In the carriage, Marguerite quietly gave the girl her version of events. She told her that because the Reverend Mother was the sister of the very Monsieur Marchand, now dead, who had played such havoc with the course of both their lives, she had been over-ardent, indeed excessive in her relations with Béatrice. Sister Constance had been worried about the fate of her child under the Reverend Mother’s aegis. She was also worried for her. Thus, it was best for her to leave the closed world of the order, where the Reverend Mother yielded too much power.
She said no more than that. She realised that, whatever her knowledge of the events that had shaped Yvette’s life, she really knew nothing of this troubled young creature. She had never heard her speak. Until now, she had rarely given a thought to how much the sound of a person’s voice played into her sense of their character.
On her instructions, the carriage took them first to Blois. They got out in the market square, which thrummed with morning activity. Fruit and vegetables grew into piles and pyramids before their eyes. Servants and housewives bustled and bargained. Chickens squawked in their cages. The cheeses competed with goggle-eyed fish in filling the morning air with musty scents and stronger reeks. After the austerity of the convent, with its punishing prioress, this sensuous abundance had a thrilling everydayness about it. She would have liked to saunter, to shop, to buy and taste, to bask in the ordinary.
Yvette/Béatrice had a frightened air about her, as if the assault on the senses was more than the thinness of her skin could permit. Marguerite hurried her across the square and downhill towards the blacksmith’s forge. They had all but reached it, when a woman walking briskly in the opposite direction lifted her eyes from the cobblestones to stop and stare at them.
‘Béatrice? Béatrice … is it you? You’ve come out.’ Louise Limbour flung her arms around her friend. Tears and words poured out together.
‘I’m so glad. I’m so glad. But has she told you?’ Louise’s eyes darted up towards Marguerite and gave her a look that was both mistrusting and fearful. ‘I had to, Béatrice, I had to give him away. I couldn’t keep him. Not at my stepfather’s. I would have had to explain how I had met you. Then everything would have come out and he would have killed me. Or burnt me. Branded me with his pokers. So I couldn’t. Couldn’t keep the babe. But he’s safe. I’m certain of that. I gave him to the curé, to Père Benoit.’
Louise paused to look around her, adjusted her bonnet, then urged a confused Béatrice up the street, further away from the blacksmith’s shop.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Béatrice’s voice cracked with bewilderment and disuse. It was a thin reed of a voice, like the girl herself.
Louise looked around her once more, cast her eyes up at the windows overlooking the narrow street. She wound her arm through her friend’s and hurried her into the hubbub of the market square.
Marguerite followed quickly. She needed to hear every word of this.
‘Your baby. Frère Michel brought him to me. A bonny little thing. But I couldn’t keep him. I gave him to the curé.’
‘You gave him to the curé,’ Béatrice repeated like an echo.
‘Yes. I took him to the church. I wish you’d been there with me. I told him. Told him everything. Almost like a confession, but without the box. I begged for mercy. For both of us. I told him that the baby had been born to a friend of mine and his father was this rich man called Marchand, and that Père Benoit might take the babe to him. Or find another suitable home.’
‘What?’ Béatrice grabbed at Louise’s arm and made her stop.
‘Yes, I thought that would be for the best. I know the curé, you see. I knew him from a post I had.’ She stole a look at Marguerite, as if to estimate her intelligence. It was a look that spoke of independence and a certain effrontery. It was the look she had imagined in the Louise she had been told about, who was quite different from the crying woman she had met in the chocolate factory.
‘Yes, I took him to the curé and I told him everything. But I don’t think he believed me, you know. He thought I was lying. ’Cause he lies all the time himself.’
‘Lying?’
‘Yes,’ Louise suddenly giggled. Her voice took on a lilt of scoffing triumph. ‘He thought I’d made up all that stuff about you and that the child was really mine. And his. He patted my hand in that way he has and I could see … could see exactly what he was thinking. It was his. He thought I was covering up for both of us. Serves him right.’
She laughed again and this time Marguerite joined her. She could imagine the curé’s preening look. The two young women stared at her.
‘No, I really don’t mind that you’ve been to bed with Père Benoit, if you didn’t mind, Louise.’
Louise looked a little put out. ‘Only now and again. And I was hardly in a position to mind.’
They had turned another corner and were walking downhill now. Respectable, clustered houses pushed in on them with the pressure of ears attuned to scandal. Louise lowered her voice.
‘You won’t tell anyone, will you? Please. And it wasn’t my doing. Père Benoit has ways of being persuasive. He ruts like any other man. Never mind the cassock.’
Marguerite smiled. She hadn’t considered that. Though she had wondered whether the piece of black cloth she had found in the woods might indeed have come from a cassock. There were ways in which she was more naive than this slip of a young woman who had been to a different school of life.
‘Don’t worry, Louise. I won’t talk.’
‘So my baby is alive. Alive and in the hands of a curé.’ Béatrice’s face wore all the traces of someone who could make no sense of a world turned topsy-turvy.
‘I didn’t want to say anything to contradict the curé. He’s so vain. I knew he’d find the best possible home for your poor tyke if he thought it was his. I knew Marchand meant less than nothing to you. Worse than nothing. A blot. And the curé, it seems, had set his sights even higher.’
She shot a glance at Marguerite and started walking very quickly. Nothing was said until the river appeared before them, a vast artery, yellowy-grey in the morning light.
The girl stopped abruptly.
Along the river, workers were moving towards their places of employ. But Louise’s eyes were fixed on the clean water spewing out of the gutter, the rag that forced its direction.
‘I didn’t know he was going to choose your home. I didn’t, Madame. Believe me. Not until you said. It was only twice with Monsieur. He wasn’t really interested in me. It was only because you were always away.’
Marguerite nodded.
A barge hooted its passage. Fishermen heaved their catch on to the shore. A burly man in a bowler held up a pair of scales. A cat scooted past her, miaowing his passage to her skirts, only to wind his way downhill.
‘So you put the babe in a basket and took him to the river on Père Benoit’s instructions,’ Marguerite said softly.
‘No, Madame. No. I would never have done that. I wouldn’t be stupid enough to put a living child into the river. I just left him with Père Benoit. He promised to take care of everything. Everything. The next I heard was from you. That you had discovered a child. My child. You wouldn’t listen to the truth.’
‘I see. I am listening now. I hear you clearly, Louise. Thank you.’
The curé, it seemed, had ordered things in her husband’s life for far too long. He would have to go now. But it was best that Olivier himself saw to that.
Béatrice was clutching at her friend’s sleeve, her voice a plea. ‘I don’t understand. Where is my baby? Where is he? Why didn’t they tell me? Why didn’t mother superior tell me?’
‘They thought she would kill him.’ Louise was blunt. ‘I tried to tell you. Tell you she was too hard on you. All those beatings and scourgings. It wasn’t right. All you did was fall prey to a man. Jesus was kind to Mary Magdalene. There wasn’t the need for all that. She’s mad. Spent too long inside.’
Louise kissed her friend on both cheek
s and told her to come back and visit soon. There were plenty of jobs in the factory if she wanted one. Then, with a sudden shyness, she curtsied briefly towards Marguerite and rushed away.
Marguerite watched her, grateful for the clearer rendition of the state of things than she herself would have been able to offer.
THIRTY-TWO
They had all come to see her off. To kiss her goodbye. To hug. To thank. Even just to wave. It made her loath to leave. But the sky was so blue, so inviting. And the wind beckoned, its gusts strong, flapping at the ends of the linen they had draped over the long outdoor tables so that a parting toast could be raised to her, though it was still early morning.
There was Olivier, a little languid, but himself again in his yellow cravat and checked frock coat. He had returned to the vagaries of his own uncertain conscience, rather than the one awoken in him by the insidious and ambitious curé who had played to his vanity with controlling lies. The sculptor Villemardi was at his side. Both of them were talking, laughing, eyes and hands alight, wondering when she would come for more sittings, so that her likeness could become more like, wondering about a little sortie to Paris to see the latest work, wondering about a new crop for the far fields.
There were the sisters. Yvette with her cropped head and still painfully thin, as if the punishing regime imposed by the order had taken up permanent residence in her mind, as if her body were still sullied, a marionette separate from her being except when pain united them. Still, when she held Gabriel she looked down at him with a rapt expression. And Martine’s joy at finding her Yvette again was so great that Marguerite hoped it would breach her sister’s impermeability, which was both a strength and a kind of visceral loneliness. It reminded her that the girls were orphans, left motherless too soon, a semblance that had initially drawn her to Martine.
The babe wasn’t motherless. In fact he had now acquired several mothers, not to mention two godparents. He had been baptised as Gabriel Olivier Branquart by the bishop himself, whom Olivier had called in to lodge a plaint in his ear against their altogether unsatisfactory curé. Père Benoit had been quickly removed to unknown climes to avoid scandal.
In the role of godfather, Olivier rediscovered himself. He also discovered Amandine Septembre, who had won the hearts of everyone around her. She was holding Gabriel in her capacious arms now. The babe was staring at her with that gurgling and placid amazement which was always and ever his response to her voice, sung or spoken. It evidently tickled him in some deep region. Or maybe it was simply her vitality; it brimmed and billowed, inviting them all to come close. The child loved life.
Amandine had a plan for the sisters and herself. They were family, after all, she told them with her deep laugh – wasn’t Gabriel in fact her half-brother, which made Yvette a kind of aunt and her sister another kind. And as the eldest she had to look after them. She would be a rich woman soon enough, after that mischief-maker’s will came good. And his partner, Madame’s husband, that minuscule Monsieur Tellier she had met, seemed right enough. He was happier than all of the rest of them to have his erstwhile wife put away. He wanted Amandine to carry on with the Caribbean side of the business. She knew it well, but with her uncle gone she needed help. The sisters would help her. Hadn’t their family been in the trade, too? Or if Yvette preferred, she could train to teach. They would be well off by the standards of Martinique. This meant no one would think twice about Gabriel’s dead father.
Marguerite had applauded the plan and told them that, until their departure, they would have a home in La Rochambert. They could all keep Olivier company. He would miss the baby. As would she. But she was needed back in Paris.
She looked round at the gathered crowd and met Dr Labrousse’s eyes. He was talking to Madame Germaine and Martine, who was gazing wistfully at the returned-again, older sister she so plainly adored. Marguerite had a hunch about the doctor. She wouldn’t be surprised if he too one day set sail after the girls. As for dear Mr Rama, who was bowing to Yvette and asking after her health, he and his entourage had been busy repainting their wagons and preparing for a spring foray further south.
Marguerite smiled at them all as her pilot urged her into the basket of the great balloon. It was Olivier’s present to her. A flight to Tours, or near enough, from where she would take the train to Paris.
She stepped into the small wicker space, skirted the brazier, helped take in the ropes and sandbags despite her pilot’s admonition, and waved as they were unmoored. Waved to Madame Solange and her husband and plump Armand, and to Celeste, the wet nurse. Waved to all of them. She tried to keep her smile intact as the basket leapt and swung into the air, taking her stomach with it. She gripped the ropes and hung on. They were growing smaller and smaller, children all of them.
The wind streamed across her face. Her hair fluttered loose from its pins and hat. Her hands grew cold. The wonder of it began.
The trees seen from their webbed tops down looked like giant swaying creatures tied to the ground by sticks and longing to be set free. There was a green sheen to the earth, as if the colours of spring grew denser from above. Cows lolled as small as toys and La Rochambert began to take on the air of a dazzling white and perfectly carved playhouse for some doll-mad girl and her indulgent father.
Yes, Olivier had chosen her present well. She had been complaining of her sense that she had come to La Rochambert to enter some strange, hoary clime far from this new twentieth century, a space where medieval tortures and consciences abetted by ideas of sanctity were still at their destructive work and no one seemed to notice. A place where families were allowed to abuse and women were mistreated; where the Enlightenment had never taken place and the Republic might as well never have been born. All that, plus the murder of innocents. How could such a world still exist in the twentieth century?
Olivier had grinned his old world-weary grin and said he wouldn’t be all that surprised if it went on existing for quite a while. But if she was bent on change, she might like to run for office on a different ticket than the one he had aspired to.
She was a woman, she reminded him. She couldn’t even vote.
He was sorry about that, he said. But grateful that she had saved him from his own political ambitions. And rid him of the sombre eminence who had provoked them. As thanks, he would fly her out of here at the first opportunity.
She hadn’t taken his words literally.
Now she was floating like a soaring bird. Then rushing on a gust of wind. She clutched at the edge of the basket. Below her, she recognised the ivy-clad house she had first noticed in Olivier’s photographs: Beaumont, where P’tit Ours had bravely met his end defending his Amandine.
She said her goodbyes to him, too, and watched the distant roll of the land, the forest where she had found the body of Danuta the Dancer and been felled by Auguste, the strongman. The bulge of the hills was so minimal from here that perspectives were flattened, trees grew into hedges, the river into a strip of waving ribbon on patched, irregularly woven cloth. Suddenly she recognised Blois and, at its edge, the cluster of buildings where the sisters lived out their walled lives.
She let her eyes roam the horizon. She felt free up here. Light. Yes, she was flying. In this third month of the new century into which baby Gabriel had been born, Marguerite de Landois was flying. The world dipped and rushed towards her, then tilted and rushed away. Deep in her pocket, she fingered the letter from the other side of the ocean. It was a letter that made her spirits soar and billow and float. Soon, she might just follow them out over the Atlantic.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lisa Appignanesi OBE is a prize-winning novelist and writer. The former President of English PEN and Chair of the Freud Museum London, she is a Visiting Professor in Literature and the Medical Humanities at King’s College London. Her novels include The Memory Man (winner of Canada’s Holocaust Literature Prize) and Paris Requiem, the first novel in the Belle Époque trilogy. Her non-fiction includes the acclaimed Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women
and The Mind Doctors, Losing the Dead and Trials of Passion: In the Name of Love and Madness.
Other Books by Lisa Appignanesi
Novels
The Memory Man
Sanctuary
The Dead of Winter
The Things We Do for Love
A Good Woman
Dreams of Innocence
Memory and Desire
Paris Requiem
Non-Fiction
All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion
Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800
Freud’s Women (with John Forrester)
Losing the Dead
Simone de Beauvoir
The Cabaret
Femininity and the Creative Imagination: Proust, James and Musil
Trials of Passion: In the Name of Love and Madness
Edited Volumes
Fifty Shades of Feminism (with Rachel Holmes & Susie Orbach)
Free Expression is No Offence
The Rushdie File (with Sarah Maitland)
Dismantling Truth (with Hilary Lawson)
Postmodernism
Ideas from France: The Legacy of French Theory
Copyright
Arcadia Books Ltd
139 Highlever Road
London W10 6PH
www.arcadiabooks.co.uk
First published by Arcadia Books
Copyright © Lisa Appignanesi 2014
Lisa Appignanesi asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Sacred Ends Page 35
