen under these words to regal proportions. His shoulders were now straight. His eyes shone.
A nervousness took her over. Of course, this was it. The explanation. The explanation for everything. Including the good deed of taking on the babe. Of calling her here. Of insisting on her presence. Of wanting a firm grip on her whereabouts.
Was it possible that Olivier had become so enamoured of country life that he now accepted all its values? The Olivier she thought she knew could not begin to consider a late career in politics, let alone joining the Catholic Party. It was unthinkable that he would link himself with a reactionary faction that had put all its religious fervour in these long years of the Dreyfus affair into fomenting hatred, into defending a retrograde France of the imagination, one that had never really existed in the placid, yet heroic, feudal parochialism they evoked.
‘Rome has given you an int
erest in politics, I see, Monsieur.’ She converted her uneasiness about Olivier into a focus on the young priest.
‘It has indeed. The role of the Church is central to the moral strength of France. We must prevent these urban Republicans from contaminating all of our lives with their excesses, not to mention their financial intrigues. They bleed the countryside, the core of our nation, of its spiritual wealth.’
The man had all the arrogance of youth compounded by the righteousness with which his vocation endowed him.
‘Really?’
Olivier caught the combative edge in her tone and stepped in to distract her.
‘Look what Monsieur le Curé has brought for my collection.’
Marguerite glanced at the small painting her husband held in his hand. She wasn’t sure she knew anything of a collection of Olivier’s, but if this were to be part of it, she would have to withhold her opinion. She could understand this lapse of taste no more than his sudden interest in the Catholic Party.
The picture showed a robed and bearded priest of some antique sort, his hands clasped in prayer. In front of him were two men, their limbs bared and intertwined – whether in a struggle or capture wasn’t clear. The man in front had his hands raised to the skies and a suffering expression on his face. The whole was executed in miserable fashion.
‘It’s Saint Benoit healing a man possessed by the Devil.’
‘I see.’
‘Do you?’ The priest’s voice had a coolness that verged on the rude. ‘It’s a copy I made of a fresco in a cloister in Bologna. A fresco by Louis Carrache, a master of the Bolognese School.’ He enunciated each word ponderously, as if talking to an illiterate schoolgirl.
‘Do you dabble then, Father?’ Marguerite met the man’s eyes with the full force of her own. ‘Yes, I do see now. The great Bolognese School of the Counter-Reformation. I must admit, I have a taste for earlier, rather less excessive work than this. Work where the Devil holds less sway.’
His cassock swinging, the man had the courtesy to perform a small bow. He mumbled something in Latin about taste.
Sacred Ends Page 7
