The Lantern (11 page)

Chapter 10

I
t was a creeping unease, at first, which I ignored. Then tightness across my shoulders. All of a sudden, I had the strongest sense that someone was behind me in the kitchen. I looked around. Of course, no one was there.

Dom had gone out to the CD shop in town, where he’d put in an order for some rare recordings of Rachmaninoff playing his own piano preludes. In a feeble attempt at disguising my blue mood that morning, I was preparing a pleasant lunch, hoping to serve it on the table in the south-facing courtyard if the midday sun was warm enough.

I had made an artichoke-and-tapenade quiche, and Dom’s favorite crushed potatoes with black olives and olive oil—which I intended to decorate with a sprig of olive branch.

Next I was trying to follow a magazine recipe for
charlotte aux trois abricots
—a moist cake made with three kinds of apricot: fresh; stewed with lavender; and a whole pot of apricot jam. Like so many French recipes, it seemed to assume that time was no object, that cooking was the point of life rather than a quick dash into the kitchen to sustain it. But that was fine. I was happy enough at this table, in this room where the sun streamed through tall windows, and at that point time was irrelevant (apart from precise cooking instructions, of course; there was a certain bossiness in this magazine cook’s tone that insisted concentration was required).

And it smelled wonderful already, an olfactory elegy to life in the French countryside. The fantasy life that had seemed within reach but which was even now slipping from my grasp.

I
n my dream state, I must have been unconsciously dwelling on what was happening between me and Dom, and whether it had anything to do with the place we had chosen with such impetuous optimism.

Then, there it was again. The sense that I was being watched, that someone else was there. My fragile mood of tranquility had fractured. I was tense in an instant.

Looking around more wildly now, I could make myself see shadowy groups of previous occupants; oil lamps glowing; spirits lurking in the dark corners of the room; the laughter and misfortunes; children in thick nightshirts; candles that suddenly extinguished themselves, the swish and skitter of mice in the wood and plaster ceiling, the reading of the scriptures with their resonant comfort and hope. Then the sun flared angel-bright, a stark, searching eye. It raked the cuts and crevices of the table and revealed my phantoms for what they were: my own fears.

I stepped out of the back door to clear my head. I leaned against the wall, telling myself to stop being foolish. And then I saw it again. The same figure floating on the path as before. Blue-gray, ethereal.

Transfixed, heart knocking ever harder, I moved slowly and silently down the steps, keeping it in my sights. I left the courtyard and crept into the garden.

It was still there. Then it moved toward me. It was a woman on the path, wearing a kind of loose cloak, and this time she did not dematerialize. She was coming closer.

I
n the daylight, she was older than late thirties, where I’d placed her at a guess in the Durands’ hall. The wide mouth had lost the plum gloss. But the well-cut auburn hair was unmistakable.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you!”

“It’s a public path.” I was embarrassed to realize that I was trembling.

“My name’s Sabine.”

“We met already,” I said. “At the Durands’—that wonderful lunch.”

“I was wondering if you would remember.”

Was she being sarcastic? Possibly she was. The slightly hooded eyes, carefully made up, were watchful and lively.

“It’s good to see you again.” Keep it calm, keep it light.

“How do you like it here?”

“It’s . . .” I gestured around, feeling the tremor in my hand, hoping it didn’t show. “ . . . it’s lovely—fabulous, what can I say? We feel very lucky to be here.” But even as I said it, I could not help but think of the damp bubbling the plaster walls, the mossy green streak down the bathroom wall. Shutters banged in the wind, a wind that might blow itself into a weeklong mistral at any moment. The sun had gone in.

She nodded, as if that was as it should be, and then made a move to walk off.

Before I realized what I was saying, I was asking her if she’d like to come inside for a drink—a coffee, a tea? Anything to detain her a while longer so that my brain could catch up with my instincts and allow me to turn this to my advantage.

Accepting graciously, she followed me into the courtyard and up the steps to the kitchen.

“Do you live in the village?”

“Just outside, on the road to Céreste.”

“All year round?”

It wasn’t as stupid a question as it might sound. Many of the local professionals worked in Marseille, or Avignon, or even Lyon, commuting back at weekends. Sabine had the distinct air of a professional woman.

“Half-and-half these days.”

What do you do? In the wrong tone, at the wrong time, it can be such a rude question. I hoped she might answer it of her own accord and spare me the difficulty. But she was looking around at the kitchen as if satisfying her own curiosities.

She picked up a chipped porcelain jar, decorated with a picture of serpents sipping from a bowl, inscribed in loopy blue letters:
HERBES DES MAGICIENS
.

“Left in the house for you to find?” she asked, as if she knew.

I nodded. “We’ve found all kinds of things here. We call them gifts from the house.”

I poured two cups of coffee, and we sat at the long pine table by the window. Through the tall window facing the courtyard, I could see walnuts being shaken from the tree, plopping down into the tufty grass.

There was an awkward pause.

“So much history, so many families must have lived here over the centuries,” I said brightly, dismissing any idea of barging straight in with what I really wanted to ask her.

“That’s true.”

She was watching me carefully. She knew. I felt it as clearly as if she had put her hand on my shoulder and asked to hear my confession. She knew and she was waiting.

“I found a
borie
up in the woods a few days ago,” I went on doggedly. I’d found out about these primitive houses made of a round pile of stones. They were all over Provence, probably built by shepherds for shelter. “How long has that been there? I wonder.”

“A very long time. Maybe even before this house.”

She was looking around again, as if familiarizing herself with some changes. That was disconcerting.

“And this is old enough. It’s not in a very good state.”

“Do you intend to do much work to it?”

“Quite a bit. The staircase is in a terrible condition—it feels unsafe. And there are great cracks running down the walls where the house was enlarged at one time. There’s a buttress, but it seems to have failed.”

“That’s what they used to do, in houses like this one—when they needed more space, they just built on a new section. They grew along with everything else. What you must not do is do too much.”

“I know. We mustn’t spoil it.”

Sabine seemed to think better of a comment.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “There won’t be any Plexiglas walls or industrial-steel stairs.”

“Inside the houses here, parts are left rough. No one cares, especially not the Parisians and other wealthy northerners who come to play at being rustics for a few weeks in the sun.”

I’d seen them that summer, arriving in great, gleaming, black four-wheel-drive vehicles that scattered pedestrians in Gordes. Patronizing the crowded, overpriced restaurants for those who are more interested in being seen than being fed. Celebrity-and politician-spotting, then scouring
Paris Match
and
Point de Vue
to see if they were right.

“That’s only in the summer, though.”

“Generally only for August, the Parisians.” She dismissed them with a wave of the hand. “The other nationalities come all through the summer. The locals complain about the crowds in the supermarkets, but you can see all that and still like being here.”

“Well, I can’t comment . . . being a foreigner myself.”

She smiled. “It wouldn’t be the same without any of you. I work as a house agent, among other things.”

I
t turned out that the other things included running a local glossy magazine and holding a stake in an upmarket service company, the kind of place that could organize a chef and a dinner party for twenty with a few days’ notice, or find and supply a special kind of chair, or oyster, or work of art to order. She agreed with me that it was almost impossible to find good lighting, lamps that did the job but were not in dreadful taste—I’d decided that the gloomy corners of the house, lit so brightly by sunlight during the warmer months, needed urgent illumination. As winter drew in, the old place was full of dark corners and hidden dangers. She told me where I could find the kind of lighting shop I’d been looking for, and suggested that if we went together she would be able to swing me a discount.

Neither of us mentioned Dom.

When Dom returned for lunch, I didn’t mention her, either.

Chapter 11

I
was sent on an errand up in the village for Maman the next day. She was still tight-lipped with me, though she had left it to Papa to unleash the stern words I’d known were coming. As I ran into the courtyard, having delivered her message, Pierre was leaning against the fig tree with his hands behind his back.

“You told,” he said.

“You know that I didn’t.”

“I know that you did, Bénédicte. You weren’t being careful, like I told you. Either you let Papa see you, or maybe you just told him what you were doing.”

“But I didn’t!”

“And now you are going to see there are consequences.”

“What do you mean?” I was tired of his menacing, tired from the ordeal in the dark store.

Pierre brought around one arm, and I saw what he had been concealing. It was the little black kitten I was allowed to adopt when it had appeared in a thunderstorm, mewling pitifully, a few weeks previously. She was a puny, shy little creature who gladly took food from us but otherwise kept to herself. But as her strength returned, she had started to play, chasing a walnut around the stone terrace outside the kitchen, then flopping over and pedaling at it with her back feet.

The black kitten dangled dangerously. Pierre’s thumb and index finger were a noose around her neck.

“No! Don’t! Let her go!” I cried, launching myself at him, not caring what he could do to me.

But he raised his arm out of my reach. The cat swung from the gallows of his hand. Maybe I was already too late and he had already strangled it before he saw me. I agonized over whether I saw it move or protest before he made the vicious move.

The light changed and freckled the courtyard. His sneer was hardened by shadows.

Then he smashed the helpless body down. It lay limply on the earth as I could only stare, horrified, tears spilling in a sudden flood.

He took a knife from his belt and looked at me. He bent over and, with one swift, sudden movement, ripped the animal open so that her guts spilled the length of her poor body, matting the soft black fur with quivering scarlet.

I ran. In the orchard, against a plum tree, I threw up until my back hurt.

W
hen I cried, Maman used to hug me and say there were guardian angels looking after us all, watching over this farm; that nothing bad would ever happen to us here.

“Where are they, then?” I asked.

“If you look really hard, and listen, too, then you’ll know,” she said.

So I strained for a sign, for a sound, but never found the proof.

The same sounds rise now: the goat bells from the fields below, the cicadas and birds. The wind in the plane trees still whispers the old stories. Then it changes to give an impression of a lively stream, or a vehicle coming up the lane. The trees imitate the sounds of life, absorbing and replaying them, according to the type of wind that stirs their boughs.

Bowed down, I went upstairs to find solace in my books. I did not have many, but for my birthday Maman and Papa had given me a lovely copy of Corio’s
Provençal Tales
. It was a medium-size fabric-covered book with a thick dust jacket painted to look like embossed leather. It was the best present I had ever had, full of the stories repeated over hundreds of years by the shepherds as they made their way with the sheep across plains and valleys with the seasons. Stories in which time had no meaning, and life stayed the same; in which good and evil were interchangeable at the flick of a mud-caked cloak, and human nature remained as dark as a cave with no way out.

But when I put my hand under my bed for it, the book was gone.

Though I searched and searched, I never found it. I had no proof but I knew who had taken it, and that there would never be a confession to this crime.