‘That dolt was waiting for me. He took me by surprise.’
The inspector rubbed the back of his head. He looked shamed and angry by turn. ‘I suppose he thought the horse would run off with me.’
‘Thank our lucky stars, he didn’t. He was probably waiting for my mare, who was still tethered.’
‘And you, Madame, are you all right?’
Marguerite nodded. ‘Well, at least we know what we’re up against now, Inspector.’
‘We’ve got our culprit. I’ll wager a proper exploration of the tunnels will lead us to Martine, as well.’
‘And to Amandine Septembre. The only problem is I don’t altogether see what ties P’tit Ours to the dancer. Nor what his motive might be for killing the man on the tracks as well. And what of Yvette? Has he had her buried underground all these months?’
The inspector shrugged and shook his head reflectively. ‘The thing is, Madame, with these brutes, it’s easy enough. He might have killed out of simple jealousy, just like that, a moment’s rage. Let’s hope he’s sweet enough on your Martine for that not to happen – certainly not while he’s got her locked up.’
Marguerite winced. ‘Or maybe, Inspector, he doesn’t need a motive. He’s working for someone. And that’s the very someone we didn’t find at home on our last visit.’ She pointed past the trees, into the distance where Napoléon Marchand’s house lay.
‘That’s possible, too.’ The inspector was rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. ‘Yes. We’ll pay a visit to Marchand as soon as I’ve contacted the police in Montoire.’
‘You remember, P’tit Ours’s mother talked about the old master corrupting him. The old master whose portrait has disappeared from their hall, alongside that of the relative he will certainly now identify for us.’
‘The relative he had killed,’ the inspector finished for her. ‘Or killed himself. I need to go to Montoire, Madame. I need to send some telegrams to Martinique urgently.’
‘But Inspector, surely you need to rest first, to have your head seen to?’
He shook it, to prove it was still in operation. As if the gesture had reminded him of something, he dug abruptly into his pocket. Relief flooded his features. He brought out his little notebook. It now contained an address in Martinique. That would certainly speed their searches.
Marguerite had only been back in the château for some three minutes when Jeanne rushed towards her. The maid’s look of astonishment reminded her that she was not in a fit state for general inspection.
‘Monsieur has been asking for you, Madame. He’s in his study.’
The way the girl looked down at her feet and fingered the edges of her white apron indicated that Monsieur was hardly at his sweetest. Marguerite, had she allowed herself the anxiety of anticipation, would have expected no less.
‘Thank you, Jeanne. Please tell Monsieur I shall be with him in an hour. Then come and help me change.’
Marguerite was as good as her word. There was little point in putting off the inevitable moment. And her mind, now, was filled with so much else that confronting her husband about last night’s ordeal seemed almost trivial in comparison. Martine was gone, her disappearance a matter of life and death given the dangers this afternoon had revealed.
In fact, as she made her way towards Olivier’s study, she decided to pretend that nothing much was amiss in her relations with him. There would be time enough for all that. She didn’t want to be laid even lower by the sharpness of his tongue and the malice he could unleash. And Olivier could hardly be planning to make his nighttime visits a regular occurrence. He and the curé had made their point. In the light of day, it was clear she was something of an unhappy bystander whose body was needed but whose presence was superfluous to the act of penance being undergone.
She forced away the waves of shame that coursed through her, compelled herself to knock.
At Olivier’s ‘come in’, she opened the door, her little speech about Martine’s absence and the need to find her already on her lips.
‘Ah, Marguerite, good.’ Olivier smiled at her with a look that appeared to convey simple innocent pleasure.
It surprised her as much as Paul Villemardi’s presence at her husband’s side. The relief she felt indicated to her the depth of her prior fear.
She greeted them both. They were standing on the same side of Olivier’s large mahogany desk, looking at something. Light streamed through the window above, illuminating them with a biblical cast, as if they had stepped out of some minor Dutch master’s scene of Saint Jerome addressing a follower.
‘I hope Jeanne explained.’
‘Yes, yes. About Martine. I imagine she met someone to her liking last night and decided on a little escapade.’
Marguerite stepped back with something like shock at this casualness. ‘I doubt that somehow,’ she said in a low voice.
‘That’s because you always think the worst first. She’s young, after all. I saw her talking with Monsieur Bonpierre’s son.’
‘Did you? And you really think she went off with him, went off without telling any of us. It would be rather irresponsible of her.’
‘My dear, you understand young women these days far better than I do. Perhaps she couldn’t find you. Didn’t want to tell a servant for fear of gossip. What do I know? She might already have had a flirtation with the boy. You told me she was from the region.’
Marguerite didn’t reply.
‘But it’s not because of her that I asked you to come here. I thought you’d like to see these. My footman has just picked them up from Legrand’s studio in La Châtre.’
Marguerite bent towards the desk and saw a sheaf of photographs laid out in what was evidently an order. At first she couldn’t make out what she was seeing. Then it came to her that these were aerial shots, marvels of the new technology, taken during Olivier’s balloon trip. As her eyes grew accustomed to a perspective that shrank everything yet simultaneously introduced a panoramic vista, she grew excited. ‘I’ve never seen the country like this. Never. La Rochambert is so flat, like an ancient earthwork. And the lines of the trees, so strange, just a blur of shadow. And everything’s so … so close together.
‘They’re beautiful,’ Paul Villemardi murmured. ‘The photograph will displace us all.’
‘But you use three dimensions, Paul. Not the same thing. Not in any way.’
‘None the less.’
‘Is that why you chose to work in sculpture rather than paint? Because of photography?’ Marguerite asked.
The sculptor shrugged. ‘Not altogether, but perhaps. Next time,’ he addressed Olivier again, ‘I’d like to come up with you.’
‘So would I,’ Marguerite heard herself say, then clamped her lips shut. How could she have said that? Let herself be carried away by the excitement of the images like that? Olivier would think she acquiesced to his brutal behaviour.
‘I’ll arrange it.’ She could feel his eyes on her back.
‘The camera’s at a tilt, isn’t it?’ She changed the subject. ‘It makes me feel quite dizzy. And this field here, just to the north of the house, is at a strange angle.’
‘It takes a while to learn how to decipher these images. I think I’ll mount them. Put them up in the hall as a sequence. You see, here, here is the large wood and the river, just a swirl of ribbon, really. And the vineyard. Like a bit of corduroy.’
Marguerite stared. She was beginning to find her bearings amidst these oddly abstract shadows that gave only the contours of shape. Like looking at a puzzle or a set of abstract forms. The curl of the river, the look round a smudge of an island, the wood she had walked in during her misadventure … Her eyes raced. No, she couldn’t distinguish a clearing. But the wall, she was certain the wall she had seen was there, and beyond it, at a good remove, a house that resembled a flattened U from the sky.
‘Where’s that?’ she asked innocently.
‘That’s a house, quite a big one. I’m not sure exactly where. What I should really do
is get Monsieur Lemaître to identify all this. Since he’s always up there, he’ll know. Then we can give the photographs captions.’
‘Excellent idea,’ Paul Villemardi said without much enthusiasm. ‘I think I’ll get back to work.’
‘Before you go, Monsieur Villemardi,’ Marguerite stopped him. ‘Did you by any chance speak to Martine last night? Overhear anything?’
‘Your Durand has already asked me. None too politely, either, I should point out. He couldn’t have been less polite if he was accusing me of tying the girl up in my studio and covering her in plaster.’
‘I apologise for him. The police have their ways.’
The man bowed. A little smile played over his lips.
‘The only thing of interest I managed to notice last night was that our dear Père Benoit was in a terrible temper. What did you say to him, Olivier, to get him so worked up? I would have thought God didn’t allow it in his intermediaries.’
‘I didn’t notice.’ Olivier was curt. He tapped his fingers on his desk, willing Villemardi to leave. Marguerite was about to follow after, when he called her back.
‘There was something I wanted to mention to you, Marguerite.’ The face he turned on her was a mask of pleasantness. But the crack in his voice belied both the importance of what he was saying and his anxiety about her answer. ‘The notary is drawing up the adoption papers for Gabriel. Charles Gabriel de Landois is the name we approved, remember? He’ll be coming round with them next week. And then there will be the baptism. I’m assuming that will be convenient for you.’
‘If it isn’t, I’ll give you good warning, Olivier.’
She could see his instant recoil. The façade of courtesy cracked.
As she pulled the door shut behind her, she heard his slightly menacing, ‘I trust that won’t be necessary.’
NINETEEN
The morning brought a message from the chief inspector, who had spent the night at the inn in Montoire. He had been too tired to return after the misadventures of the day, and he wanted a response to his telegram. A visit paid by two constables to Napoléon Marchand’s house just outside Troo had yielded nothing. The man wasn’t there. Nor was P’tit Ours in either house. Durand was insisting that a watch be put on old Marchand’s house, and had also communicated with the prefecture in Tours to ask them to pay a visit to the man’s address in that city. He would write to her again later, if anything turned up. She was to spend the day resting. That was an order from the Paris police. If he, himself, was anything to judge by, she was probably more tired than she knew.
Marguerite stepped into her bath. The steaming water was scented with rose and lime blossom. Madame Germaine had supplied the mixture days back, along with the poultice for her wound. She had also told her to breathe deeply of the steam, to let the brew seep into her body until the water grew tepid. She had promised it would relieve her aches.
Marguerite hoped it would work on her new ones as well. The scramble up the hillock had resulted in more bruises and scrapes.
She had secretly hoped that the day would have produced a message from Martine. But nothing had come. She cursed the fact that the area hadn’t yet been wired for telephone. It slowed everything about their investigations. Perhaps it would also slow the speed of impending disaster. It might give them the time of a reprieve in which to snatch friends from the scythe of death, so busy of late in these valleys.
Something niggled at the back of her mind as she completed her toilette, something about Martine she sensed she had forgotten. She went over the girl’s behaviour the night of the party step by step, including the flirtation she hadn’t seen with this Bonpierre lad, which Olivier had cattily referred to. It came to her, while Jeanne helped her with the corset she would have liked to refuse, that even if their principle suspect were P’tit Ours, someone needed to go and interview the people Martine had talked to that night – in particular Père François, the old priest who had so upset her. He might have said more to Martine than she had let on. She would have to ask Olivier where the man could be found.
Olivier. She stole a quick look at her body and shivered. She still didn’t want to confront all that. Yet thoughts of rape had punctuated her night with a terror greater than that of the tunnels. She had imagined Leda and Europa. She had been visited by a cascade of antique nymphs taken against their will by divine beasts, terrifying creatures who drove them mad or in turn transformed them metamorphosed them into trees or pools – so that they were no longer thinking, feeling humans or nymphs, but parts of unspeaking, only semi-sentient nature. Vegetable or animal matter.
Marguerite refused their muteness and suffering for herself. She tried to tell herself that whatever had happened with Olivier was not really happening to her. Any other woman would have done as well.
But wasn’t that the very nub of the horror? The shame. This trampling of individuality. The sense of being no one in particular yet somehow chosen by fate. Olivier was the incarnation of her brutal fate, cruel and smiling by turn.
She wondered how he could live with himself and this new series of lies that pretended that he had somehow changed, when the look in his eyes the night he had followed after the musician proved altogether differently. She didn’t know whether she loathed him more for his attempted rape or for lying to himself and pulling on the cloak of supposed virtue the curé had supplied.
She hadn’t always loathed Olivier. At the beginning, she had been half in love with him. No, that too was a lie. She had been wholly in love with him, as her seventeen-year-old self then understood the matter – a matter influenced by her father and her great aunt’s wishes, but also by Olivier’s charm, his knowledge of the world, his sharp intelligence. To him, then, she had probably seemed not all that far away from a boy – a boy who had learned to wear dresses.
Not enough of a boy, however, for he lost interest in her soon enough except in the most superficial of ways. He continued to pay attention to her appearance. He loved her to look beautiful. He loved to dress her, to be there when the couturier paraded his models, to suggest a fabric here, a snip and pleat there, a row of buttons, a smattering of lace or braid. He loved to choose the evening’s jewels for her, her hats, her gloves, even her tea gowns with their peacock colours. When her façade particularly pleased him, his eyes shone – as if he had given to the world a masterwork of his own creation.
If she hadn’t misunderstood his sexual abandonment of her, hadn’t imagined a mistress and in her youthful ardour followed him into the brothel’s depths, who knew but that they might still be one of those fashionable couples of a certain age who pursued life amicably enough, both together and separately, in Saint-Germain-des-Près. Couples who pretended that their sexual inclinations were neither more outré nor more limited than everyone else’s.
But she had been too naive, too eager for truth, too scandalised and uncomprehending when she had ferretted it out in that tawdry bordello where the boys and the men met. She didn’t regret her detective work. Not at all. Nor did she regret the separation she had forced with the threat of blackmail. The independent life suited her. Before this visit, she would have thought Olivier would have acknowledged that it suited him too.
Now everything had changed for the worse. Olivier was obviously struggling to redefine the accommodation they had reached. He wanted to redefine it in the name of some mad political aspiration born out of vanity and boredom. Or delusion. His was a punitive religious delusion. The child was part of it all.
She paused, stumbled in her thoughts. She saw her eyes reflected in the mirror – large, clear, golden, flecked with darker tints, searching. They were telling her she was blind. Stupid. Why hadn’t she seen it before? Olivier was communicating something with his brutal act. He was telling her that, even now, he was capable of bedding a woman. He was telling her, however covertly, however subterranean his manner, that the babe he had named Gabriel was his.
Yes. Of course. Wasn’t that what Madame Solange had intimated when she had talke
d about the brazenness of the servant girls? And Villemardi … He had suggested much the same thing about the girl Louise – and he knew her well, after all. She had been his model. Marguerite had misinterpreted him. She had assumed the standard story of the artist and his model. She had assumed he was deflecting attention from his own interest in the girl by generalising it. What was it he had said? All bees were attracted to wayside flowers.
In her mind, she had gone through all the men in the house – except Olivier. In her knowledge, Olivier’s tastes tended towards the exotic – towards the hothouse rather than the wayside. But perhaps this time, something had taken him towards the wayside.
She remembered that conversation now in its fullness. Was it Villemardi or one of the servants who had also hinted that Louise was the kind of young woman who, if she found herself with child, would have little hesitation in confronting the father squarely?
This was precisely what the girl had probably done. In one way or another she had brought the babe to Olivier, and Olivier knew it.
Villemardi had told the inspector he was going to Blois and would try once more to track this Louise down. At least, unlike the inspector, he knew who he was looking for. Marguerite must prod him.
She didn’t realise she was standing there, at the window, her nails biting into her palms, her eyes unfocused, until a horse came into view. It emerged from the poplars in a flare of red and white like a dream mare bearing a ghostly Napoléonic soldier.
As the pair drew closer Marguerite recognised one of Danuta’s horses. The man riding him was more difficult to identify, but when she did so she raced for the stairs.
She didn’t wait for the servants to gawp at him and give him a difficult time of it.
‘Mr Rama,’ she said, as soon as the door was open. ‘How good to see you.’ She addressed him in English.
The snake charmer bowed with military precision and thrust an envelope towards her. ‘I have been asked by Chief Inspector Durand of the judiciare to deliver this to you, Madame.’
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