The Orchid Shroud (12 page)

MONDAY AFTERNOON, 3 MAY

G
ive him his due, Jean-Claude was prompt with his results. But, then, he already knew a lot about the family. He proposed a rendezvous at five o’clock at Aurillac Manor. His research notes were there, plus other material and family artifacts that Mara might find interesting.

Mara arrived twenty minutes late. Thérèse met her at the door: Christophe was still keeping to his room, and Monsieur Fournier was waiting for her in the library. She left Mara to find her own way to the large, handsome chamber on the ground floor.

“Ah, Mara.” Jean-Claude strode forward to meet her, taking her hand and brushing the back of it with his lips. He did not, however, venture any farther than her wrist. She caught again the musky whiff of his cologne. He was dressed this time in shades of cream that emphasized his buttercup-yellow hair. His burgundy loafers sported overlying brass G’s for buckles. Mara, who had spent the afternoon prospecting a work site, wore jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt that read:
I Blow Raspberries on My Dog’s Stomach. Do You?

“I hope you approve.” Jean-Claude waved a hand about him. “We’re well chaperoned.” The walls were hung with stern-looking ancestral portraits. His assurance was at odds with the fact that he still held her hand.

“Good,” she said, disengaging herself and ignoring the ever-present tease in his voice. “What do you have for me?”

“It depends on how much you want to know.”

“I have the basic facts. They’re an old, titled family. The house
goes back to the early 1500s and Christophe’s great-grandmother was a celebrated soprano.”

“Hmm. Yes. Well. Perhaps we’d better begin at the beginning, or as close to it as I can get. Let’s start with the family motto, shall we?”

He took her elbow lightly and guided her to a massive fireplace at one end of the room. Four words were carved into the high front of the marble mantelpiece.

“Sang E Mon Drech,”
Mara read aloud, puzzling over the familiar and yet unfamiliar letter combinations. “What is this? Occitan?” She referred to the old tongue of the region, more closely related to Catalan than to French, which still survived in many parts of southern France.

“Quite right. ‘Blood And My Right,’” he translated. “In French, it would be
Sang Et Mon Droit.”

“Oh yes.” Mara recalled Christophe’s bragging rights. “Something about the privileges conferred by bloodline.”

Jean-Claude said dryly, “Something like that. At any rate, it suggests an old family of noble lineage, does it not? Which brings us to the family tree.”

He now steered her toward a large library table in the middle of the room. An ornately lettered parchment covered the tabletop, protected by a sheet of beveled glass. It showed generations of de Bonfonds going back to the tenth century.

“Looks terribly old,” she murmured, squinting at the faded, ancient script.

Jean-Claude laughed outright. “It’s terribly”—he lowered his voice—“bogus. In fact, the earliest entry I could verify is here.” He tapped a spot three-quarters of the way down the chart. “Xavier, Christophe’s four-times-great-grandfather, 1730–1810, a man with a reputation for violence. He whipped a servant almost to death for spilling a flagon of wine. In the end, he was killed by his own dog. That’s him over there.”

He walked her over to the life-sized portrait of a man, done in middle age and compellingly posed in a dark cape with a touch of scarlet at the collar. Mara stared at a gaunt face with a big jaw, long nose, and ginger-colored hair and eyebrows that ran together above pale, protuberant eyes. Beside him stood a large, unfriendly-looking dog. The artist had rendered man and beast in such a way that their two bodies almost blended. One of the man’s powerful hands grasped the dog’s collar, as if restraining the animal. Maybe it was the one who had turned on its master. The other hand held an opened scroll. Stepping closer, she saw the family motto repeated, with a slight variation of spelling, on the scroll.

“He was titled,” said her guide. “Le Baron de Bonfond. On paper, anyway.”

“On paper? What are you saying?”

Jean-Claude laughed again. “Pure fabrication. I suspect a twist of his real surname, Lebrun, to which I have found reference, suggesting that our so-called Baron started out life as plain old Mr. Brown. He took the name ‘Bonfond’ from an upstream relative, inserted a ‘de,’ cleverly converted ‘Lebrun,’ to ‘le Baron,’ arrived newly made in the Dordogne, and married well. Interestingly, Bonfond was also the family name of Xavier’s wife, Séverine, to whom he was distantly related. An insignificant little thing”—the genealogist waved at a bland, featureless face captured in a small oval frame—“who died in childbirth. Her branch of the family were Huguenots, wealthy but nonaristocratic.”

Mara turned to him, dismayed. “Are you saying there’s
no
title in Christophe’s family at all, not even on the distaff side?”

“Exactly. Moreover, far from being a baron, our Xavier actually belonged to a much-hated class of men, the
gabelous
, salt-tax collectors—don’t tell Christophe I told you. Although he seems to have used his position to do very nicely for himself, thank you.”

“Salt?” Mara was incredulous. Was this the invaluable service rendered to the crown that Christophe had spoken of?

“Indeed.
La gabelle
was one of the most hated taxes in French history. In fact, it was one of the causes of the Revolution. The rich were exempt, of course, so the poor carried the load. Smuggling salt from regions where the tax was lower to high-tax areas was a profitable enterprise. That’s where the
gabelous
came in. It was their job to enforce the tax and hunt down violators, and they were merciless. They raided homes, sent innocent people to prison, and lined their pockets with bribes. They were also notorious for carrying out body searches of women.” Here Jean-Claude smirked. “Women were very much engaged in petty smuggling, you see. The
faux cul—
more delicately put, false fanny—was a favorite hiding place for contraband salt.”

“And this house?” Mara asked, her faith in Christophe’s account of his family collapsing like a mudslide in rain. “I understood it to be in the family for five hundred years.”

“Séverine’s, not Monsieur Xavier’s. In fact, although he made himself out to be a son of the Dordogne, it seems our fake baron came from Le Gévaudan, a dirt-poor region at the edge of the Massif Central. Beyond that and his profession as a
gabelou
, I could find little about his background. Shall we move on?”

His arm pressed her forward toward more de Bonfond men. “This one’s Auguste, Séverine and Xavier’s son, and Auguste’s sons, Dominique and Roland. Dominique was Christophe’s great-great-grandfather, while Roland was the great-great-grandfather of Christophe’s cousin Antoine, whom you may know. Roland founded the Coteaux de Bonfond winery, although Antoine expanded it to its present dimensions.” Jean-Claude guided Mara farther down the wall. “Here we have Dominique’s son Hugo, Christophe’s great-grandfather.” Mara saw in the latter a large, aggressive-looking man with the family eyes, nose, and jaw. “Hugo was a great hunter.”

Jean-Claude’s fingers had somehow come to rest lightly on Mara’s shoulder. She stepped away, going over to inspect a smaller
portrait hanging next to that of Hugo, a woman in blue with a mass of honey-colored hair. The females of the family, Mara decided, seemed to have been accorded considerably less canvas than their men. This one, however, merited life-sized rendering.

“Henriette,” Jean-Claude identified. “Hugo’s wife and Christophe’s great-grandmother.”

“The Adored One,” Mara recalled. L’Adorée. Also the Walker and Plate-Thrower. She was indeed a beauty, but with a determined set to the mouth that confirmed her potential to make a troublesome ghost.

Jean-Claude shook his head. “Again, we have a play on names. The epithet was actually ‘la Dorée.’ The Golden One.”

“Oh. Because of her hair?”

“Because of her cupidity. When Hugo met her she was a sharp little Parisian courtesan with a passable voice and a driving lust for money. Her father was a drunken stonemason who broke his back rolling off a roof, so young Henriette became the family breadwinner. Her main claim to fame was a magnificent bosom. It was said that she charged by the breast, so that her other nickname was ‘One or Two?’ Christophe believes she sang at the Opéra, but that would have been unlikely because it was still being built when Hugo wedded and then bedded her. Oh yes, she was no fool. She made him wait for it.” Jean-Claude sounded almost disapproving.

“Of course,” he went on, “Henriette didn’t exactly embark on a sea of roses. She married a de Bonfond, for what it was worth, but she had to contend with a lecherous father-in-law, a husband with a reputation for slitting the throats of game he brought down and drinking their blood while they were still alive, and a virago of a mother-in-law.” He pointed to another painting. It was a seated portrait of an older woman dressed in black. A narrow face with pale, close-set eyes scowled down on Mara above a rigid lace fichu. “Odile de Bonfond, née Verdier, wife of Dominique, and reputedly the very soul of avarice. She married into the family in 1835, on
the strength of a considerable settlement. The deal was that Hugo would marry one of his Verdier cousins, thereby integrating the family fortunes and saving the Verdiers’ bacon because Odile’s dowry ruined them. Henriette spoiled all that.”

Mara noticed that the dreadful Odile had been painted clutching a cloth purse. Perhaps the artist had a sense of humor. Or irony.

Jean-Claude continued. “Odile de Bonfond doted on her son and loathed la Blonde Horizontale, as she called her daughter-in-law, which we can take as a reference to how Henriette made her living. Dominique, on the other hand, undoubtedly relished having a pretty woman about the house, so the family dynamics must have been quite interesting. However, he died not long after la Dorée came to Aurillac. Just in time, too. His excesses were eating into the estate. Then Hugo died shortly after from a fall from his horse. His saddle girth snapped. Henriette lived to eighty-two, well into the twentieth century.”

“Poor Christophe,” Mara murmured, recalling his boyish enthusiasm over the love story of the century. “But”—she experienced a sudden stab of annoyance—“does he
know
all this?” Had he been lying to her all the time, was what she really wanted to ask.

Jean-Claude pursed his lips. “If you mean, did he invent the public persona of the de Bonfonds to hide their less than illustrious past, no. All of the misrepresentations I mentioned were established well before him. It’s likely that Xavier was responsible for most of them, including the fake family tree that purports to go back to the Crusades but which, as I said, dates no further back than Xavier himself.”

“But you told Christophe, didn’t you? You told him what you found out.”

Jean-Claude gave an eloquent shrug. “I tried. He had hysterics when I debunked a seventeenth-century claim to an episcopal branch of the family. After that he refused to let me remove so much as a note scribbled on the back of an envelope from the
premises. I found it easier simply to give him the results of my research and let him do what he wanted with it. However, I think he must have known something was not quite right, at least where the baronetcy was concerned, because subsequent males after Xavier never used it, and Christophe himself has never attempted to claim it.”

“But the book he’s writing on the history of the de Bonfonds—?”

“Will no doubt be a highly sanitized version of the truth.”

Mara groaned audibly.

Jean-Claude looked amused. “So. Where was I? Hugo and Henriette had one offspring, Christophe’s grandfather, Dieudonné. He was born in 1872, just before Hugo’s death. That’s him as a child, done by Archambault, quite a well-known artist in his day.”

Mara saw a portrait of a boy of perhaps seven or eight with dark hair and eyes and a round, impertinent face. “And later”—Jean-Claude led her to another section of wall, where canvas gave way to photographs, paint to sepia tones—“in middle age.”

The impertinence had now mellowed into complacency: a heavy-set gentleman, posed with his hands on his knees, the broad face riding above a stiff wingtip collar. In feature and expression, he was a cruder, more vigorous version of Christophe.

“Dieudonné saved the day for the de Bonfonds because Dominique really had left the estate in a bad way, and Hugo, if he had lived, would probably have finished the family off. However, young Dieudonné was a terribly clever chap who invented a revolutionary inking technique on which he built a very successful printing business. He married well, Léonie Boursicaut, from an important Bordeaux family. They had a son, Bertrand, Christophe’s father, who further filled the family coffers by marrying into the wealthy Pommarel family. And a daughter, Amélie, who died young of influenza.”

The later generations of de Bonfonds, caught in various attitudes
by the photographer’s lens, gazed down at Mara. It seemed to her that prosperity had improved the family features. Gone was the earlier glare of greed and raw ambition. In its place a smug and more subtle acquisitiveness, the rounded look of people who were sure of their importance and their position in the world. She said as much. “I mean, they don’t lunge out at you like they do in the paintings. They sit back and let the camera come to them. See for yourself.”

Her guide looked surprised. He scanned the array of faces for a long moment.

She shook her head impatiently. “Jean-Claude, this is all very interesting, but nothing you’ve said gets us any further ahead with identifying Baby Blue. You’ve mainly talked about the men. It’s the women we should be concentrating on, isn’t it? You said that between 1860 and 1914 there were several females of childbearing age living at Aurillac. Tell me about them.”

His hands went up. “Of course. My apologies. I only wanted to provide you with the, shall we say, necessary background for understanding the family we’re dealing with.” He smoothed back his golden hair. “Well, of the women, you’ve met Henriette. Then there was Eloïse Verdier, Odile’s niece. She stayed at Aurillac between 1865 and 1870—through Odile’s connivance, so she and Hugo could make a match of it—but moved back to her family’s home after he married Henriette. Eloïse got over her disappointment and lived out her life as a spinster devoted to good works. There’s no likeness of her here, but no doubt she was appropriately pious-looking. Then”—Jean-Claude stopped before a head-and-shoulders portrait of an anemic female with an otherworldly expression—“we have Catherine, the eldest of Odile and Dominique’s daughters. She joined a convent at the age of twenty-four. Daughters often took the veil in those days, whether they wanted to or not, because dowries were expensive and the upkeep of unmarried females a drain on family coffers. Mind you, the family had to make a one-time endowment
to the convent, but it probably worked out cheaper for them in the end because it was in exchange for Catherine’s renouncing all inheritance rights.”