‘It’s as I’ve said to you before, Madame. We shall have to make you an honorary member of the force. I’m only sorry I haven’t been able to help you more here, and with the waif. The baby must be a great worry, fine little chap though he is.’
‘Ah that, Inspector…’ She downed her coffee in a gulp and shook her head. A bittersweet expression settled on her lips. ‘I’m happy to say our waif is now only half a waif. His father, who is known to me, has now come forwards. In private, of course.’
Fréteval, where the doddering priest who had known even Marguerite’s long dead mother presided, was a flat, grey town, not really much more than a sprawling village with a smattering of old stone streets. It was served, however, by a smart, well-painted station, part of the Republic’s attempt to bring the countryside into the present. It was overlooked by a hill where the ruin of a hulking fortress marked the passage of the Lionheart.
The church was a plain, grey affair, stripped of its ornament by the Revolution, though large enough on the inside to hold a capacious congregation. It also had beautiful stained-glass windows through which the light glowed in a rainbow of colour over motes of dust. Two old women in identical rough serge dresses were sweeping out the area in front of the linen-clad altar with straw brooms. Marguerite watched them whipping up dust. The priest’s handmaidens, she found herself thinking. All the humility was with the women who served the church. She walked over to them. Jeanne, whom she had decided needed an outing, was right behind her.
‘Do you know where I could find Père François, Mesdames?’
The two women looked up at her, then at each other. The one on the left murmured toothlessly. ‘I know where. But I wouldn’t if I were you. Find him, I mean.’
‘Why not?’
The women looked at each other again and now the other one spoke, tugging at her kerchief. ‘He’s out of sorts, Ma’am. Better not to speak to him when he’s out of sorts.’
‘What has made him out of sorts?’
The women shrugged simultaneously. ‘Maybe it was the girl who tried to run away again.’
‘She only wanted me to post a letter. It’s the third time she’s tried.’
‘A girl?’
‘Yes, Yvette he calls her.’
Marguerite stood very still. A long sigh escaped her. A part of her had still been afraid. Afraid that the girl might be dead – as dead as Danuta the Dancer in that wet wood.
‘And did you post the letter?’
‘No, Ma’am. He took it away. Took it straight out of my hand. Poor little thing isn’t looking too well with all that fasting, either. I told him. But he doesn’t listen. Not any more. And he doesn’t see either. Sees less than my Pierre when he went off to meet his maker. He lost his specs ages ago. Broke them deliberately if you ask me.’
‘And he called me Agathe the other day, when he knows perfectly well that I’m Marie. I’ve been doing for him long enough,’ the other woman grumbled. ‘And for the one who died before him. Time they sent us a younger man.’
‘I fear I shall have to see him before that happens. Where do I go, Mesdames?’
They glanced at each other, shrugged and pointed to a door on the side. ‘If you don’t find him, go up the stairs and across the hall to the house.’
Marguerite found Père François in his office. It was littered with paper and bits of leftover food. To the side of his desk there stood a pew, and above it a great wooden carving of a tortured Christ. More worryingly, in what looked like an umbrella stand she spied an assortment of rods, thongs, whips and crops that made her think of a medieval flagellant’s armoury, or one of those terrifying dungeons she had heard of in the centre of Paris where macabre practices were indulged in for sexual purposes. Pain for humbling the body, eradicating the shame and sin of pleasure, and pain for producing that very pleasure: the mysteries her fellow beings provided never ceased to astonish her.
Père François, who failed to recognise her even when she had stated her name several times, was no less of a puzzle. He receded behind his desk and pointed an accusing finger at her. ‘Temptress,’ he muttered, beneath his breath, and when she tried to remind him that she was her pious mother’s daughter, and he had seen her not so long ago at the château, he flapped back and forth across the small space like some deranged bird.
His hold on lucidity was even more tenuous, though a momentary light flickered in his watery eyes when she said, enunciating with great clarity, that she was looking for Yvette Branquart.
‘Cheating strumpet,’ he squawked. ‘She fled. Left us. She’s sinful. Damned.’
‘Are you certain, mon père? I was told by your Church associates that you were holding her here. Holding her sister, in fact, whom you have mistaken for her.’
The hollow face struck her as a death’s mask, its empty stare inhuman. She looked down at the desk and there, lying on top of a prayer book amidst the litter, saw an envelope in Martine’s handwriting, addressed to Celeste Delmas at La Rochambert. It was the letter the cleaners had mentioned. She whipped it off the table and slipped it inside her cape.
‘Well, mon père?’
The man didn’t answer. He was looking at her with a stricken expression, as if she were the incarnation of the whore of Babylon.
The old man was clearly demented. His superiors must have been shielding his lapses for some time. A flame of anger leapt in her.
‘I shall just go and fetch her and take her home, mon père. This is no place for a frail young woman. For one thing, it’s exceedingly cold.’
As she closed the door behind her, she saw the accusatory finger pointed at her once more, accompanied this time by a mumbled Latin incantation.
She shuddered. The man might be deranged, but the force of that finger, held aloft in the gesture of some medieval inquisitor, still touched her. She moved away quickly as if his invisible minions might fly after her.
She had no clear idea where she was heading. The letter might point a direction. Or the women in the church. She only hoped Martine wasn’t being held in some freezing dungeon in accordance with the man’s hoary fantasies. Halfway down the sombre corridor, light poured in from a high window. She paused and tore open the envelope.
The letter brought a chill with it that was colder than the frigid quarters. She hurried towards the church, almost colliding with Jeanne as she went.
‘I’ve found her, Madame. I’ve found her. Upstairs. All the way upstairs. In the attic. I’m sorry if I was snooping … but I just thought, if there was a maid, like me, we could chat, and instead I heard this crying. Martine. I called to her. But she’s locked in, Madame, I don’t know how we’ll get her out. Truly I don’t.’
Jeanne, too, was in tears by the time she had finished her report.
Marguerite soothed her and went to find the women who were cleaning the church. She hoped they were still there. She realised that her hands were trembling. Not fear, no, she told herself. She could overpower that old man if she had to. But out of rage. A burning rage about the abuses the hierarchy shielded. She remembered now that her father, way back when, had already complained of the power of the clergy in the countryside. The corruptions of power.
Women were a negligible breed for so many of these cassocked men who took their cue from St Paul. They were mere vessels to be filled. Filled with whatever ideas they chose. Or more bodily matter, if ideas weren’t in the offing. Even Olivier, under their influence, had only had a momentary compunction about using her in the lowest manner.
And the maid Louise, too – a vessel with a twin use, but still without mind or soul as far as he was concerned.
By the time Marguerite found the two cleaners, hanging up their aprons in a nether room, they would have had to possess the strength of Hercules to refuse her the key to the room in which Martine was kept.
When she and Jeanne opened it to release the girl, she stared at them as if they might be apparitions invoked by her prayer. Martine was kneeling in front of a small crucifix. Her e
yes were bruised, red-rimmed, her nose pinched. Her mouth opened, at first to make no sound and then only a whispered query.
‘Madame?’
Marguerite helped her up, and feeling her solidity the girl threw her arms first around her, then around Jeanne.
‘My deliverers,’ she murmured, then in a movement that Marguerite could read only as guilt, crossed herself quickly.
They met no one, either on the stairs or in the hall or in the darkened corridor that led past the priest’s study. In the church, people were beginning to gather for the afternoon Mass and they slipped out of the side door to make their way round to the waiting carriage. It was only as Georges was helping Martine up the steps that Père François emerged from the church. He was breathing heavily. He watched Martine’s receding figure with open-mouthed disbelief. Like some Jeremiah, he raised an admonitory fist in the air. Then his face seemed to cave in on itself and crumble, leaving only a shrunken old man in a cassock.
‘Yvette,’ he wailed, his arms now stretched before him like a supplicant’s. ‘Yvette. No, you mustn’t. You mustn’t go.’
Martine hesitated. For a moment, it was as if the voice of the pitiful old man calling for her from the wide arched doors of the church might pull her back into her imprisonment. Her body strained towards her jailor. Her eyes grew too big for her face. They yearned towards the priest with a feverishness that looked very like love, a kind of uncanny love. And indeed, there was the same intensity in the old priest’s face, a father in more than name, perhaps, losing a daughter whom he had held in a tortuous captivity that was also a closeness.
Marguerite shook away her fascination, climbed in quickly with Jeanne, blocked the man’s view, and ordered Georges to hurry.
Throughout the journey homewards, Martine wept soundlessly and clung to Marguerite’s hand, as if to let go would condemn her to an inferno reserved for the most atrocious of sinners.
At last, when they reached the château, the girl seemed to shake herself internally.
‘I am sorry, Madame. So sorry for the trouble I have caused. So very sorry.’
‘Don’t worry about it, Martine. You’re safe and you’re forgiven. We don’t need to talk about it now. You need rest. A bath, sleep. Some food, perhaps.’
At the mention of food, Martine’s hand flew to her mouth. A retching she tried to hide overtook her.
‘Didn’t he let you eat?’ Marguerite whispered. She put her arm round the girl and drew her close. Her shoulders were as thin as a child’s.
‘He’s right, Madame. I’ve been so bad. So many sins. Penance. I had to do penance. I’m dirty. So dirty. That’s why I can’t find Yvette. That’s why she went off.’ She was whimpering, a beaten animal, forced into a litany.
‘Hush.’ Marguerite tilted Martine’s face towards her and brought the restless vagueness of her eyes into focus. ‘You’re not bad, Martine. Whatever you might have done can probably be remedied. Everyone makes mistakes. It doesn’t make them bad or dirty. Père François may not be the best judge of what mistakes are. He’s very old now. In his dotage.’
The girl focused for a moment, then fell back into her haunted emptiness. It was as if she’d been drugged. Or hypnotised. Hypnotised in the way the famous Charcot had hypnotised his hysterics. Marguerite recognised the look.
She patted the girl’s thin hand. ‘Rest now, Martine. You’re safe. Safe.’ She paused, then hurried on. ‘He thought you were your sister, didn’t he, Martine? He thought you were Yvette. She must have confessed to him. Confessed something he thought very bad. But you’re not your sister, as responsible as your love for her might make you feel. Do you understand that, my dear?’
Over the next days, the account that emerged of Martine’s kidnapping made Marguerite rage. Old Père François had put the poor young woman through purgatory. Somewhere in her trajectory, Yvette must have confessed to him her rape by Napoléon Marchand and was therefore doomed in the old man’s jaundiced view, through no act of her own. Mistaken for her sister, Martine’s never-to-be-expiated penance was to fast and pray, to wear a hair shirt and flagellate herself before the priest’s eyes before bedtime. All this had not only eaten away at the girl’s body but begun to tug at her mind. She had taken on the priest’s estimate of herself, had lost her bearings; had become, in some measure, his parrot, a poor, frail, battered thing.
After an initial visit from Dr Labrousse, who was tentative towards Marguerite and tender with Martine, Marguerite urged the girl into health with the only tools she knew – rest, good food, fresh air and plenty of conversation. There was also time with little Gabriel, who was the only person regularly able to draw Martine’s smile. She seemed to blossom in his trust. As for Marguerite’s assurance that she was now almost certain they would soon find Yvette, Martine paid it little attention. She didn’t want to think. Or maybe she needed to put some distance between the young woman Père François had conjured up for her as her sister and the Yvette she remembered.
Marguerite, too, needed the breathing space. Another matter had urgently to be contended with, much as she might secretly like to delay it. Olivier was growing impatient for the adoption and Gabriel’s baptism to go ahead. And Madame Germaine had come good with an address for Louise Bertin, who now went by her stepfather’s name of Limbour.
Marguerite stared at the piece of paper with the Blois address and wondered what impact meeting the woman Olivier had bedded would have on her future. Louise Limbour. Little Gabriel’s mother.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The morning dawned clear, with a warm, tantalising breeze that sang of spring. Marguerite took it as a good sign, though she wasn’t yet certain what good might mean in the present circumstance. She dressed simply – a small, high-piled hat, a striped skirt with a lace-trimmed bodice, her auburn cloak with its black trim – and had already climbed into the carriage when she saw Paul Villemardi racing towards her. He opened the door.
‘May I accompany you, Madame? I’m told you’re going to Blois. I have an errand to run. And Olivier said I might be of some assistance to you.’
‘Did he?’
Olivier, it seemed, wanted his spies with her.
Villemardi climbed in beside her before she could think of a suitable excuse.
‘I can see from her face that Madame would rather I minded my own business today. I promise to be as silent as Madame wishes. And to leave her quite alone when she so desires.’ He turned an infectious grin on her. His eyes twinkled beneath the unruly fringe of hair.
He was making himself irresistible, Marguerite thought. There was little point resisting. She returned his smile, but refused the offer of conversation.
On the terraces, a caped Celeste was manoeuvring little Gabriel’s pram through the doors of the house that Armand held open for them. She wondered if Louise would want to come and visit her child. What might she feel about another woman taking her place as the boy’s mother?
The more Marguerite focused on it, the odder her position in relation to the child became.
The adoption of a foundling, its origins unknown to all, would have been a simple matter. But here, she was being asked to take on the role of stepmother to her husband’s child, yet the child’s real mother wasn’t dead and would soon be known to her.
She didn’t want to dislike her. With painful honesty, Marguerite realised she didn’t even really want to meet her. But she had to know how the young woman felt about giving up Gabriel. And somehow a letter wouldn’t be enough. Or maybe she was, after all, more curious than she liked to admit, even to herself.
Marguerite tried to imagine exactly how Louise had gone about abandoning the babe. Had she watched and waited for Olivier to turn up, made certain he had the basket in hand before running off? Had the day had fleet clouds like these, creating shadows on the hills? How and when had she let Olivier know the child was his? Could the girl write? Had there been a go-between, someone in the house who knew that Olivier was growing attached to the child? All these questions and
others coursed through her mind while they rattled towards Blois.
She watched Villemardi covertly. At first she had thought he was the girl’s seducer. But no, no, he must have been the go-between. That’s why he was here. Here with her now on this lengthy trek to the royal city. Of course. Her glimmering but constant sense that she was somehow at the centre of an invisible cabal came to the forefront of her mind.
In profile, the sculptor’s face had a feline aspect. She was surprised she hadn’t noticed it before. What she had been aware of were his fine features, their delicacy atop that solid, peasant’s body. She stared at him. It came to her like a shock of ice water on a hot day that she had got things all wrong. Because Villemardi had been so seductive, so beguiling towards her, it had deflected her. She had failed to take on board that it was he who was or at least had been Olivier’s lover. It made complete sense. Villemardi had been Olivier’s lover until Père Benoit arrived on the scene with his rather different ideas. That was why the sculptor had such animosity for the curé, and why Olivier was so torn about sending him away. She had been utterly blind.
Had she failed to pick up the cues because she simply didn’t want to see them? She had no more wanted to identify the sculptor’s bond to her husband than Olivier had wanted to recognise her in the muddy-faced Antoine. Surfaces, anticipation, habit – all had played their part.
‘So, Monsieur Villemardi, you feel Louise would talk to me more easily with you there?’ Marguerite now forced a conversation.
He shrugged. Gave her the benefit of his velvet eyes. ‘Olivier thinks so. And who am I to question Olivier’s assumptions? I’m a mere bit player in his grand design.’
‘Come, come, Monsieur Villemardi. I have never known you to be quite so self-effacing.’
‘Then you don’t know me well,’ he said, suddenly rude. A moment later, he was contrite. ‘Forgive me. Perhaps I’m looking forward to this interview even less than you are. It brings back a painful period.’
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