The Orchid Shroud (13 page)

They stepped up to the next painting: a large, plain female dressed in an unflattering shade of green and uncomfortably posed with a pug in her lap.

“This one’s Cécile, Hugo’s youngest sister. Hard to say which is uglier, isn’t it, the woman or the dog? She, too, planned to take the veil, but nothing ever came of it. And finally”—moving on to a photograph of a plump, placid-looking woman—“Dieudonné’s wife, Léonie, who came to Aurillac when she married into the family in 1901.”

Mara gazed about her. “Which one?” she wondered aloud.

Jean-Claude nodded. “Indeed. Which one? Léonie I think we can discount. First, she simply doesn’t seem the type, but also because, as I said, a bastard would have been much less of a problem for a married woman, who could pass it off as her husband’s child.”

“Henriette was married,” Mara interposed, “but you said she was widowed early. A bastard could have been an embarrassment for her, too. Or did she remarry?”

“No, and for good reason, although I’m sure she didn’t want for suitors. Her difficulty was that Hugo left her an annuity, not only contingent on her producing a surviving male heir, but requiring her to remain in a state of exemplary widowhood if she wanted to continue to touch her
rente
. Maybe she took a lover who put her in an embarrassing way, but I somehow doubt it, first because Maman Odile would have had her out on the street
tout de suite
for breach of contract, and second because I suspect Henriette’s real passion was always money. In any case, she proved herself to be a very able administrator of her young son’s estate.”

“That leaves Catherine, Eloïse, and Cécile.”

“Exactly. Now, Catherine is a definite candidate. Did she have a true calling, or was she confined to a nunnery because she was
delivered of an illegitimate son? It’s what they did in those days, you know. As for Eloïse, she came to Aurillac when she was twenty-two and stayed there five years. While cozying up to Hugo, did she curdle the cream by getting pregnant by the stable lad? If so, I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire Verdier clan conspired to help her get rid of the baby. A lot was at stake for them.”

Mara nodded.

“But for my money, the most interesting candidate is Cécile. Why? Because she offers us the most concrete possibilities and provides us with the most information. She kept a diary of sorts between 1861 and 1871, an absolute gold mine for someone like me and the source of most of my personal information on the family. In it she refers to a liaison with a certain captain in the Imperial Army—we’re talking about Napoleon III now—whom she met in Paris.”

He took her to a large, glass-fronted cabinet. It contained, Jean-Claude said, the de Bonfond family papers as well as all his research notes. One shelf was given over to Cécile’s diary, organized by date in cardboard folders, secured at the corners by elastic loops. He pulled out the folder for the year 1870.

“I offer you excerpts that support my hypothesis. These relate to the summer when Cécile met her army captain. I had the unenviable task of putting her ramblings into some kind of order when I took on Christophe’s book project. No easy job, since there were major gaps, and most of her entries weren’t dated. Her handwriting was also awful.”

He opened the folder and paged through a stack of loose sheets covered in ill-formed writing.

“I’ll spare you the details of Cécile’s more graphic entries, but here, for example, she refers to what we can only take as a sexual encounter.” He read aloud:
“‘La nuit il me vient sournoisement.’”

“‘He comes to me stealthily in the night,’” Mara murmured to herself.

“It’s undated, and she doesn’t mention names, but it sounds very much like a tryst with her army captain, doesn’t it?” He sifted through more pages. “And again:
‘Il me vient, toujours sournoisement, avec son regard bleu qui me transperce jusqu’aux entrailles.’”

Mara’s eyes rolled at the congested prose: “He comes to me, always stealthily, with his blue gaze that pierces me to the entrails.” Cécile must have been a reader of romance novels.

“However, nothing came of the affair.” Jean-Claude put the papers away and snapped the elastics in place. “The family intervened, and poor Cécile was forced to give her lover up. The fellow was probably just a common adventurer looking for an advantageous alliance anyway. In any case, he was cut down in the Franco-Prussian War only months later.”

Mara guessed, “So she woke up one day to learn not only that her lover was dead, but that she was carrying his baby?”

Jean-Claude nodded. “Significantly, it’s at this point that she first mentions following her sister into the Abbaye des Eaux. She didn’t, in the end, but remained at Aurillac, growing ill, old, and mad.”

“And you think she killed her child?”

“Et voilà
. Or possibly the matter was decided for her.”

Mara blinked. “You mean by someone in the family?” Then she recalled that Baby Blue had been smothered with unnecessary violence. “As if in a towering rage,” Loulou had said. As if someone had wanted to crush the very life out of an unwanted bastard. She pictured the infant torn from Cécile’s arms, stifled before the mother’s horrified eyes, imagined the woman’s screams. Had Cécile recovered the broken body of her baby, wrapped it lovingly in a shawl, and enclosed it in the wall?

“Merde,”
said Mara. It was all so sordid. An affair, a bastard, the swift dispatch of an inconvenient piece of humanity, probably engineered by the family. And definitely a de Bonfond. Bleakly Mara watched as Jean-Claude closed up the glass-fronted case. How
was she going to report this to Christophe? At the moment, she was glad that he was incommunicado.

Jean-Claude shrugged. “Of course, this is all conjecture. There’s no definite proof, except perhaps one or two vague references I found in letters written by Eloïse to Cécile. Eloïse, by the way, is the great-great-aunt of Christophe’s and Antoine’s cousin Michel, who represents the Verdier side of the family.”

“Christophe doesn’t want you talking to them,” Mara reminded him quickly.

“Don’t I know it? When I was researching the de Bonfond family’s history, I suggested accessing the Verdier archives, to fill in the blanks, so to speak. Christophe nearly had a seizure.” Jean-Claude paused thoughtfully. “Come to think of it, this may be the source of the information Michel—or more likely his son, Guy—wants to sell to the media.”

She sighed. “So, in addition to Baby Blue being Cécile’s bastard, Christophe’s family tree is a complete charade. Xavier invented a fake set of antecedents and a baronetcy to cover up the fact that he was a
gabelou
and, who knows, probably made up the family motto as well.”

“That, too. Very likely.”

“Almost certainly,” said Mara. “Because he couldn’t even get it right. It’s carved into the mantelpiece as
Sang E Mon Drech
, and appears in his portrait as
Sang
Es
Mon Drech.”

Jean-Claude stiffened. “Show me,” he said.

She did, pointing out the errant “s” that appeared in the painted scroll but was missing in the carved version.

He peered long at the faded cursive lettering. “Blood Is My Right.” He shrugged. “Old documents are full of orthographic errors. Cécile, for one, was a dreadful speller.”

“Although there’s a difference, isn’t there?” She was not going to let him slide away from the fact that he had failed to spot the
inconsistency. “Blood
And
My Right. Blood
Is
My Right. So which is it?”

Jean-Claude stepped back to gaze thoughtfully up at the fraudulent baron.

“I honestly don’t know,” he said. He looked troubled and, for the first time, completely thrown off his stride.

TUESDAY MORNING, 4 MAY

T
he early-morning air was still and chill. According to local wisdom, the risk of frost would persist until Les Saints de Glace, around the middle of the month. People did not plant their kitchen gardens before then. From where Julian stood on a rocky outcropping high on Aurillac Ridge, he had an unobstructed panorama of the Sigoulane Valley and, farther to the south, glinting in the cold, champagne light, the river. The Dordogne, tumbling out of the crystalline highlands of the Massif Central, was broad and peaceful in this stretch, swinging lazily between tree-lined banks and limestone cliffs, offering habitat for pike and perch, roach and bream, and good fishing for herons. Immediately below and behind him, forests cloaked the heavily folded earth.

Julian lingered a moment longer, taking in the view. This was his favorite time of day. Admittedly, he preferred to enjoy it clutching a mug of hot, sweet tea while appreciating a different scene: his own bit of land, where pink valerian bloomed on the stone wall dividing his property from that of Madame Léon; where the dew lay silvery on the tussocky grass; where the bottom of his garden was a cloud of cherry blossoms, and the old fig tree by his kitchen door was beginning to set hard little nuggets of fruit among broad, lobate leaves.

But he was driven by the imperative of his orchid. Ever since he had discovered the embroidery, he had been rising at the first sliver of dawn to conduct a fevered but methodical search of Aurillac Ridge. He had but a few precious days to devote to this activity before
work on the pavilion kicked in. If it kicked in. He had not yet completed a revised plan, or, more to the point, a new budget for Pierre. The orchid, for the moment, was his top priority.

His reasoning went like this: The embroiderer had seen the flower and stitched its likeness on the shawl. This woman—he assumed it was a woman—was associated with Aurillac. Therefore, she must have seen the orchid somewhere in the vicinity of the manor. Given the roughness of the terrain, and wearing whatever females wore in those days, she would most likely have stuck to places where she could walk easily. Thus, he had already gone over the grounds immediately surrounding the manor and was now exploring the intricate network of paths radiating out through the extensive woodlands surrounding the property. In the back of Julian’s mind, Paul’s objection to the shawl’s provenance lurked like a tiger: “That’s where it ended up. You have no idea where it came from.” Julian preferred to ignore the disheartening possibilities.

He sighed, gave a hitch to his backpack, and headed down a narrow trail overgrown with grass and bordered with cowslips. Orchid-hunting was a lonely, quirky occupation. Julian thought of famous orchid-hunters of the past: Rumphius, who went blind in the Moluccas; Skinner, who spent over three decades wandering in forests before dying of yellow fever; Cuming, who discovered more than thirty new orchid species; and Lobb, who brought home the magnificent
Vanda coerulea
, although he left his leg in the Philippines. There were many others, odd, elusive men every one of them, who disappeared for years into far, tropical jungles, some never to return. He wondered if he was going the same way, albeit closer to home and in less strenuous circumstances. Mara, he suspected, thought him obsessive. Maybe Linnaeus had had a point when he asked “whether men are in their right minds who so desperately risk life and everything else through their love of collecting plants.”

As he walked, he was rewarded by occasional sprigs of Green-winged and tiny Burnt-tip Orchids growing along the borders of the trail. These were some of the earlier species to show themselves. Soon Lady Orchids, long-leafed
Cephalanthera
, deep-throated
Serapias
, and stately
Limodorum
would come into bloom. Their succession was as much a part of his internal rhythm as was the flow of seasons to the farmer, the rise and fall of tides to the fisherman, the wheeling of constellations to the astronomer.

Bismuth appeared suddenly from the undergrowth. His paws, snout, and the tips of his long, floppy ears were covered in mud. The dog looked doubtfully at his master.

“Grubbing again?” Julian growled. The dog came to him, tail thumping rapidly between his hind legs. “Oh, come on, then,” Julian conceded and gave Bismuth a grudging scratch on the head. Bismuth, overjoyed, rolled over on his back.

Something else stirred in the bushes. Christophe’s gardener stepped onto the trail. Stooped and thin, he resembled an elderly crane. His clothes, hanging loosely from his frame, resembling bedraggled feathers, added to the impression.

“Ah, Didier.”

“Good dog, that,” said Didier, as Bismuth righted himself and went over to investigate the old man’s boots. “Don’t hold much with them myself, but this one’s got a nose. Make a good truffler. What’re you doing here?” The gardener’s inquiry was not rude, simply to the point.

“Well …” Julian was momentarily distracted by the idea of Bismuth’s being good for anything. He decided to enlist the old man’s help. “I’m looking for something.” He dug out a copy of Iris’s sketch of
Cypripedium incognitum
from his backpack and held it forth. “This. Have you ever seen anything like it?”

The gardener took the drawing from Julian and held it close and then at arm’s length. He tipped his head this way and that and
sucked his teeth. “Not sure,” he said finally and gave the drawing back. “Although that might be the thing the old ones called
Sabot du Diable.”