Sacred Ends

by Lisa Appignanesi

  At the railway crossing, near the river, a queue of vehicles waited while the signal announced the coming of a train. The hoot and charge of the engine brought with it her recent journey, the sudden stop, the shrieks, the dead man being carried away, his mottled face. Martine had fainted, confessed a misrecognition. With a twist of the mind’s kaleidoscope, the doctor’s photographs appeared before Marguerite. She could now see the resemblance, too. There was something about the dead man, perhaps it was just the larger-than-life size, which brought to mind the old reprobate she had sat with in that overcrowded drawing room.

  Martine had been frightened not only because of the recognition. She thought her sister – brave she had called her on another occasion – had hurt the man. Had Yvette written telling her of brutalities Martine didn’t like to repeat to Marguerite? Had she really in fact injured the old reprobate, as Madame Tellier claimed, and then run from the house? Run to the doctor, P’tit Ours had said. Perhaps she was injured herself. But Labrousse had stated he had never seen the girl in his consulting rooms.

  How many of these informants could she trust, Marguerite wondered as the carriage took up its swaying, bumpy progress on the high road once more. And what part of what they had said bore a relationship to the truth? Half-lies could be as revealing as whole truths, but only if one had the key.

  If Yvette had fled, where could she have gone? Why hadn’t she gone to her sister in Paris? That could easily be explained by a lack of funds. Paris was a long way to walk. She could walk to her friends in Vendôme, on the other hand, even if it might mean a day’s trek. But the friends said they hadn’t seen her. Why hadn’t they? Why didn’t she go to them?

  Marguerite closed her eyes and imagined the Tellier house again. Was the absent Monsieur Tellier another version of Madame’s grotesque father? What if the girl felt as she did: soiled, ashamed somehow, too ashamed to tell anyone? Where did helpless, impoverished, perhaps ravished girls go when they felt ashamed? Maybe the old man – Napoléon, he had called himself – hadn’t been lying. A brothel, he had said. It was all too easy for a young woman to disappear into a brothel. It was a destination one couldn’t even tell a sister about. You had to be brave in a particular way to choose it over other courses. She should have thought of it sooner.

  On a whim, Marguerite redirected Georges to Montoire. She would send a telegram to the chief inspector.

  About to announce his candidature, Olivier would have her locked up if he discovered that she had been frequenting the very kind of sites he used to visit for other purposes.

  PART TWO

  DEAD WOMAN RUNNING

  NINE

  While she waited for a reply from the chief inspector, Marguerite set out to do what she had intended ever since the babe’s existence had been announced to her.

  She rose early. A circle of wintry sun on the horizon boded well. She packed her saddlebag and started out without alerting anyone to her plans. The morning hoar frost crackled beneath the horse’s galloping hooves. The wind flushed her cheeks and whipped her into alertness.

  Olivier and Villemardi had been walking with their fishing poles on the day they had found the babe, so their route would have been different. They would have gone round the valley into the woods and down to the river.

  Instead, just where a small island rose from the reedy waters, as green and graceful as an abode for nymphs, Marguerite’s path took her up on to a sinuous track and into the woods. Where they grew dense on either side of the track, she pulled up short and dismounted. Tethering the horse’s reins to a bough, she opened her saddlebag, looked round and listened. There were no hooves coming her way, no crackle of footsteps on twigs and dry leaves.

  She vanished into the woods and shielded herself behind shrubbery. Here, she pulled off her riding jacket and skirt. She hadn’t bothered with her top hat this morning. Beneath she was wearing men’s trousers and a rough brown sweater. From the bag she took a thick, blue, working-man’s jacket, quickly donned it, then folded her skirt into the pouch. The jacket pocket yielded a large cap, into which she tucked all her hair. As she rubbed earth onto her cheeks to smudge it into a disguise, a girlish mischief played through her.

  ‘Antoine’ was now all but ready to do the sleuthing he could do so much more comfortably than his aristocratic feminine double. Marguerite tucked the pouch neatly into the saddle, took a pair of galoshes from its other side and leaned against a tree stump to pull them on. A scarf wound round her neck and she was ready. She gave the horse a pat, then headed off into the woods and back down to the river’s edge. For the first time since her arrival, she felt utterly at home on this bank, amidst these trees and shrubs and spiky thickets. Her feet grasped the ground firmly. She could run and bend, even swing from branches. She felt like a girl again. Or rather, a boy.

  But it wasn’t for all this, she reminded herself, that she had donned the guise of Antoine. The youth might be an adept of Paris streets, but he had never before dared to come to La Rochambert. There had never been the need until now.

  Whatever he might have said when she first arrived, Olivier didn’t really want her to trace the babe’s origins. Nor did Père Benoit. The priest had joined them for dinner last night together with some bigot of a politician from Tours. She had been prepared to strangle him well before the evening was over because of his high-minded stupidity. If he really thought France needed less industry and more farmers after the horrors of the last agricultural depression, all she could recommend was that he give up his post and live a peasant’s life for a few years.

  Olivier had once more swollen to the heroic proportions of a grand and charitable seigneur in the waif’s beaming anonymous stare, let alone that of his new-found flatterers. But he would be less than happy to find himself giving succour to the bastard offspring of named and disreputable individuals. Indeed, he would be altogether miserable to find anyone turning up in the course of time and demanding hush money. What would happen to the child then, a child who might be old enough to understand matters?

  It surprised her that Olivier hadn’t considered any of these eventualities. The countryside had put his jungle instincts to sleep. Hers were still awake.

  Today Marguerite was determined to find out at exactly what points a basket might be left at the river’s edge and be propelled safely by the current to the spot where Olivier and Villemardi had told her they had found the babe.

  She had wondered whether someone might have borrowed a boat from the island and rowed a little way upstream to a safe spot. But seen from her present position in the woods on the opposite bank, the pretty little island, with its mill, had too open an aspect. Winter had denuded the willows. In summer, they wept heavily into the river, shrouding the area beneath and providing perfect hiding spots for boats. Now eyes could fall upon you from any point.

  She tramped on, her boots crunching through the sharpness of the frost to squelch the leaves beneath, sticking a little in patches of mud where the ground was open and warmer.

  Why was it that she imagined a woman carrying the baby in the wicker basket, rather than a man? In fact it would be far easier for a man to trudge through woods like these unnoticed, prodding at points in the bank with a stick, just as she was doing now.

  She considered this and paused to look around her. The woods when she stopped walking were preternaturally still. No wind whistled through bare branches. There wasn’t even the chirrup of a bird. Everything had stopped to watch her passage.

  She stepped on a twig and heard a loud snap. It broke the hush. It also alerted her to the fact that this spot wore all the marks of Olivier’s description. She prodded at the bank, a little steep here, but not too steep to step down carefully. Beneath the swirl of the grassy waters, wedged amidst pebble and mud, she made out a log. It climbed towards the shallows where it lay just below the water’s surface. That log could easily have been what stopped the basket’s progress downriver.

  Now, instead of imagining an unpredictable current, she consid
ered an alternative possibility. She imagined a woman walking, a desperate woman, looking for a spot where her child wouldn’t be harmed. She imagined her carefully stepping down this slippery bank and thanking the stars for her good fortune. If she wedged the basket well enough right here, it might just be found before the river carried it further. Might even be found by one of the passing skiffs or small barges.

  She would have lifted the baby out before leaving it, hugged and kissed it, certainly also given it suck, and then allowed the waters to rock the cradle, gently enough. Perhaps she had even hidden behind the trees and waited with the infant. Waited to make certain that it was found. That would mean she might even know who had picked the child in his basket out of the river.

  Marguerite watched the waters and reflected. All this – except the feeding – could have been done just as easily, in fact more easily, by a man. Where would this man or woman have come from?

  It was too late to find footprints, even if any had been left on the cold ground. But on a whim and because of the lay of shrubbery and trees and leaf mould, she decided to walk away from the river for a distance. The sliver of a path might abut somewhere telling.

  She pretended she had a sizeable basket on her arm, kept shifting its position slightly to make up for height. She looked out for markings on bark or snapped shrubs. She had done this as a child when she played with the local children. Her father had given her the Leatherstocking Tales to read and they had pretended they were in the terrifying wilds of America, rather than here on the borders of the Loir where no Natty Bumpo and Chingachgook trawled the forests. It had come as something of a disappointment when she had learned, only a few years ago, that the creator of these great stories of the wilds of the new world had written many of them not so very far from her Paris house.

  Marguerite stopped. There, hanging on a low and prickly thicket branch, was a piece of ripped cloth. She eased it carefully from the thorns. It was a black worsted fabric of good enough quality. A woman, then. A black skirt caught on a lowlying thorn. Not the poorest of women, either. But she mustn’t jump to conclusions. People came through here for purposes other than leaving infants in the river.

  She folded the cloth into her trouser pocket. Did this part of the woods still belong to the family estate? She no longer knew, if she ever had. She trudged on uphill and came to a field. There were no houses in view, so she retraced her steps till she came to the area where she had found the piece of cloth and now turned to her left. This wasn’t terrain she recognised.

  Her thoughts moved to Martine. She had only told the girl a very little about her visit with the Telliers’. There was no point worrying her needlessly. But she had asked whether Yvette had ever written anything specific about the old man.

  ‘Only that she didn’t like him. Not one little bit,’ Martine had murmured. ‘But she was probably trying to be brave. Braver than me. I told you how he scared me. A terrifying old drunkard. Once, in his own house when I had to go on an errand, he just sat there in a black stupor, staring into space as if he were already dead. Didn’t even see me.’

  Marguerite had asked delicately whether he had made advances to her and Martine had blushed and said once, but she had run like the wind, and though he had cursed her he couldn’t follow after … because his legs weren’t that good.

  Marguerite walked on, inspecting ground and shrubs. More than anything she would have liked to talk the whole matter over with Rafael. How she missed their roaming, speculative conversations. But there was nothing for it. Rafael was thousands of miles away and immersed in his own preoccupations. She was no longer even certain what they were.

  As for Olivier, though she put the best possible face on it, he had begun to frighten her far more than he ever had before. He had grown monomaniacal about his plans and determined that she be included in them.

  She shivered, unsure whether the cold had come from her thoughts or a drop in temperature in this shadowy area of the woods. The trees were taller here, dark sycamores whose bare branches swayed like grasping arms in the wind. She hastened her pace. And then, from behind one of the thick trunks, Olivier appeared.

  At first she thought she had conjured him up with her thoughts. But no, he was there, his strides certain, his walking stick prodding the earth with unhesitating assurance. She moved into deeper shadow. He stopped a few metres away and his eyes played over her in cool assessment. She felt a disconcerting flush rise to her face. Would he recognise her, despite her cap, scruffy clothes and smudged cheeks?

  It was worse. She could feel from the nature of his gaze, the sudden thrust of his chin, the casual hand placed on his hip, that this was the old Olivier, the one she had only ever seen in action once before. Were the woods a favourite haunt of his? A meeting place? Did he think Antoine might be fair game, a passing youth who wouldn’t mind a little adventure?

  ‘Where are you heading for, lad? What are you up to? Mischief, I imagine.’

  Marguerite didn’t trust her voice. She lowered it, grumbled in a rustic manner, fabricated. ‘To Montoire. I’m late.’

  She could feel Olivier considering. She circled him. ‘Good-day, Sir.’

  The stick was suddenly in front of her, tripping her up, preventing her passage. ‘Not so fast. Don’t we raise our caps any more? No respect?’

  She barely righted herself, used a tree for balance. ‘Sorry, Sir.’ She moved round again, hurried on, murmuring, almost in tears. ‘Don’t want to be late, Sir.’

  ‘Next time you come this way, give yourself more time.’ Olivier shouted after her. A laugh came from him. Loud. Gruff. Not altogether friendly. It echoed in her ears. She hurried.

  He hadn’t recognised her – not unless he was capable of an elaborate joke. And he wouldn’t pursue the boy Antoine. No, not that. She started to run. Ran until she was breathless. When she couldn’t run any more, she stopped to look behind her. No, no. He hadn’t bothered.

  Relief coursed through her, robbing her of energy in its passage. She breathed deeply. Collected herself. Walked on. She didn’t want to think. No, it was best not to think.

  A small clearing appeared. She stepped into its tall grass, its brighter light. Crows swooped and cawed their menace overhead. There was no sun to give her a sense of her direction. Was she lost? Where was her horse? Her head was swirling. She should turn back to the river. No, no. There was a pile of heaped logs at the far end of the clearing. Which meant she must be near a house. A house where she could ask questions tomorrow. A house where someone might have seen something, a woman with a basket, a servant running…

  She headed towards the logs and on uphill. There was a distinct path now, closely bordered by bramble, trailing green vine and hawthorn, narrow and oddly steep. With no notice, it abutted on a wall – an ivy-covered wall, so that she hadn’t taken it in at first, had assumed an extension of the woods. The wall was of substantial height. It indicated a place of some importance on the other side.

  Marguerite racked her memory. She couldn’t think what the property might be, whom it might belong to. Nor could she see a door in the wall, which was odd, given the path. The twigs and vegetation on the left looked as if they had once been trampled. She headed in that direction. Some twenty metres on, she noticed what seemed to be a portcullis, its heavy bars hiding a moss-covered door.

  She pushed and prodded against both to no avail. Nor was there any purchase to be had on the wall. Even Antoine couldn’t scale this height. She looked round to see if there was another path from the door leading down towards the river. But except for the direction from which she had come everything was covered in thick undergrowth. She retraced her steps to the clearing. Only then did a downward possibility present itself.

  It was steep again here and sombre. Strange how she always remembered these valleys as warm and pleasant, with perfume in the air. The memories were warmed by childhood, warmed by summer and birdsong. Now everything was cold and still. Oddly still. She felt it as the stillness of threat. She hurried o
n, her heart racing, perspiration seizing at her armpits. Would Olivier in his predatory guise be waiting round the next tree. The undergrowth was tricky here, thick with twining vine. It clutched at her heavy, unfeeling boots so that she had to keep her eyes to the ground.

  As a child, she remembered, she had liked that. She had watched the earth with all its buried and hidden life for hours, had stood spellbound by the regroupings of an anthill as she prodded it with a stick, or waited with baited breath at dusk for the arrival of a mole’s snout at the mouth of his mound. Natural marvels, their mystery had filled the childhood space of wonder. A space that for Martine and her sister had been taken up by saints.

  She reflected on this for a moment, then sighed with relief when a silver glimmer in the distance announced what must be the river. She ran towards it, her heart light again, her eyes focused on her destination. She was almost tempted to hail a passing boat, if one should come. Anything to take her away from here and to people.

  Her boot caught in a tangle of shrubbery. She fell, fell downhill, face forwards, her cap flying, her gloved hands only stretched in front of her in time to prevent her head hitting the ground with a heavy thud.

  She lay there without moving until her breath came back. She seemed to be intact. Nothing broken. Only when she stood, did she see that she had torn her trouser leg. Her knee burned. And her cap had landed at some distance from her head. She must fetch it. Must. It was the most important part of her disguise. She trod back to where it had fallen.

  It was then that she saw. Saw it with a lurch and heave of her stomach that chased away all thoughts of Olivier or hair or anything at all. Saw the obstacle she had tripped on. It was a leg, a leg stretched across the path. The bottom half of a woman’s leg: the calf prettily turned, the stockings, cotton or wool ruched around the ankle in a bunch.