Season of Light (35 page)

‘Was Didier as religious as you?’

‘Perhaps not so much. He and I used to argue because Didier thought that religion should not involve itself in politics. He hated the fact that Louis called himself king by divine right. Jean and I used to argue for the Church. We said faith must always come first. Didier would have none of that.’

Asa remembered how a group of youths had settled like a flight of birds around Didier in the Tuileries gardens.
These are my friends from Caen
. ‘What were they like, these other friends of yours? Estelle and Jean?’

‘The Beyles? They lived on the rue de Bras, above their shop. It was a huge family. Estelle hated the fact that she didn’t go to school because she had to work and look after her brothers and sisters, though she was given private lessons in English so she could use it for the business. Jean Beyle was Didier’s close friend. He could have been a curate in any church in Caen but instead he chose a country parish called Mantheuil between here and Bayeux.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘He’s not there now. We don’t know where he is but we’re afraid he’s dead. The last time he wrote to us was from a church called St-Joseph …’

They walked slowly down the steep rue Menissier and across the sluggish river, along the tree-lined rue des Carmes, and were soon close to Asa’s former lodgings, the Auberge St-Jean. Asa’s feet dragged. She was too hot and the streets were too much a reminder of those first days in Caen after Madame had abandoned her. The truth nudged at her elbow; it was all there, if she dared to look. With her whole being she yearned to escape another visit to the church of St-Jean, but Charlotte had already opened the door and drawn her into its dark interior. Charlotte crossed herself boldly, genuflected and headed for the Madonna and Child.

‘She’s called Our Lady of Protection,’ she whispered. ‘Look how lovely she is. She’s venerated by everyone in Caen, that’s why she’s unharmed.’

The infant, perched in the arms of the Madonna, had Normandy eyes; wide set, blue, limpid. What a fool you are, Thomasina Ardleigh, they told her. ‘Père Beyle,’ she whispered, ‘Estelle’s brother. You say he was called Jean. Was that his full name?’

‘That’s it. Jean Beyle. Oh, except that his sister used a pet name to tease him. We all did sometimes: Gabriel. Like the Archangel. Too good to be true.’

Charlotte couldn’t keep herself from the Place de Liberté for long so they parted company outside the church. Asa continued alone to the rue de Bras, the street along which she’d scurried when she first arrived in town, in search of bread. It was lined with capacious timbered houses, some, even in these difficult times, with thriving businesses on the ground floor; bolts of fabric lined up for inspection, bonnets, shawls and fichus.

It was the end of the day. Shutters were being locked into place and the great doors leading to the courtyards where carriages used to be kept were pulled half shut. Asa slipped into a shop where plain linen caps were pinned to a red curtain and a girl in narrow skirts was winding ribbon. ‘Excuse me,’ said Asa.

‘Yes, miss?’

‘I was wondering if you could tell me – do you know a family called Beyle?’

The girl paused in the act of smoothing the frill of a cap. ‘The Beyles who used to live three houses along? You won’t find them. They’ve left town.’

The house in question was distinguished by a blue door. Like others in the street it was several storeys high but had fallen on hard times. A girl wearing a revealing shift was hanging out of an upstairs window and the great door leading from the street was ajar. Asa walked boldly into a courtyard of faded nobility with its worn carvings of cherubs and saints. A washing line had been strung from corner to corner, from which hung stained baby linen, and a woman was perched on a step, nursing a child. ‘Yes?’

‘I’m looking for a family called Beyle.’

‘
Beyle
. They moved out years ago. Went to Austria, I think. They were losing too much money.’

‘Do you know much about them?’

‘Not really. I remember that as a girl I was allowed to peek into their shop when we brought eggs into town. It seemed like a palace because the paint was all gold and there were all kinds of pictures, goddesses and such, on the walls. And chairs with velvet seats. I used to watch the great ladies arrive in their carriages and sweep inside with their maids scuttling behind.’

‘The Beyles were lacemakers, I understand?’

‘Good heavens, no. I thought you said you were looking for them? I assumed it was because you knew their trade.’

‘I used to know one of the girls. We had lessons together.’

‘Well, surely she told you? The Beyles were famous for miles around. A cut above, and didn’t they know it. They were
éventaillistes
, fan-makers. Had been for generations.’

It was the hottest hour of the day. Madame Vadier, seated at the kitchen table chopping onions, made it clear that Asa was in disgrace for abandoning the currants, but Asa was in too much of a hurry to attempt conciliation. Instead she asked for directions to Mantheuil and ran upstairs to collect her passport. The housekeeper insisted sullenly that she take bread and fruit with her unless she wanted to make herself ill again. This time Asa walked west through the city gates in the direction of the prison where Professor Paulin was being held. After about a mile, however, she cut off north along a narrow lane so seldom used that midges had colonised the space between overgrown hedges. Occasionally, through a gate, she glimpsed the pinnacles of Caen; once, when the horizon dipped, she saw a triangle of sea.

The village of Mantheuil, nearly two hours’ walk from the city, had a commonplace church like so many others in Normandy – topped by a short tower and an even shorter, four-sided spire. Asa was hit by a pang of longing for Ardleigh with its luscious lanes, prosperous blacksmith and sleek cows trudging past the manor-house windows twice a day. The timbered cottages of Mantheuil were clustered round a small square with a pump, and children sat listlessly in meagre patches of shade, their bare feet paddling the dust.

Though the church door was open, the interior was far from inviting, given that it had been stripped of all but the pews and the altar. There were no flowers or candles. A statue of a woman, presumably the Madonna, had been slashed across the breast, and the head and neck were missing. But at least the church was cool; a gentle breeze blew through broken panes of glass and the stone floor was unharmed except for the buff from hundreds of years’ footfall.

Before this plain little altar Father Beyle had said mass, day after day: dark haired and slight, kind and devoted. So it was along this aisle, according to Madame, that a village woman had taken her broom and swept the dust from beneath the feet of the usurping priest.

After a few minutes Asa emerged into the hot square and gave the children her parcel of bread and currants to share. After that they were eager to answer her questions.

‘Who was the landowner here?’

‘The one whose house was burned? The marquis? He’s gone. Him and his wife and their baby. They say they went all the way across the ocean to America.’

‘In which direction is the chateau where the family used to live?’

Grubby hands pointed towards the sea. Asa walked on, past a two-storeyed cottage, timbered but grander than the rest – the priest’s house, perhaps, where Père Beyle might have drunk coffee with his sister when she deigned to saunter out from Caen and berate him for not being political enough. The chateau was half a mile from the village, set behind a high wall and a fringe of trees. Built of grey rather than local stone, the castle had three turrets, two on either side of the central porch and one on top. Above the massive front door was a broad, latticed window, and the slate roof was so steep that it was half as high again as the walls.

Asa drew closer until she came to the gate, which was thrown back on its hinges because the chateau was deserted; more than deserted, it was reduced to the bare bones of itself, gutted by fire, the walls blackened and windows smashed so that it was more like a ghost house. When she walked up to the porch and peered inside, Asa could see a stone staircase winding upwards in a spiral, but no floor above. The gardens, which had once been laid out in the formal style, complete with fountain and symmetrical beds, were overgrown. There could be little doubt, from the weeds that grew amid the stone steps and the way the ruin had settled into itself, that the chateau had been abandoned for years.

And no, it wasn’t a shock that the sign on the gate read ‘Chateau de Rusigneux’; in her heart Asa had known the truth for days. From the burnt or migrated inmates of this place Madame had stolen her name. And it was here that Thomasina Ardleigh, unknowing rival in love to Estelle Beyle, acknowledged beyond a shadow of a doubt that Madame, her former companion, like the fans sold for generations by her resourceful family, existed only thanks to the invention of a flexible and fantastical mind.

The Paulins, father and daughter, had borrowed money on the assurance that it would be refunded promptly by John Morton, and had made arrangements for Asa to travel to Le Havre, where she would stay until a means of getting her back to England had been found. She had to wait a few more days, however, because the roads were packed with troops marching towards Lisieux, and Girondin deputies arriving hotfoot from Paris, sweating and terrified, with stories of arrests, imprisonment and interrogation. Since anybody leaving Caen would be searched and questioned by one side or another there was little hope for an English girl travelling on a false passport.

On the afternoon of Sunday, 7 July, Asa drank coffee for the last time with Charlotte and Beatrice in the garden of the rue Leverrier. The fine cups were of white porcelain with gold rims, a wedding present for the late Madame Paulin. Beyond the garden walls the city lapsed into a pre-revolutionary Sunday torpor. Inside, between the low hedges of the parterre, Didier had dreamed of changing the world, egged on by a dark-eyed wisp of a girl intent on owning him and his future.

Afterwards Beatrice followed Asa up to her room, closed the door and stood with her hands behind her back, as though steeling herself to make a speech.

‘You’re not going to Le Havre, are you?’

Silence.

‘You’ll go to Paris. You have those letters from Didier and you think he still loves you. Asa, you have to face up to the truth about him.’

Asa sank down on the bed. Beatrice watched her for a moment then sighed and put her hand on the latch.

‘I have to go and find Didier,’ said Asa, ‘I have no choice.’ She took Madame’s fan from the top of her case and spread it on her lap. ‘Take a closer look. It was given to me by that French companion of mine I told you about who abandoned me here in Caen and whose name, or so she claimed, was Madame de Rusigneux.’

Beatrice picked up the open fan and placed it on her palm, tentatively, as if it were a butterfly.

‘This companion of mine led me quite a dance in England, pretending to know nothing about me. But I have discovered that her real name was Estelle Beyle and that she must therefore have known everything; especially that Didier and I had fallen in love when I was in Paris. She found a way of getting an introduction to my family and insinuated herself into my house until eventually she was part of my life.’

‘Your companion, you say?’

‘My companion, teacher, counsellor; all these things.’

The fan trembled on Beatrice’s palm. ‘Why would she do this?’

‘I really don’t know. It seems odd for Madame – Estelle – to have gone to such lengths. Perhaps she wanted to find out more about me, or hurt me if she could. Maybe she wanted to punish Didier … sometimes in the last couple of days, when I realise to what extent she deceived me, I begin to question everything. After all, she was often kind to me … but then, the next minute, she would be cold. You see – I can’t even speak about her without my voice shaking.’

‘This is incredible,’ said Beatrice. ‘That’s exactly what she always does; she gets under the skin. All my life I have been haunted by Estelle’s jealousy and schemes, and her pursuit of my brother. I thought I was finally free of her.’

‘I am worried that your brother is in terrible danger. If Estelle can behave towards me with such cold-blooded calculation, then what will she do to Didier? She thinks he killed her brother. She told me so. When she gave me all the facts about Jean Beyle’s death – except his name – she also talked about people of influence, the ones she had relied on to save him. I’m sure she meant Didier.’

‘But you don’t need to go to Paris. I’ll write to Didier and warn him.’

‘But it’s more than that. I must go, partly for Didier, but mostly for me. My life has been held in check for five years while I waited for Didier. I believed in him, Beatrice. I thought he loved me. I understand that he had a mistress, but remember he wrote to me. Now I see that there was something desperate in those letters. Perhaps he really did love me. Perhaps he still does. And if he doesn’t, if he has deceived me, I want – I
need
– an explanation, from his own lips, so that I can let go, at last.’

Beatrice put her hand above the bed and let the fan fall with a chatter of ivory guard sticks. ‘I remember this fan. Estelle was a genius at making something out of nothing. The original of this painted blue urn used to stand in the middle of our garden. In the autumn, mother and the gardener always turned it on its side and emptied it of soil and dead plants. Once, when we were playing hide and seek, Jean Beyle crept inside it – he was nine or ten, I should think – and when he was found the urn had cracked in two. He was very upset about what he’d done, but Estelle comforted him and said she would resurrect the urn in a fan one day, only it would be more beautiful than ever – hence the birds and the leaves.’

Asa remembered Madame’s bent head, the dark hair falling over her shoulder, the tilt of a magnifying glass above a brush so fine it was nearly invisible; she felt a tremor of the old love and the old loathing.