The Secret of Provence House

by Aubrey Rhodes

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘We’re Catholics you see.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, slightly embarrassed, ‘that’s understandable.’

  Back at the house that night in her high wide bed, with the vast and wild countryside around her, and the thick dark sea in front of her, she relished her reprieve. She woke at dawn between linen sheets and worked on the translation.

  Chapter 34

  As we neared Sicily again, I wondered if Yeshua might regain a hold on life. It was my hope to try and reunite him with Daphne. But upon our arrival at the villa we learned that the Emperor Tiberius had recalled Claudius, Octavius’s father, to Rome, and Claudius had taken his entire household with him, including Daphne. Six servants of local origin were left behind to maintain and protect the property, plus a Roman associate who informed Octavius that his father had put the villa and all its land up for sale. Four days later, after cashing in my tin at a new market, one that produced a massive profit, the villa was mine.

  I decided to make my home here. I would never find a more beautiful place, one immeasurably closer to the mines, a place from which I could trade more profitably. I knew that Canlia would never adapt well to life in Jerusalem, and I hoped I might dissuade or at least delay Yeshua’s return as well. Octavius was pleased when I told him that he and his family would forever have a place here. I kept the servants but made few improvements. There was something about the old-fashioned style of the villa’s construction, its cracked tiles and fading murals, the black and white patio design dedicated to Neptune with his trident standing upon a dolphin that appealed to me and seemed appropriate for a man my age.

  Octavius maintained his battle-ready exercise regime and sought the company of other Romans in the area, and even found himself a young woman among them he thought to marry. Canlia, who was now the mistress of a fine house and estate, relaxed in the safety of my company. That was proof enough that I had made a wise decision. And at first, Yeshua seemed to make peace with his grief. Though he remained quiet and withdrawn, his physical appearance improved, and he took once again to wearing clean garments. A tranquil rhythm of living took hold of our lives as the horrors of the Belerion raid seemed finally behind us.

  Then, one evening, at the dinner hour, Yeshua was nowhere to be found, and recalling how he had gone missing here once before, I made my way up to the shrine to Minerva and there I discovered him looking out to sea.

  ‘Yeshua,’ I said to him. He turned and smiled at me.

  ‘Uncle,’ he replied.

  ‘The evening meal is served.’

  ‘I apologize uncle, but I am fasting.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, as a bad feeling entered my spirit, ‘that is something I should try more often. Giving one’s entrails a rest is a practice they appreciate.’

  ‘I am fasting for my Father, not my entrails.’

  He was seated on the edge of a low wall from where there was a commanding view. I settled myself beside him. ‘Your father is a Nazarene carpenter and as much as any man he values the sustenance to be had from a well-prepared meal.’

  ‘My Father is everywhere and only values what I am prepared to renounce.’

  Then he smiled at me again and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘this is not what you enjoy hearing from me. I know you had hoped to draw me away from this. And for a time, you succeeded. It started here.’

  ‘What started here?’

  ‘The straying from my path, my weakness, my capitulation to the life of the flesh.’

  ‘The flesh, entrails, and the rest, is all we have nephew. It is sad perhaps, but true.’

  ‘I know that is what you believe,’ he said. ‘I know you are angry with those who promise redemption in a world where terrible events take place each day. I know you think your view is stronger, that it reflects the heavens as they are and not as I know them to be. I know you think my beliefs are a weakness that proposes invisible explanations for earthly disappointments. Thus the fasting you see – to toughen me up.’

  I covered the hand he had placed on my shoulder with one of my own and said to him, ‘I only seek, for myself and for my loved ones – you among them Yeshua – peace and pleasure, escape from pain, acceptance of disappointment – to work as one must but to spend as much time as possible contemplating the sea like you are doing now, enjoying the scent of wild flowers, the curve and swell of a woman’s breast.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, looking away. ‘I know you uncle. I know you well, and I have tried your way, and I pray for you so that God can make room for your admirable stubbornness. My path is different. I strayed onto yours and lost my own and the terrible sign my Father sent to me, his rage at my abandonment of his will, has sent me back to Him to beg His forgiveness, and now a calm invades me as I see what I am meant to do. As I see who and why I am.’

  ‘Who are you Yeshua?’

  ‘I am who I am uncle, and I promise you, here and now – regardless of your thoughts and deeds – I promise you everlasting love in Heaven. I promise that to you and to Canlia and to the child she bears for you.’

  ‘You can promise such a thing?’

  He nodded his head. It was as if he was once again the proud and sullen adolescent I had led away from Nazareth.

  ‘And Octavius?’ I asked him. ‘Can you promise that to him?’

  ‘We shall have to see.’

  ‘These things you say dismay me,’ I said to him. ‘The whole purpose for this journey from its beginning was to show you a way out from these things that you say again now. I was so pleased when you married, and so wished your mother had been there.’

  ‘To savour your victory.’

  ‘To savour yours.’

  ‘And yet, had she been there and stayed on, she would have been violated and murdered.’

  ‘And resting no doubt with your Heavenly Father.’

  ‘You mock me,’ he said.

  ‘I am disappointed.’

  ‘You are angry with me.’

  ‘Because I love you, like you are my own son.’

  ‘You are a good man, uncle.’

  ‘And a sinner, according to you.’

  ‘As fine a sinner as ever there was. And far less than I myself have been.’

  And so it came about that he left me, left us. I had failed him and failed his mother and father. And to my great surprise and further woe, Octavius decided to go with him. In order to properly retire from his legion so that he night return and marry and settle nearby to us, he would have to return to Jerusalem. He also wished to communicate the news of Lucca’s death to their comrades still in service to the Emperor. But what most touched me with respect to his motives for returning, were the words he spoke to me the night before they departed.

  ‘Though grown into a man, Yeshua is still young in many ways,’ he said. ‘And he is not a fighter. I feel bound to complete our original agreement and would not feel right were he to sail off alone.’

  Canlia and I slept fitfully that night and many tears were shed the following morning. Yeshua placed his hand upon Canlia’s swollen abdomen, blessing the fruit of her womb. It was hard for me to let go of him after so much time together. It would have been far harder still had I known that the next time I would see him – thirteen years later, on the day of my arrival to Jerusalem – he would be hanging from a cross.

  Chapter 35

  She closed her laptop. The only noises she could hear came from the breaking waves of the Celtic Sea and a dripping faucet in her bathroom. A week earlier it would have been much the same, except Camilla would have been in her room down the hall. It seemed inconceivable to her that in only a single week, Camilla had died and been buried on the island of Mallorca, she had been to New York and back, had broken up with Nathan and started an affair with James.

  She remembered her promise to James to go and visit his mother’s grave. Though the elegant dowager was interred where she wished, next to her daughter in the town where she was born, the idea of it felt foreign and lo
nely to Laura. But she’d never had the opportunity to observe Camilla in the context of Deià. She had only known her, and briefly, there in Cornwall from whose soil the woman seemed to have sprung fully formed. Laura thought Camilla would have preferred to be buried along with ‘her line’ as she called it. But such perhaps had been the degree of misery the woman had gone through with her mother.

  She recalled the story Jean-Paul Bonnerive told her about Lorca’s father being buried in Westchester. She thought of her own mother buried in the Sacred Heart Cemetery, close to Gary Cooper’s grave in Southampton, Long Island. Where would Jean-Paul end up? For it would be soon. She had not been bold enough to ask. Where would she like to be buried, if at all? Against her will she imagined what those buried corpses would look like at that moment – the older ones reduced to bone and sagging clothing darkly stained, sealed within pitch-black, satin-lined coffins under the ground. Camilla’s body would still be relatively fresh, but soon it would begin to putrefy. The whole thing was brutal and ghastly. Cremation made more sense to her. But of course, sense had nothing to do with it, and she knew that to the dead the whereabouts or state of their remains had no meaning whatsoever. Once you were dead, one place or method was as good as another. The significance of one’s homeland or tribe lost all importance. It was only important to the living.

  The more she thought about this business of living and dying the crueller it seemed. Philosophers and psychiatrists, wise women and men, tended to emphasize its naturalness, its inevitability best met with acceptance and equanimity. Few spoke of the terror, of Kurtz’s ‘the horror’. Few expressed rage at the unfairness of it. Dylan Thomas perhaps when he wrote,

  ‘Do not go gentle into that good night,

  Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’

  A scene from a film she saw years before had stuck in her mind, the Clint Eastwood western Unforgiven, when, at the end, the Eastwood character is about to kill the nasty sheriff played by Gene Hackman. Hackman says, ‘I don’t deserve to die like this,’ and Eastwood replies, ‘Deserving’s got nothing to do with it.’

  She knew that death was as natural as being born, or chewing on the meat of other animals, or defecating, or having sex, that it was part and parcel of the frenzied, gene-driven instincts that swept up all living creatures despite human attempts to deny or rationalize it, to translate or pray one’s way out of it. She too would die. Her day would come. Just as sure as she was lying there awake and alive and comfortable that autumn morning – her life would someday end, and once it did all that she had done and experienced would lose meaning in an instant and forever, because when we die the universe dies with us. Those left behind cease to exist or matter. When insects and fish and most animals are born, they separate from their parents quickly. But for humans it was different. How were you supposed to love someone, and then lose them? How were you supposed to do that and survive without always mistrusting any further moments of grace?

  With thoughts such as these coursing through her it became impossible to sleep again. She rolled over on her side and remembered how it felt waking up next to James at the Bowery Hotel before the phone call had upset everything. Holding onto that memory, using it to shoo the others away, she got up, brushed her teeth, and ran herself a bath.

  Half an hour later, she was in the kitchen eating a raft of toast with a soft-boiled egg and a cup of tea. Both of the MacShanes were there, Finn in an upbeat mood despite the black armband and what it stood for, Bidelia quiet and distant.

  ‘How did you sleep, Miss?’ He asked her, pouring the tea into the porcelain mug that had the estate’s coat of arms on it.

  ‘Very well thanks,’ she answered, ‘but the house feels very different without her, don’t you think?’

  ‘If it feels different for you,’ he said, ‘imagine how it is for us. Thank goodness for routines is all I can say. Otherwise we’d be just moping about not knowing what to do.’

  Bidelia’s silence and the serious, preoccupied demeanour on her ruddy face lent an awkward note to the ambiance in the room. Laura imagined the woman was still upset, both for the loss of the employer they had been so faithful to for so many years, as well as from a lingering reaction to what had been Carmensina’s attempt to oust them.

  ‘Do you think it would be all right if I were to go for a ride on one of the horses?’

  ‘For sure, Miss,’ he said. ‘With Mrs Trevelyan gone who knows what will become of them all.’

  ‘Are the two women here today?’

  ‘Yes, Miss. They come every day, including Sundays, from eight until one p.m.’

  Laura left the house through the rear kitchen door and crossed the gravelled square to the stables. When she came in, Gin and Jen were spreading fresh hay in the paddocks with pitchforks. Laura commiserated with them for a bit and then Gen saddled Daisy while Laura sat in the tack room pulling on the same boots she had worn when riding with Camilla. Before mounting the horse, she looked into the office and studied the painting of Camilla’s mother. The young girl arranged upon her side-saddle stared back at her with an imperious intensity.

  Rather than head off in the direction of the cottage and the dolmen and the lake, she rode around the walls of the massive house and left through a small gate that put her on the shoulder of the main road. After a while she crossed the road and took an earthen path that led down to a bay with a curving strand of beach she had not noticed before. Upon arriving there she dismounted and read a small plaque affixed to a post that said the bay had been used centuries earlier for ships loading tin from the nearby mines. It pleased her to think this may have been the place where Joseph of Arimathea, Yeshua and the Romans had landed, and where Yeshua had mourned, stricken with grief, after the village massacre. It spurred her on to return to the library and her computer to continue her work.

  Chapter 36

  Canlia’s child was born at night on the thirtieth day of October, a boy we named Dawid, or David, the beloved, after the ancient King of Judea from whose line, it was said, the Messiah would come. I thought Yeshua would appreciate that. And in deference to Venusha and Canlia’s father we gave him the second name of Arto-Uiros, or Arthur.

  Anyone who has witnessed the birth of an animal can see that we are animals too. Anyone who has seen up close the innards of animals and humans must know, as Yeshua himself once observed, that none of us reflects the image of God. The tubes and the blood, the bones and the sinew, the nerves and the muscles are all too densely packed, too preposterously configured. Surely God would have put his creatures together in a simpler fashion.

  I was alone with Canlia when the child came out of her and I watched her awaken it and clean it and take it to her breast and I watched her bite through the cord that kept them together and then toss the afterbirth out for the dogs. My fierce and holy pagan girl – braver than I hope I shall ever have to be.

  I was humbled. When the women servants arrived to tend to her and the child, I left them and walked out to the reflecting pool, tranquil under half a moon, the autumn’s clear skies a riot of stars. Some leaves floated in the water. Leaves with little veins in them like the ones seen through the child’s thin new skin. Leaves that had been blown from branches that sprouted from trees like the nerves within the child’s tiny muscles. Trees that grow and come from seed, like that which fertilized Canlia’s small, blood filled womb. All life is wondrous.

  David Arturious grew into a beautiful boy with good friends, some of them Roman children, some of them local islanders. They filled the villa with life and kept me young. After a time, I gave up dealing in tin. The journeys grew more tiresome, took me far away from the villa, and it was not a vocation I wished for my son to learn, for it would take him far away from us as well someday. Once upon a time all I wished for was to be able to travel as far afield as possible from Judea and the small world surrounding me there. But now I was a settled man with my own wife and child, a condition I had nev
er aspired to and that took me pleasantly by surprise. It came about through marrying a pagan and having someone else’s child, but still it came about.

  I looked around and asked my neighbours and all agreed that in addition to the wheat and fruit trees already produced there, the villa’s lands would also be ideal for viniculture. I had numerous hectares cleared and I imported vines from the mainland – for I did not fancy the sweet wines common to the island – and within a few years the business prospered and instead of being an importer I became an exporter.

  But a final journey awaited me. When David turned thirteen, I told him we should go and visit his real father’s homeland.

  ‘You are my real father,’ he said to me, kissing my cheek. And in truth I did not wish for us to leave.

  ‘I know,’ I said to him, ‘but later you will thank me for having shown you this other part of the world, and you have family there who will rejoice at seeing you. And is it not true you have always wished to sail across the Great Sea? And the sooner we do this the sooner we can return and now is a good time for leaving the vines behind.’

  Canlia wished to stay put and there were trustworthy men and women keeping the villa and the grounds and working the vineyards. Before we departed, she asked me to leave her once again with child and as her charms were still considerable and my own body not yet buried, we tried and managed to plant seed within her in the hope it might bear fruit. I think in truth she feared we might not return.

  Chapter 37

  As real as his anger had been after speaking with Finn and discovering what had happened when Laura returned to the estate, James was reluctant to speak with Carmensina about it. The funeral had been draining, and throughout that day and afternoon Carmensina had comported herself in an exemplary fashion. She handled the girls beautifully, answering their difficult questions with frankness, grace, and tenderness. She treated the odd assortment of guests with charm and patience. Thinking about it that evening, James had little doubt that part of her serenity derived from the satisfaction she felt from exercising a new-found authority, from having lowered the boom on Laura and threatened to do so on poor Finn and Bidelia. He sensed that, linked to her outrageously brutal timing, was an eagerness to take over Provence House in Cornwall, to make some changes, and probably to hire her own staff so as to make the transition, in her mind, complete.