The Orchid Shroud (17 page)

“Oh? What, then? Picnics on the grass? Champagne? Foie gras?”

“Good god, no. Far from it. Not at all.” Floundering, he concentrated on his food. By the time their dishes had been cleared away, he realized that he needed to up the stakes.

“What I’m trying to say is, we’ve been seeing each other for over a year now. And I thought … I want …” He stopped. What did he want? Sex with her was good. When he could get it. Was he asking for more? It would be nice. Quite suddenly he realized that what he really wanted was more of
her
. More of her quirky, go-for-it presence in his life. More—he was amazed to find himself thinking it—commitment. It was a word he thought he’d left behind him. The problem was, how to put it to her.

Two waiters approached, pushing a trolley with their main courses. Again thankful for the diversion, Julian watched them go about their work. They assembled the plates swiftly, expertly, announcing them as they set them in place in the manner of an important personal introduction:
“Pour madame, les ris de veau à la périgourdine.”
Braised sweetbreads in a handsome copper dish, with an accompanying flat-edged spoon, designed for scooping up
the rich Madeira sauce. Unfortunately, the spoon was fashioned for right-handers. Mara was left-handed.
“Et pour monsieur, la truite au bleu garnie.”
Trout (that had been swimming in its tank minutes ago, before the chef had knocked it on the head), quickly cooked and simply served, dressed in butter and parsley.
“Voilà, et bonne continuation!”
They were gone.

Julian cleared his throat. “It’s just that it occurred to me that maybe our relationship should move on a bit.”

Mara paused, fork halfway to her mouth. “How?”

He took a deep breath. “Something a bit more permanent?”

She stared at him doubtfully. He had obviously been to a barber. His normally overlong hair was cut short, and his beard and mustache were neatly trimmed. She took a bite of sweetbreads topped with truffles and said, oblivious of the flavors cascading around her tongue, “What exactly do you mean?”

Hadn’t he just said it, or was she being purposely obtuse? He found himself taking another deep breath. “Well, I just think we ought to know where we’re going. I mean, where do you want to be five years from now? Where do I want to be?” He had read somewhere that this was a good way of putting it. It wasn’t. It sounded like something he had read somewhere. He paused self-consciously.

His words should have filled Mara with a sudden gladness. His brown, melancholy eyes fixed on her in earnest interrogation. He had not spoken of orchids all evening. No longer turning in circles, going nowhere, Julian had come very much to the point. Why, then, did his question now engender a certain amount of panic in her? Could it be that she felt safe going forward only as long as he held back?

“Julian, is this some kind of marriage proposal?”

He seemed for a moment to have difficulty swallowing and appeared to be working something around in his mouth.

“Because, if it is, I have to tell you I’m not sure I want to go
down that road again.” She said it gently. Once with Hal was enough.

He pulled a small white bone from his mouth. “I’m with you there.”

“But, yes,” Mara went on, “if you want, we could talk about … like you said, something more permanent.” The option of her house or his, with socks everywhere and inadequate heating, rose before her. “That is, if you’re really serious.”

“I am. Very.” He spoke firmly, but there was a fugitive look in his eye.

In that moment, Mara experienced a letting go that brought a great understanding and a rush of tenderness for them both. Julian talked very little about his past, but she knew that he, like she, had sustained a lot of private pain. He was a sweet man and a simple man. Sweet, simple people tended to be terribly complex. He was reaching out, tentatively, ineptly, not because he loved her madly but because he cared enough not to want to lose her. Just as she cared enough about him to be unreasonably angry over finding him with Denise, which made her simple and complicated as well. Either way, fear of loss was a shaky footing to build on. “We’re good friends, Julian,” she said finally, and this time she was the one who reached for his hands. “Right now, that’s good enough for me. Really, there’s no hurry, is there?”

“No,” he said. “Of course there isn’t.” Unlike the trout he was deboning, Julian was astonished to find himself off the hook and swimming free. The feeling left him feeling flat and a little at a loss.

T
he rest of the evening went well. Mara forgave Julian his wayward picnic with Denise and related Jean-Claude’s shocking revelations about Christophe’s pedigree. Over a selection of cheeses, they laughed at the genealogist’s ineffectual attempts at seduction. Julian was very interested in Jean-Claude’s theory that Cécile was Baby Blue’s mother.

“Can you ask him if she did needlework? That would clinch it. I figure she saw the flower, was impressed by it, and embroidered a copy of it on her shawl. The fact that she got the details so exactly suggests that she knew the flower well, so she must have seen it more than once.”

“Or else she picked it,” said Mara, “and used it as a live model.”

“Hmm,” said Julian, sobered by the thought. Had the stupid woman destroyed the last living representative of the plant? No, that couldn’t be. Mara’s sister had come along a century or so later and photographed another exactly like it.

Julian then told Mara about his ongoing search for the mystery
Cypripedium
. He continued to spend every free moment combing the area around Aurillac but had seen nothing remotely resembling a Slipper Orchid.

“However, I have a new lead. According to Didier, a plant called Devil’s Clog used to grow around there. He thinks it might be the same thing as
Cypripedium incognitum
. Unfortunately, for some reason the locals dug it up wherever they found it and planted Aconite—Monkshood—in its place. I’m praying that a few representatives of Devil’s Clog survived. It’s possible, you know.” He gazed around him restlessly. Orchids had a limited blooming period, and if he didn’t find it soon, he’d have to wait until next year. He shook his head and shared with Mara the ironic observation that the only person who took his quest seriously (apart from her, of course) was someone he didn’t even like: Géraud Laval.

“Honestly, if he weren’t so grabby, if I knew I could trust him, we could section off the terrain and search it together. It would go twice as fast.” He said it with less vehemence than he might have because his attention was momentarily distracted by the arrival of dessert, a dense, dark wedge of chocolate gâteau topped with crême fraîche for him, a frothy sabayon for Mara.

“Why not give it a try anyway?” Mara suggested. “Or,” she added slyly, “don’t you want to share the glory?”

“It’s not that,” Julian replied earnestly. “If the bugger found it, he’d dig it up. He’s notorious for that. And he, more than anyone, should know better. You can’t just ‘transplant’ an orchid like you can a tulip, Mara. They’re extremely habitat-sensitive, and they grow where they grow because of the presence of certain kinds of fungi that they depend on for food, especially in the early stage. It’s a kind of
danse macabre
”
—
here he interlocked his fingers in a digital struggle that involved the noisy popping of joints—“where the fungus tries to parasitize the young orchid. But the orchid baby, because it takes several years before it’s able to put out leaves to photosynthesize food for itself, tries to eat the fungus. Eventually, if the plant survives the fungal attacks, the two continue a long-term mycorrhizal relationship, with each trying to cannibalize the other and succeeding well enough to get what each needs but not enough to kill the other off.”

“Like an old married couple,” Mara mused.

“Sort of. Anyway, instead of gathering the seeds and growing them
in vitro
on agar jelly, Géraud just digs up the plant plus a huge ball of the surrounding soil, destroying whatever else is trying to grow there, which is often another orchid.”

“He said he only digs plants up when they’re at risk, like on a construction site.” Mara did not particularly like Géraud, either, but found that Julian’s sense of rivalry with the man often marred his judgment.

“Bollocks. He’s absolutely wanton. His only objective is to add to his collection. Sometimes it works for him, but mostly the plants die. It’s a pity, because orchids develop very slowly and take years to bloom. So, by the time he’s dug up an orchid in flower, it might have been five or ten years in the making. The bastard’s destroyed countless orchids this way. As far as endangered species are
concerned, he’s an out-and-out menace.” Julian, breathing hard, tore angrily at a piece of bread.

Mara put her fork down. “I could help you,” she said. She had done orchid searches with him before and knew better than anyone what they were looking for.

Julian’s head shot up. “You mean it? God, that’s fantastic!” He had the presence of mind to acknowledge, “I know it’s not something you particularly enjoy, tramping through fields and forests and all that. But if you’re really serious—well, all I can say is it—it’s terrific of you. When can we start?”

“Tomorrow, if you like. I’m free all day.” His enthusiasm was making her tired in advance. “To be honest, I’m not that busy.”

In fact, with Christophe’s gallery on hold, she was close to twiddling her thumbs.

SATURDAY MORNING, 8 MAY

M
ara had never seen Julian so exuberant. He rapped at her door early the following morning, embraced her energetically, and helped her climb into his van even though she was perfectly capable of stepping up unaided. Jazz jumped in to join Bismuth in the back, where both dogs settled down for the ride among the tools and flowerpots.

“So. Are you ready for this?”

He whistled as he drove.

They did not approach Aurillac in the normal way, from the valley floor, but instead came at it from the east, along another network of roads because, as Julian had said, the back of the property was where he thought they should concentrate their search.

“I’ve gone over every square centimeter of the gardens,” he told her by way of a briefing. “I don’t just mean around the house. Originally, the gardens were much more extensive than they are now. I know because I’ve uncovered traces of the old grounds going well beyond what you see today. If Christophe had just been willing to stick with the project, we could have reclaimed it all. I mean, in some parts it would have been as easy as rolling up the overlying turf like a carpet.”

“Christophe’s enthusiasms wax and wane,” Mara said, with a sense of foreboding about the future of his—her—gallery, “like the moon.”

“Then I moved on to the woods at the front and sides of the property. Again nothing.”

“That leaves everything else.” Mara thought she saw where this was leading. Aurillac was a huge estate. The house perched on the spine of the ridge. Much of the terrain sloped steeply away from it. “I hope you don’t expect—”

He forestalled her. “Ah, but that’s my point. I doubt Cécile would have been clambering down ravines or scaling cliffs. So I thought we’d focus on places where the terrain is relatively level and open. This means the rest of the property I haven’t searched, all the land behind the house that extends into woods and meadows. It narrows our search considerably. I worked it out, using the Série bleue maps.”

“Oh,” said Mara, only somewhat relieved. The maps, she knew, showed every topographical feature on a scale of one to twenty-five thousand, including type of ground cover, but they did not pinpoint orchid colonies, let alone specific plants.

T
hey were passing through open woodland along a road so narrow that at one point they had to pull over and stop when they met an oncoming Deux Chevaux. The other car stopped as well. Two men and a spaniel were in it. Hunters, from the look of them. One of them held a shotgun between his knees. The driver leaned out the open window.

“Salut
. Just thought I’d let you know. There’s been another possible sighting of the Beast near here. A group of us have been combing the woods for it since dawn. You haven’t seen anything, have you?”

“No,” said Julian.

“Well, keep your eyes open. Are you armed? Too bad. If you plan on hanging around these parts, you’ll want to be careful. The accursed thing is moving around in broad daylight now.”

The driver raised a hand in farewell and edged forward. The car was soon lost to sight.

“Why the hell do they insist on calling it ‘the Beast’,” Julian
said in disgust as he put the van in gear, “when everyone knows it’s nothing more than a feral dog?”

“Tell that to the man who was killed. Or the woman who got mauled.”

“In both cases it was protecting its kill.”

“So what are you saying? Don’t bother it when it’s eating? Quite honestly, Julian, do you think this is a good idea? That man said the thing was spotted around here this morning.”

“Miles away by now, with all those hunters after it. Anyway, you’ve got me and Jazz to protect you.”