Sacred Ends

by Lisa Appignanesi

  ‘I omitted to mention to you, Father, my wife is rather well versed in the arts. Is herself a tolerable artist.’

  It was the first time since her arrival that Marguerite had heard Olivier’s droll tone. Perhaps this new solemnity and correctness was merely a façade.

  ‘I haven’t seen the latest additions to your collection, Olivier. You must show me.’

  He waved towards a waist-high set of drawers edged into a far corner of the room at the base of the bookshelves. ‘It’s mostly in there. I have framed none of them yet. We’ll look later. My dear,’ he added, with a faint smile, ‘I believe Monsieur le Curé has some news he wanted to tell us first.’

  The cleric looked at Marguerite and licked dry lips with a fleshy tongue. ‘I’m not sure if Madame…’

  ‘Madame has heard most things at least once before, mon père. Don’t be embarrassed by her presence. I am sure you shall yet grow very fond of each other.’

  She felt the curé’s gaze fall on her. Did those cool grey eyes betray just a hint of malevolence? She had a niggling sense that the man saw her as a competitor for Olivier’s attention. Had it been excessively devoted until her arrival?

  ‘I do want to change before lunch, Olivier, and perhaps look in on the babe.’ She smiled sweetly.

  ‘Of course, of course.’

  The men exchanged a glance and nodded mutual approval.

  Marguerite hesitated at the threshold. ‘Incidentally, Monsieur le Curé, my husband told me you checked with the police to ascertain that there have been no kidnappings in the vicinity.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course.’ The man beamed goodwill at her. ‘Of course. And while we’re on the subject, Madame, I am sure Monsieur le Comte has mentioned the urgency of a baptism to you. You will have to agree on a name. Monsieur I know is quite partial to Charles Gabriel. We want the child protected.’

  She understood by the way he touched his cross that he meant protected against an eternity in limbo. She couldn’t stop herself confronting him.

  ‘Nurse tells me he’s a strong little soul. In due course, Monsieur. I have really only just arrived and I must make certain we are not robbing some poor woman of her offspring. Too often such women are so badly treated, so maligned, so lost, as to prefer to murder or abandon their children rather than be discovered. If that is the case here, and I can find her, I would rather do everything in my power to help the poor woman, than to take over her child.’

  ‘Marguerite,’ Olivier snapped.

  But she had already closed the door behind her.

  The long table beneath the painted ceiling of the dining room, with its plump cupids and plumper clouds on a sky of clearest blue, gleamed with silver and an array of delicacies. The muted rose of the walls urged calm. But there was tension in the atmosphere. Not that it diminished the men’s appetites. Olivier, Villemardi and especially Père Benoit ate with an open carnality. They also drank their way through half a dozen bottles of wine with a heartiness Marguerite would have liked to attribute to the country air, but secretly felt was the product of their surprising hostilities.

  The proud new curate treated the sculptor with contempt. The two men vied for Olivier’s approval like rival sons contending for a disdainful father’s attention. Or unmarried sisters competing for the hand of a single suitor. Spellbound by the spectacle, Marguerite forgot to preside as the young men hurled only slightly veiled insults at each other.

  ‘And how has the stone responded to your blows these last days, Monsieur Villemardi?’

  ‘As well, no doubt, as the serving girls to your catechism, Father.’

  Villemardi was so brazen, Marguerite found herself warming to his energetic refusal of the curé’s ever more soulful sanctimony.

  ‘If you and your kin didn’t with one voice champion the large family and the virtues of many children and with another decry the loss of female virtue and the poor illegitimate bastards who result, these girls wouldn’t get themselves into such a twist. End up abandoning or murdering their offspring. Use your pulpit to blame the men who seduce and abandon, if you have to point your punitive finger at someone.’

  ‘Shall I blame you then, Monsieur Villemardi? Shall I preach a sermon to convert you to chastity?’

  ‘Yes, I do see that with the Church’s patriotic logic, chastity is what will increase the population of France, so that we catch up to our fine German neighbours, as you so loudly proclaim you wish. Yes, I do see.’

  ‘You are incorrigible.’

  ‘And you and the Church have forgotten the meaning of forgiveness. I do hope, Olivier, that if you’re going to run on a Catholic ticket, it’ll be one that sides with the Republicans and says death to the old celibate orders, death to the rich and unholy congregations. Give their land, their brainrotting schools to the poor. Take away their political power.’

  Villemardi laughed at his own effrontery while Olivier chided and the curé reprimanded in the severest of terms, threatening the sculptor not only with Hell but with banishment from his patron’s house.

  Only when the cheese was served did Marguerite begin to suspect that the two young men’s ire might be fuelled by more than the wine, the bill currently making its way through the Assemblée and general political disagreements.

  Covertly she watched Olivier. She wondered if it was precisely for the spectacle of these two younger men’s acrimony that he brought them together. He did little to abate their rising vitriol. Like a Roman at a gladiatorial combat, he observed, at once immune to and excited by the possibility that at any moment the contenders might draw blood.

  With the last draining of glasses, Marguerite felt she could put off the question she wanted to ask the sculptor no longer. ‘I believe, Monsieur Villemardi, you weren’t able to recognise the dead man who had a card from the family firm in his pocket.’

  The curé put his glass down with a clatter.

  ‘Really, Marguerite. We are still at table,’ Olivier reprimanded.

  Villemardi paid no heed. ‘Non, Madame. Though I was tempted to ask if I could do a death’s head of him. It was quite a remarkable face. Sculptural in its grossness. Particularly with that missing eye. I could imagine it as belonging to a Bacchic figure, to be positioned at some interesting angle in the woods.’

  ‘That’s enough, Paul.’ Olivier pushed his chair back emphatically.

  They followed in his train to take coffee in front of the fire. A feeble sun was already beginning to sink in the afternoon sky.

  ‘I wonder if I might be invited to see the pieces you’re working on before the light goes altogether, Monsieur Villemardi. It would give me great pleasure to do so.’ Lunch had sparked Marguerite’s interest in the sculptor.

  The man performed a small military bow then flung his head back so that the hair flew. ‘I would be honoured, Madame.’

  Villemardi had converted two old outhouses at the far side of the chestnut grove into a conjoined workspace. His materials, marble and the white stone of the region, lay loosely covered under a tarpaulin, sheltered beneath a sloping half-roof on the outside of the structures. Inside, a small tile stove barely took the worst of the chill from the long, dusty rooms. A series of work smocks hung from hooks on the door and Marguerite would have been happy to don one. It wasn’t offered. Instead, Villemardi abruptly cloaked himself in sullenness, as if expecting to have to ward off blows from the neatly aligned series of hammers and chisels.

  Marguerite said nothing at the display of temperament. She was used to artists and their complicated dance. They tended to welcome attention with a first step and reject it with a second, compounding desire for recognition with a sensitivity that shouted it was hardly necessary.

  She was, however, surprised to see pinned to the walls a series of photographs, perhaps by the American Muybridge, and evidently clipped from some journal. Motion studies, they depicted a woman in a long dress leaping over a stool, each lift of skirt and arm and leg embodied in a separate image. There was a running figure, too, calves tens
ed mid-air in fugue, then a horse trotting, and finally a sequence of clouds, larger, smaller, whisking across a flat sky. She wondered what part, if any, all this played in the man’s work, but his expression forbade questions.

  In the far room, white sheets covered a series of mysterious shapes. As Villemardi removed them, she saw figures far lighter than the stone they emerged from all but dance across the room. Two of them were of the same young woman taking on the fleeting pose of a classical nymph. Her cloak, intricate in its folds, defied gravity. It flew through the air. Everything here was light and motion as if to spite the materials that shaped it. The carved figures gave off the very breath of freedom.

  She saw now why Villemardi was interested in the photographic studies.

  ‘These are good.’ Marguerite said in a soft voice. ‘Very good.’

  ‘It surprises you.’

  ‘Not at all. Are they recent?’

  ‘I’ve been working on them on and off for over a year. I hope to have them placed in the gardens this summer.’

  ‘May I ask who served as your model?’

  ‘One of the maids.’

  ‘I should like to meet her. To compliment her on her transformation.’

  ‘You’ll have to travel to do that. She’s no longer with the household.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes. Madame Solange saw to that. But don’t expect me to carry any tales.’ He crossed his arms over his chest in a stubborn gesture.

  What was her name?’

  ‘Louise.’

  She stared at the man. ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you?’ he asked, ever brash.

  ‘I’d like to talk to this beautiful young woman. Do you know where I can find her.’

  ‘Talk to Madame Solange. I have no idea.’

  ‘Sad to lose such a talented model. What was her family name?’

  ‘Do servants have family names?

  The facetious grin played over his face as he emphatically pulled a drapery back from another figure.

  Elbow poised on knee in a forwards thrust, Marguerite recognised Olivier emerging from stone like some Medici.

  ‘You’ve given him a very stately air.’

  ‘Do you think I’ve been obsequious? Like our dear curé?’ Villemardi met her eyes as if he expected an honest answer, not one from either a flattering patron or a dutiful wife.

  ‘You see Olivier as a strong, somewhat arrogant man. It isn’t untrue to him.’

  Villemardi gave her his first open smile of the day. ‘It’s not finished yet.’

  Marguerite nodded. ‘May I touch?’

  The stone was cold and not quite smooth.

  Villemardi examined her without making any pretence of doing otherwise. ‘You’re not as I imagined.’

  She met his gaze with her own direct one.

  ‘I won’t ask what you imagined. But tell me … you don’t like our new curé very much?’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  Her laugh rippled. ‘Come, Monsieur Villemardi, don’t make me re-estimate your intelligence.’

  ‘All right, but not for reasons you can imagine.’

  ‘Oh. Let me try. Did he abandon a sister or a cousin of yours at the altar?’

  Villemardi chuckled in not altogether friendly a fashion.

  ‘No. Though he could have. And he would have made it seem as if it were an act of tribute to his God.’

  The fierce undertow in Villemardi’s voice amplified her sense that the two men had a history, that their spats bore the venom of an age-old grievance.

  ‘You knew each other in a previous life?’

  ‘Is it obvious?’

  ‘I am hardly new to society, Monsieur.’

  ‘We were at the same school. In Tours. He was a terrible bully to us poorer boys. Always mocking – our clothes, our clogs, our ways of speaking. Organising cabals against us. Dare I say he wasn’t known for his charity.’

  ‘His own parents have wealth?’

  Villemardi shrugged. ‘I no longer know. I suspect there may have been some decline in their fortunes. Over the Panama affair. They fell for the golden bait like so many others. In any event, I think it was around that time that our local devil developed a vocation.’

  ‘And he remembers you?’

  ‘I had no reason to change my name. Isn’t it interesting how it is only criminals and those with a vocation who change their names with such facility?’

  There was more bitterness in his voice than Marguerite had bargained for. The childhood scars were still raw.

  ‘In any case, Monsieur, I suspect where art is concerned, you have certainly surpassed your schoolmate.’

  Villemardi gave her a small bow. ‘But don’t underestimate our dear curé in other areas, Madame. That would be a mistake. By the way, Bertin was the girl’s name.’ He paused. ‘Many men, you know, like bees, are attracted to wayside flowers. But there are those of us who prefer rarer varieties. I would be honoured if you would consider posing for me, Madame.’

  She wasn’t altogether sure why, but she felt the compliment was double-edged.

  EIGHT

  Martine folded nappies. The squares of cotton mounted, bright against her dark-grey, high-necked dress, which bore all the additional trimmings and displaced buttons of a hand-me-down. The girl’s hands moved mechanically. Her eyes never left the babe.

  The makeshift nursery had so swiftly acquired the necessary trappings that it was hard to think the child hadn’t always been here in this blue-and-white room with a dormer window that looked over the small orchard. A crib had appeared from nowhere, a small tin tub, even a wooden rattle. A door to the side showed the nurse’s room, her neatly made bed.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind, Madame,’ Martine turned as Marguerite came in and gave her what was almost a smile. ‘But Celeste said she had so much on her hands that I offered to help.’

  ‘That’s fine, Martine. If it distracts you.’

  Martine had returned from her journey to Vendôme the previous evening with no news of her sister.

  ‘It does, Madame. And … and I hate doing nothing and being so beholden to you.’

  ‘All the more reason then.’

  ‘He’s so sweet.’

  They stared at the sleeping face of the infant, the shadow of thick lashes on milk soft skin. The cheeks had filled out, even since Marguerite had been in the house. There was a kind of carnal plenitude about them. It was hard to think that such a brief span ago, the creature had been all but dead.

  That was one good thing, at least, Marguerite mused. She ran a finger along that elastic expanse of cheek. The eyes flew open with a single swift movement. They focused on her, deep and dark in their gaze. If she looked down, down into the pupils with the kind of attention the mite focused on her, would she find the photographic imprint of his mother – the first face ever to leave a trace there. A face that wasn’t the one she could see now.

  As she brought her own closer, a smell of incense rose to her nostrils. On the flannel sheet to the child’s side, she now noticed a small but sturdy gold heart from which the scent seemed to emerge.

  ‘What is that, Celeste?’ she asked the wet nurse.

  ‘It’s his sacred heart, Madame. It keeps him safe.’

  ‘I see. I see. From Monsieur?’

  ‘I don’t know, Madame.’

  ‘How old do you reckon the mite is, Celeste? Do you think he was abandoned straight after he was born?’

  ‘Difficult to say.’

  She lifted the child with a single certain movement, propped him on the changing table and stripped him down.

  Round naked limbs flailed the air in random playfulness.

  ‘He’s filled out well. But I’d say he’s still under a month. Probably born just before Christmas.’

  Marguerite nodded sagely and turned back to Martine. ‘I was planning to pay a visit to Madame Tellier today. I imagine she’s settled back after her trip to Tours. Would you rather stay here, Martine? Or shall we go toget
her?’

  The girl’s cheeks grew pale. ‘Oh Madame. If you don’t mind. I so hate that place. If only…’

  ‘You stay here and help out Celeste then. You could also undertake some secretarial tasks for me, if you felt like it.’

  ‘Ah, Madame. Of course.’

  Before Marguerite could say any more, Jeanne burst through the door. She was flustered.

  ‘There’s someone here for you, Madame, I didn’t catch his name. But he looked nice enough so I invited him up to the library, the way we do in Paris. But I bumped into Monsieur le Comte and he wasn’t pleased. I didn’t know what to do.’

  ‘So you came to find me. That’s altogether fine, Jeanne.’ Marguerite calmed her. ‘He’s still in the library I take it.’

  All Marguerite saw when she came in was a narrow back suited in rough blue wool and a dark head bent over a volume.

  ‘Monsieur?’ she murmured. The man leapt back and snapped the book shut as if he’d been caught in an illicit act. ‘You asked for me?’

  He turned and bowed deeply, but she had already recognised him from his height.

  ‘Madame, I was in the vicinity. I hope you don’t mind my stopping by unannounced. You have a very fine library here. I envy you its contents.’ Dr Labrousse rattled on, his colour deepening.

  ‘Indeed. My father was something of a scholar and added liberally to what he had inherited.’ Her eyes twinkled. ‘I believe the cellar still houses his collection of specimens. He liked to preserve parts in alcohol. For comparative study, you understand. My husband has long wanted to rid himself of them. Perhaps you might like to look at them … What have you been reading so fervidly?’

  ‘A volume of the Encyclopédie. An original.’

  ‘Ah yes.’

  ‘Of course, that wasn’t what I came for.’ He looked at her beseechingly as if she might understand his errand without the need for words.

  ‘I … I was sharp the other day. A little rude. I wanted to apologise. So many people here won’t accept what I say. Because I’m from elsewhere. But perhaps you don’t know. It makes me tetchy.’

  ‘Montpelier, the diploma in your office said.’