The Orchid Shroud (38 page)

“What happened to them?”

“Oh, they drowned, or died of fever, or were shot. Who knows? Maybe some were even cooked and eaten. It was a dangerous occupation. Still is in some ways.” He reflected for a moment. “I think one of the Verdier ancestors was an orchid-fancier who either went himself or hired professional hunters to bring back orchids for his collection. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why the Verdiers went into hock. The hothouses were expensive enough to
build and maintain, but it was getting the plants to go in them that probably drained the coffers. In Victorian England, fortunes were squandered on the acquisition and propagation of orchids. The same could have happened here.”

“Wait a minute,” said Mara. “If your orchid was an import, then that solves the problem of where Eloïse saw it. In a hothouse.”

Julian blew out a lungful of air. “Possibly. Although, we have to remember it also grew in the wild. So it’s either a naturally occurring plant, or a hothouse escapee. Either way, if
Cypripedium incognitum
developed a bad reputation as Devil’s Clog, I figure it did so only
after
Eloïse made her embroidery in 1869. She wouldn’t knowingly have put something discreditable on the shawl at a time when she was still planning to become a de Bonfond.”

Mara considered this. “Then the plant couldn’t have been associated with werewolves in Xavier’s day. But it might have come to be toward the end of Hugo’s life. According to Cécile’s diary, little Yvette Garneau had her throat torn out in December 1871. Cécile implied her mother was afraid Hugo had done it. Well, if Odile was having her suspicions, maybe other people were, too.” Mara repositioned her shoulder, which was becoming painful. “You know, Hugo’s tie with
Cypripedium incognitum
makes sense on another level. If he didn’t use a killer dog, he might have relied on a drug to give his lycanthropic delusions an extra kick.”

“If Hugo was taking
Cypripedium incognitum
as an hallucinogenic,” Julian muttered doubtfully, “he’d have needed a lot of the stuff.”

“Then that’s it!” Mara exclaimed. “He cultivated it.”

“I doubt it. You can’t grow orchids like Brussels sprouts, Mara.”

“Well, then, he paid people to find it for him. And that could be where Didier got the idea that the old ones dug it up.”

Julian remained skeptical. Nevertheless, he blenched at the thought of his orchid being harvested wholesale. “And the Wolfsbane?”

“After people began to suspect that Hugo was a werewolf, they started calling it Devil’s Clog and tried to eradicate the plant. Putting Wolfsbane in its place was their way of making sure.”

Julian sighed. It was all speculative, but it made a kind of terrible sense. He refolded the bills carefully along their original creases and put them back in the box. “Anyway, getting back to hothouses, there isn’t one at Les Chardonnerets. At least, nothing you can see from the road.”

“It’s probably been destroyed by now, to make way for all those vines.”

“That’s the trouble,” Julian complained bitterly. “It’s vines everywhere you look”

“Well, it
is
a vineyard.”

I
t’s really disappointing.” Mara tossed her glasses down irritably. “We’ve been at this for hours, and we haven’t come across anything that could have given Jean-Claude a reason to try blackmailing Christophe. Or anyone else, for that matter. Compagnon and that
juge d’instruction
are going to think we’re frauds.” She peered around her. “I’d like to have a look at Cécile’s letters again. Bring me that box, will you?”

Julian did so.

“That’s funny,” said Mara a few minutes later.

“What?” He swiveled about in his chair.

“Do you remember when Cécile complained to Eloïse about being ill? I’ve got the letter here. She talks about sitting at her window. Listen again to what she says:
‘… watching water run from the dolphin’s mouth. It is like my life, draining away.’”

“So?”

“Don’t you get it, Julian? Baby Blue was put in the wall by someone who had the upstairs end room in the north wing. Or at least by someone who could control access to the room. It would
have taken time to pry the stone out through the back of the armoire, and that person couldn’t have people coming in at will. But that room can’t have been Cécile’s room.”

His eyebrows curled like question marks. “Why not?”

“Because she had a view of the fountain. There
is
no view of the fountain from the room where Baby Blue was put in the wall. It’s at the front of the house.”

“Maybe he was put in from the other side of the wall in the next room down. You’d be able to see the fountain from there, wouldn’t you?”

“But that’s not where the armoire was. Thérèse said the armoire was in the end room. Anyway, the most important thing is that Cécile wrote about seeing the dolphin’s mouth. The only way Cécile could have had a view of the dolphin’s
mouth
is if her room was in the
south
wing.”

“But that’s on the other side of the house. If her room was in the south wing, then she—”

“—wasn’t the one who put Baby Blue in the wall,” Mara finished for him. “Which explains why we haven’t been able to find any mention of Cécile’s pregnancy or proof of a birth. She never had a baby. Or, if she did, it wasn’t Baby Blue. This means we’re back to square one. We don’t know who Baby Blue was, and we don’t know why he was killed.”

Julian sat down heavily on the bed, causing Mara to wince.

“Okay,” he said. “Then it’s a process of elimination. Baby Blue died sometime between 1860 and 1914. If it wasn’t Cécile, the only other woman of childbearing age living at Aurillac at that time was Henriette, at least until 1901, when Dieudonné married Léonie. So it’s down to those two.” Julian frowned, reconsidering. “Or maybe neither. Didn’t you say Henriette’s bedroom was on the ground floor, off the terrace in the main part of the house? And didn’t Thérèse tell you that the roof of the north wing leaked, so
that the family has lived in the south wing for generations? That eliminates both Henriette and Léonie. So who had that end room in the north wing? Are we back to a maidservant with a bastard?”

Thoughts were going off in Mara’s head like firecrackers. “No, we’re not. Christophe did say that his grandmother had the room off the terrace, the one that’s now called
le petit salon
. But I think that wasn’t until much later on. It’s one of the finest in the house, Julian. You should see the
boiserie
. You tell me: what are the chances that Henriette, when she first came to Aurillac, would have been given the best room in the house? Zilch, if Odile had anything to do with it. Much more likely that she and Hugo would have been given adjoining chambers elsewhere. Like in the north wing, under a leaky roof and up a narrow flight of stairs, so she could fall down and break her neck.”

Julian pondered for a moment. “All right. What about this? After Hugo’s death, Henriette took a lover, got pregnant, and had to dispose of the kid because her annuity depended on her living in a state of exemplary widowhood. That’s got to be it. Why the hell didn’t we think of it sooner?”

Mara remembered Jean-Claude’s dismissal of this theory when she had aired it. “It would have had to be after Odile died. There’s no way Henriette could have carried an illegitimate child to term, much less given birth, without Odile knowing, and Odile would have used anything like that as a means of dispossessing Henriette.” She referred to her notes. “Odile lived until 1899. Henriette would have been fifty-four by then. Pretty old to start having bastards. And don’t forget, we still have a second, headless baby to account for.”

“Didier’s the only one who can tell us about that,” said Julian, sobered by the thought that Didier, with half his lung blown away and fighting for his life, might soon be beyond telling them anything.

FRIDAY, 28 MAY

S
mokey the Greek prized the stone loose.

“Attention!”
A soggy Gitane twitched on his lip as he called the warning to his brother below. Theo watched the stone drop with a thud onto the floor very near his left foot.

“Please be more careful!” Mara jumped aside, protecting her injured shoulder. Her wound was mending well, her sling had come off days ago, and the stone had not landed anywhere near her, but she was nervous of everything the brothers did.

The Serafims, press-ganged by the combined muscle of the French Gendarmerie and the state prosecutor’s office, had resumed their ill-fated demolition, under the joint supervision of Mara and Laurent Naudet. The logic of the prevailing powers was as follows: Mara had been hired to build a
galérie;
although Christophe was still missing, there was no reason for her not to proceed with her contract. It had taken several days to locate the brothers and several more to get them back on the job.

Mara profoundly resented the high-handedness of the adjudant and the twitchy
juge d’instruction
, who had ordered the work to go forward. In the end, she had agreed to oversee the dismantling only of the wall where Baby Blue had been found, arguing (not untruthfully) that to do anything more could compromise the stability of the structure. With the Serafims, one never knew. Since neither Compagnon nor the examining magistrate wanted to answer for twenty tons of collapsed roof, they had grudgingly compromised.

With every stone that Smokey removed—he was now handing them down to Theo, on Mara’s strict orders—she dreaded the discovery of yet another mummified infant, this one sans head. One Baby Blue, intact, was enough for her. For want of anything better to do, Laurent tried to interest her in his theory of twins. She ignored him. As an extension of Adjudant Compagnon, whom Mara thoroughly disliked, he was owed no civility. Hurt, Laurent stood uncomfortably to one side, watching the stones come down.

I
hope you’re satisfied,” she said to the gendarme at the end of the day. The middle section of the wall had been dismantled, leaving only a fringe of masonry on either side that would be reinforced to form the arch abutments to support the roof. The effort had yielded nothing more interesting than dead space. Smokey and Theo had packed up their tools and decamped. They had misgivings about lingering in a house where walls gave up dead babies.

Laurent overlooked, or genuinely did not see, the glint of scornful resentment in her dark eyes.

“It only means the second baby is somewhere else.” He glanced speculatively through the gap at the far wall of the next room.

“Oh no,” she objected. “If you want anything more taken down, you do it without my cooperation and on your own time. Anyway, all Didier said was that there was another baby. He didn’t say where. It could be buried on the grounds. Probably is. Did your clever boss think of that?”

Laurent stiffened. “Of course he did. But he figured, if one baby was put into the wall, there was a good chance the other was, too. Why stick them in different places?”

“Then we should have found them together.”

“He thought they
were
placed together, originally. But one of them slipped down farther into the wall cavity.”

“Well, he was wrong, wasn’t he.”

Laurent took a deep breath and turned slightly pink.

“Look, Laurent.” Mara relented. The gendarme was such a decent young man it was hard for her to continue being rude to him. “Even if your twin theory is right, even if you find another baby—or five—it doesn’t change anything. Jean-Claude is dead and Didier is as good as dead. Your adjudant still counts me a suspect, and you haven’t found Christophe.”

“We’re closing in. We have a number of leads …” Laurent left the rest unsaid.

Mara shrugged. “Bordeaux. Paris. He could be holed up anywhere.” She fastened the window through which the Serafims had been lowering rubble to the ground and checked around for anything left undone. Earlier she had been through the entire house, securing all of the downstairs shutters. She asked, as she and the gendarme quit the room together, making for the stairs, “Did your boss get anything out of Thérèse?”

“Not much. He feels she’s holding back something, though.”

Like the truth about Christophe
, Mara thought grimly. “What about Dr. Thibaud? Did he talk to her?”

Laurent grinned. “Don’t tell him I said so, but I have the feeling he thinks maybe this lycanthrope idea has something to it after all. I mean, once it was explained to him by a scientific type.”

“Oh, naturally,” said Mara, feeling nasty again.

Laurent said, as they walked around the north wing to the front of the house, “I still think you should have accepted personal protection. You don’t know for sure you were shot by accident. And you might not be so lucky next time.”

“Look on the bright side. If I turn up dead, there’ll be one less person for your boss to suspect. In your trade, it’s called the process of elimination.” Mara softened, seeing the young man’s expression of chagrin. “Don’t worry. Whoever it was knows by now I’ve told you fellows everything I know. There’s nothing to be gained by killing me.”