The Orchid Shroud (33 page)

Julian also found letters from Eloïse to Cécile, written
après
Henriette, which he shared with Mara:

“Sententious bitch,” Mara commented.

“Well, she did get dumped. And at least she dated her letters,” said Julian.

Mara took up the 1871 folder. By the summer of that year, Cécile, in her inimitable style, reported that Henriette was with child. Mara read aloud:

“Jacquot Pujol. An ancestor of Didier?” Julian wondered.

Mentions of hot weather gave way to references to a rainy fall. Cécile continued to provide descriptions of domestic scenes in which Dominique behaved disgustingly, Odile sought to make her daughter-in-law’s existence a misery, and Henriette, getting bigger by the day, gave as good as she got. Mara began to feel something like an exasperated affection for the writer, who had the knack of telling it like it was. Indeed, Cécile offered the same unadorned treatment to death as to life.

“Oh my god, Julian,” Mara said. “Listen to this.”

“Julian, three children went missing and three known victims had their throats ripped out during Hugo’s lifetime. A teenage boy, Emile Joubert, who was tending his father’s cows, an old washerwoman named la Claudine, and Yvette Garneau.”

“And Maman Odile was frightened for her son. I wonder why.”

“I think we know.”

“Does Cécile say more?”

Unfortunately, she did not. That entry was Cécile’s last.

4 DECEMBER 1871

The luncheon was held on the day of the Feast of Sainte-Barbe. The guests came to Aurillac in closed carriages, the horses steaming and stamping in the cold air. Henriette, big with child, had refused to be confined to her room, as decency demanded. She had put on a loose gown of rose-colored satin and was on hand to greet (and scandalize) the guests with her smile, her unseemly dress, and her swollen belly. Abbé Fortin, wrapped like a mummy against the weather, arrived first, in an ancient black cabriolet. The others who followed were people whom Henriette had also met: Hugo’s uncle and aunt; Maître and Madame Caillaud; the Saint-Anselme headmaster; the fat, velveteen-jacketed squire and his wife, a broad-hipped woman with the ruddy cheeks of a milkmaid
.

The only stranger to Henriette was Hugo’s other sister, Catherine, on
exeat
for the holidays from the Abbaye des Eaux. Henriette studied this member of the family with interest. She had little else to divert her. The tall, pale
religieuse,
with her otherworldly air, seemed indifferent to her surroundings and oblivious of her pregnant sister-in-law. She kept herself entirely to a long, murmured conversation with the old abbot, who huddled in a high-backed chair near the fire
.

Odile sat with the women guests on sofas in the middle of the grand salon. Henriette sat in the same area but somewhat apart. Cécile slouched ungainly in a bergère next to the piano that no one played. On his feet for a change, Dominique stood in another part of the room with the
notaire
and the headmaster, making desultory talk. Hugo, who had gone hunting that morning, had not yet returned. Odile expressed her
annoyance, or perhaps her anxiety, by looking frequently for him to arrive through the double doors of the salon. They remained shut
.

Eventually, unable to contain herself any longer, Odile rose and approached Henriette, who was positioned too far away for her to address without raising her voice
.

“Shameless! This is your fault,” hissed the mother. “But for you, he would be here. He tires of you already.”

Henriette’s riposte was swift. With a terrible sweetness, she responded loudly enough for the aunt, Madame Velveteen Jacket, and Madame Caillaud to hear, “Oh
, belle-mère,
you know he stays away only because of you. He has often complained to me that you keep such a poor table that he must hunt daily to keep us all in meat.”

Odile went rigid with rage and returned to her chair. Henriette’s words were partly true. The family and household staff numbered fifteen, including three outdoor servants, all of whom had to be fed. Except for her social entertainments, when it was necessary to make a good impression, Odile was notoriously mean with her fare
.

Henriette nodded archly at the open-mouthed female guests and rose. Her porcelain exterior hid the facts that she felt unwell and that she was now furious. Furious with Odile, with Hugo for not being there. She therefore sought a victim in Cécile, who immediately struggled out of her armchair to move away the moment she saw her sister-in-law approaching the spot where she sheltered
.

“Don’t go.” Henriette followed the large young woman across the room, cornering her in a window bay. “I want to talk to you.”

“What about?” Cécile looked warily at her
belle-soeur.
Henriette only ever spoke to her to make wounding comments
.

“Is it true you leave for the nunnery in the new year?”

“None of your business,” said Cécile, sensing a trap
.

“Oh, la! Am I about to uncover more nasty family secrets? Are they making you do it
, ma pauvre
? Surely you’re not in the family way? Or is it simply that no man will have you? It will be good for the family coffers, you know, because you will be made, like your sister, to give up
your rights to the estate, and there’s little enough left to go around as it is. Poor sacrificial goat, your father’s excesses make it necessary to bury you alive in that god-hole. No more riding for you.”

Cécile maintained a mulish silence
.

“Very well,” said Henriette cheerfully. She was feeling better already. “Tell me about your sister.” Henriette gestured at the
religieuse,
deep in her tête-à-tête with the abbot. “Was she also forced to take the veil?”

“I don’t know what you mean. You shouldn’t talk like that. She gave herself to God.”

“Cats more likely, else why take the name Sister Gertrude?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Oh, you are such a ninny, Cécile. Gertrude is the patron saint of cats.”

Cécile, who did not know how to answer this, said the only thing that came into her head: “You think you’ve made such a good marriage, don’t you. But you don’t know Hugo.”

“Indeed?” Henriette for once was intrigued. And vaguely troubled. She did not, in fact, know her husband well at all, except that he was a heavy man, heavy in bed, hard of hand—but, then, weren’t all men?—who spoke little except to talk about the hunt, and who brought with him the smell of damp woods and horses and earth
.

Cécile, having captured Henriette’s attention, was unable to sustain it, however. In answer to her sister-in-law’s inquiring look, she responded weakly, “He—he does things.”

Henriette continued to stare at her mockingly
.

“He drinks the blood of animals he kills,” Cécile blurted out in desperation. It was something she had never told a soul. “I’ve—I’ve seen him.”

“Oh
, ma chère
,” said Henriette, destroying any element of shock Cécile’s revelation might have had. “I’ve known that for ages!”

In the end they were thirteen to table—Hugo unpardonably had still not made an appearance—an inauspicious number sitting down to a
ponderous meal unleavened by wit, news, or repartee. The one spot of color was Henriette (in her shameless pink gown), whom Dominique had insisted on placing to his right, thus offending protocol and Madame Caillaud. The menu consisted of six courses, beginning with a thin leek soup, followed by a cheese soufflé. They had just finished a rather tough ragout of goose, and the table was being prepared for the fourth course, when the de Bonfonds’ steward rushed in to inform the company of a terrible piece of news: the naked body of the youngest daughter of a neighboring farmer had just been found in a field. The child’s throat had been torn open
.

“Mon dieu!”
shrieked Madame Caillaud, clutching her napkin to her breast. “The Beast again!”

A group of hunters was combing the woods in the hope of catching the thing that had done it, and the steward wished to know if he could dispatch all available menservants to join the effort
.

“Certainly not,” snapped Odile from the other end of the table. “The child is dead. Nothing more can be done for her. It will have to wait until the boar’s head has been served.”

She referred to the pièce de résistance, and, Beast or no Beast, she was not being entirely unreasonable, for the head was set out on an immense platter that required two serving men to carry it in. Hugo had killed the boar, of course, and the stripping of the skull, together with the preparation of the forcemeat and the salpicon of chicken, bacon, nuts, and pigs’ tongues with which the head skin was stuffed, had taken two days
.

But the horrific news had cast a pall on the company. They sat in silence as the dish was paraded around the table for all to admire, and then placed before Dominique to be served. Eventually, the abbot spoke. In his reedy voice, he told the party of a time some fifty years ago when, as a young
curé
newly arrived in Sigoulane, he had been given to understand that he had come to a place where something very evil lived. His rambling recollections did nothing to lighten the mood
.

It was one of the boar’s ears that did Dominique de Bonfond in
.
They had been cut off earlier and simmered in a jelly stock, then skewered back in place and coated with a cold brown sauce. The host had been eating one of the ears while telling an off-color story (about a sexton who had lost his trousers) in an attempt to enliven the party. Fortunately, Abbé Fortin, because of his deafness, heard very little of the lengthy tale. He sat bemused and thoughtful throughout the account. Sister Gertrude, to his right, bowed over her plate. Her lips moved, as if in prayer. Dominique had just delivered the punch line and had thrown his head back to roar with laughter, when a piece of the ear lodged in his throat. He coughed, gagged, reared out of his chair, clawed at his neck, turned purple, and finally pitched forward onto the pièce de résistance with a sickening thud and a spectacular splattering of forcemeats
.