She turned to face J-J and put out her hands as if expecting handcuffs. “Take me away. I can’t stand the sight of the swine.”
“Monsieur de Bourdeille, I must ask you to accompany me to the commissariat de police in Périgueux for questioning,” said J-J. “And I’m sure my colleagues from the art squad will have their own questions for you in due course.”
Epilogue
The Château des Milandes looked wonderful in the magical light of an early summer’s evening at one of the loveliest spots in the Dordogne Valley. Bruno was feeling uncomfortable in his rented dinner jacket. But beside him Pamela was looking magnificent in a floor-length evening gown of woven white brocade, her slender shoulders rising above the fabric and her throat displaying the emerald necklace she had inherited from her mother. The glorious green stones matched her eyes, he thought, and perfectly set off her hair, half auburn and half bronze.
They were standing on the balcony, watching Laurent fly his hawk to entertain the throng of guests, all similarly dressed in formal evening clothes. The baron and Gilles were paying more attention to the falconry than to the women they escorted, and so Bruno turned to include them.
Fabiola, wearing a high-waisted directoire dress, was listening to Florence explain how she had found at a local brocante the length of heavy burgundy silk that she had made into her own dress. She had learned to sew, she told Fabiola, when she’d had to make clothes for her own children and found that she enjoyed it. Curious, Bruno asked if he could feel the material, and Florence allowed him to touch the scoop neck where it went over her shoulder. It was thicker than he’d expected, not what he usually thought of as silk, and draped beautifully.
“It really suits you,” he said. “And you all look wonderful—the Three Graces.” He turned to Pamela. “Who was the man you mentioned to me once, the one who said his idea of socialism was a society in which every young woman could go to a ball wearing an evening gown?”
“George Bernard Shaw, but if he tried saying that today his reputation would never recover,” she replied. “Do you think we should rescue Jennifer?”
Jennifer Muller was looking distracted as she stood silently beside the American ambassador, who was giving an interview to a TV camera. But before Bruno could react, Hodge appeared, his wife at his side, to sweep up Jennifer and join them while skillfully holding three filled flutes of champagne in each hand.
“Handling multiple champagne glasses is something you learn on the diplomatic circuit,” he said, offering a flute each to Bruno, Pamela and the others. Bruno extracted each glass with care to hand them on.
“Have you seen Amélie?” Hodge asked.
“Not since we had breakfast together,” Bruno replied. “She’s been rehearsing and doing interviews all day. But you know Amélie, it takes more than a grand concert and a TV spectacular to faze her.” He turned to Jennifer. “Did you just arrive?”
“We all came down this afternoon in the ambassador’s plane, the cultural attaché and his wife. Cheers.” She raised her glass.
“It’s a great way to travel,” said Hodge. “The downside is that we have to go back with him tomorrow.”
“You’ll have to bring Eleanor back here for a holiday and get to know the Périgord,” Pamela said, smiling at Hodge’s wife.
“Did you get to Bourdeille’s funeral?” Hodge asked Bruno. The old man had died in his sleep, in the hospital, just ten days after J-J’s questioning. He had never been formally charged nor arrested.
“Yes, I went with the mayor and some of the remaining old veterans. Whatever crimes Bourdeille committed, what he did in the war deserved an honorable send-off. Yacov Kaufman came down for it. Apparently Bourdeille spent twenty years helping Yacov’s law firm recover artworks the Nazis stole from Jewish families and refused to take a centime for it.”
“Ironic that the paintings he identified all turned out to be genuine,” Hodge added. “It was only the documents of provenance that were faked.”
“I wonder if Bourdeille knew they were faked or if he simply trusted his friend Paul Juin,” Jennifer mused.
“We’ll never know,” said Hodge. “The ambassador wants me to come down for the trial of the others. Is there a date yet?”
“Not before the autumn,” Bruno said. “Probably October, but the word from the magistrates is that Luc and Dominic will plead guilty. I’m not sure about Madame Bonnet or Madame Darrail.”
A gong sounded, and people began to drift in from the balcony to the rows of seats in the hall. Amélie had arranged special places for Bruno and Pamela, so they let others go ahead.
“You look wonderful,” he murmured, his mouth close to her ear.
She smiled at him and squeezed his arm.
“I’m so glad they’ve made it a formal occasion,” she said. “Why aren’t you wearing your medals? Several of the men here seem to be wearing theirs.”
“It’s not that formal. And my medals are pretty modest. Besides, if I’m escorting you, people must already know I’m the luckiest man in the château.”
“You realize that none of this would be happening without you, that Amélie would not have been discovered, that the American ambassador would never have made such an event of it.”
“Amélie was born to be a star, and it was Hodge who got the ambassador to come,” he said. “I had nothing to do with it.”
Suddenly Pamela stopped, and her grip on his arm tightened as a familiar slim figure emerged, slipping gracefully through the crowd toward them. Isabelle was looking characteristically striking. Her hair was in a short bob plastered tightly to her head in the style of the 1920s, and she was wearing a long halter-neck black dress with a sash of red silk around her waist that fell to the floor. Earrings of some red stone that matched her sash provided her only jewelry, along with the black plastic Swatch that was always attached to her left wrist.
A rush of memory brought Bruno back to those times they had spent together when it had been the only thing she wore. One night, wondering if he should buy her a grander timepiece for her birthday, he had teased her about it, and she had replied, “The bare minimum of efficiency is always the purest style.”
“Bonjour, Pamela, you are looking splendid,” Isabelle said coolly and then pecked Bruno on each cheek. “Ça va, Bruno? It was so kind of Amélie to invite me down. I wouldn’t have missed this concert for the world. The brigadier is my escort, and I know he’s looking forward to having a word with you after the concert.”
Still stunned at the sight of Isabelle, Bruno stammered some words of greeting while wondering why Amélie had arranged this encounter. The memory came to him of the lunch at Ivan’s when Amélie had gripped him by the chin to hold his gaze and told him to be grown up and accept that he and Isabelle had no future. So why had she invited her? Was it as simple as Amélie inviting Isabelle as her friend too?
All this swept through Bruno’s head as his eyes drank her in: that stance he knew so well; the look of self-assurance that so convincingly shrouded the vulnerabilities within; the half-concealed shapes of the body he knew as well as his own, perhaps better; the curve of her ear; the set of her chin and the way she could put an entire speech into the raising of a single eyebrow; that flash of challenge in her eyes; the half smile on those soft, half-pouting lips that he longed once more to kiss.
And some other remnant of his senses was aware of the stiffness in Pamela’s pose beside him, the urgent grip of her hand on his arm.
Isabelle gave the merest nod of her head to Pamela and turned away to find her place among the rows of seats.
“Did you know she was coming?” Pamela asked, in a voice like frozen chips of ice.
Haplessly, Bruno shook his head and tore his eyes away from Isabelle’s departing figure to ask himself what on earth he might say to reassure Pamela. He was saved by Jennifer, who arrived, the ambassador and his wife on each arm, to i
ntroduce Bruno to them as the man who had solved the case. He wrung Bruno’s hand heartily, said something about Hodge having briefed him on the case and said it was time to take their seats.
They were among the last to sit, and to Bruno’s surprise and Pamela’s evident pleasure, Amélie had placed them alongside Jennifer and the ambassador. The murmur of the audience diminished into silence, and then they broke into applause as the members of the small orchestra picked up their instruments and began tuning up. The conductor emerged to bow, and the applause redoubled before dying down as the curtains slowly began to draw back, and they heard the opening bars of “J’ai Deux Amours.”
I also have two loves, thought Bruno, trying not to think what the brigadier might want from him this time. But I wish I felt half as happy about them as Amélie does while singing Josephine Baker’s iconic song.
Acknowledgments
I have long wanted to write about Limeuil, which is rightly proud of its title as one of the loveliest villages in France. The hilltop town that clambers up from the point where the River Vézère flows into the Dordogne is much as I have described it: the prehistoric art school; the Iron Age hill fort; the Roman oppidum; the medieval castle with its well and the neo-Moroccan addition. The castle grounds today constitute a very fine garden, well worth the visit with its giant sequoia tree and its specialist corners of apothecary and herbal plants.
It was while showing some American friends from the island of Boca Grande in Florida around this garden that I saw the deep—and safely sealed—well. It was at that moment that the idea for this book was born. Some of it was written on that island on the Gulf of Mexico, in the hugely welcoming and literary home of Jane and Bob Geniesse. The medieval walls of Limeuil’s fortress can indeed be climbed as Bruno did, and its hilltop restaurant, with the imaginative name Garden Party, is highly recommended.
But all the characters in this novel are figments of my imagination. The stalwart river folk who run the popular canoe-rental business are of unblemished character. There are no such people as the Darrail and Bonnet families, and the last mayor, Guy Thomasset, is a fine and imaginative man who, with his wife, Terez, has been responsible for widening our district’s cultural horizons by bringing us broadcasts of operas from the New York Metropolitan Opera. Monsieur de Bourdeille is also an invention, although his putative ancestor, Pierre de Bourdeille, was indeed the indiscreet chronicler of the court of Queen Catherine de Médicis and the soldier who escorted Mary, Queen of Scots, back to her homeland.
Claudia and her family are also wholly fictional, although if they were real they would certainly stay at the Vieux Logis in Trémolat, where my friend, Chef Vincent Arnould, cooks so sublimely, where Yves runs a majestic and imaginative cellar and Estelle manages the place with a discreet and charming efficiency that is close to genius. I am honored to count as a friend the legendary owner Bernard Giraudel. He is still going strong at the age of ninety-two, and his grandmother founded the inn in the old priory where the family had lived for five hundred years. A great raconteur, gourmet and literary man, Bernard remembers as a boy greeting the unanticipated arrival by canoe of the American writer Henry Miller: “Barefoot, dressed only in shorts and bald as a newborn babe, he asked for a bed for a night and stayed for a month.”
The Vichy loyalist Michel Cagnac is invented, but his subsequent career in the French army in Vietnam and Algeria, and the details of the last fight of the French volunteers in the SS Charlemagne Division around Hitler’s bunker in the ruins of Berlin, are all based on historical reality. It was indeed a French soldier, Henri Fenet, who was awarded the last Knight’s Cross of World War II, and the botched execution by firing squad of the legendary Lieutenant Degueldre took place as recounted here. In Algeria as in Indochina the old French empire died hard.
History produces dramas that no novelist would dare to make up, and the history of France is more dramatic than most. It remains for me an enduring fascination and also an inspiration as I write in this valley of the River Vézère, which contains more of the sagas and memorials of humankind than any other single place on earth. Within strolling distance from our house is a château that was the secret Resistance command post in 1944; a cave with Cro-Magnon engravings of various beasts, interspersed with the claw marks of real cave bears; a nunnery that was looted and despoiled by Protestants in the Wars of Religion and closed by the French Revolution; medieval castles; Renaissance châteaux and a Neanderthal cemetery, seventy thousand years old, which embodies the first evidence we have of our remote ancestors burying their dead with ritual and respect.
Along with all of this are vineyards, woodlands that provide the truffles, venison, boar and mushrooms, and farms that produce the ducks and geese, the lamb and veal and acorn-fed pork, that have made the Périgord the gastronomic heartland of France. The account of the annual tasting of the pâté de Périgueux is based on personal experience, and I am privileged to be a member of the confrérie. And now that we have salmon and sturgeon back in the rivers, thanks in part to the European Union’s admirable rules on restoring water purity, they are a source of great bounty, as they were twenty-five thousand years ago when the meter-long engraving of a salmon was carved into the rock of the Abri du Poisson in the Gorge d’Enfer near Les Eyzies. And each year on the waterfront at Limeuil at summer’s end is a massive fish-fry, open to the public, to remind us of the food the rivers have so long produced.
After twenty years of having a house here, and nearly forty years of regular visits, my passion for the Périgord is undimmed. It has been enriched by the many friendships our family and basset hounds have made here, the tales and legends we have heard around the tables where we feasted and drank the wines we have come to revere and enjoy. Without these stories and friendships, the food and the history, there could be no Bruno novels.
A special debt is owed to my beloved wife of forty years, Julia Watson, always the first to read my drafts and to compose my recipes and improve Bruno’s cooking, and to our daughters Kate (for the website) and Fanny, for the algorithm that keeps track of people, places and meals in the novels. Caroline Wood, a friend as well as a wonderful literary agent, is a constant support. I am blessed with great editors: Jane Wood in London, Anna von Planta in Zurich and Jonathan Segal in New York.
One of the lesser-known pleasures of being an author is the opportunity to meet and befriend so many booksellers, who along with winemakers and cooks are responsible for much more than their share of human gratification. They are invariably kindly and welcoming folk and many around the world have become friends. People who keep and work in bookshops seldom become rich in terms of money, but the rest of us would be incomparably poorer without them. It has been a great pleasure to introduce so many of them, and so many readers, to the unique and timeless charms of the Périgord.
Martin Walker, Périgord, 2018
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Martin Walker served as a foreign correspondent for The Guardian in Africa, the Soviet Union, the United States and Europe and was also the editor of United Press International. He was also a senior scholar of the Woodrow Wilson Center and senior director of the Global Business Policy Council, both in Washington, D.C. He now shares his time among the United States, Britain and the Périgord region of France, where he writes, chairs the jury of the Prix Ragueneau cookery prize and is proud to be a grand consul of the wines of Bergerac. He enjoys writing a monthly column on wine for the local English-language paper, The Bugle, and with winemaking friends produces an agreeable and unpretentious red wine, Cuvée Bruno.
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The Body in the Castle Well Page 31
