The Orchid Shroud (43 page)
Authors: Michelle Wan
Suddenly a shape appeared outside the whirling circle. Julian had joined the macabre dance. Crouching, swaying with the
movement, seeking his chance, he held the boning knife extended before him like an offering. He made two tentative stabs at the powerfully bunched haunches, but the animal, aware of him, was too swift. And smart. It swung wide to include Julian in the epicenter of its attack, driving him and Mara together, swirling about them like a devilish storm. Julian stumbled and fell to one knee. With a roar, the beast lunged. In that moment, as it bore down on him, Julian drove the blade in deep.
A wild shriek shattered the early morning stillness. In a frenzy of snapping and snarling, the beast spun about on itself, seeking the source of its agony. Mara had the rifle the right way round by now, her finger on the curvature of the trigger. She squeezed. In the explosion that followed, the animal seemed to rise gigantic in the air. Behind it, the fiery edge of the sun, nudging above the horizon, gave demonic illumination to its death.
WEDNESDAY, 2 JUNE
Mara wrote to Patsy:
>… The Beast, of course, is the current nine-day wonder, nearly eighty centimeters at the shoulder, one and a half meters long, nose to tail, and fifty-five kilos in weight. Some kind of wolfhound-mastiff cross, they think. Someone set this monster loose, probably because it was so vicious they couldn’t control it. Or maybe because it smelled so awful. Compagnon and his boys are now trying to track down the bastard responsible. There’s no doubt it’s what’s created havoc in the valley. Antoine is in hospital being stitched back together. He admits nothing, but the gendarmes found soil in his car that matched samples taken from the spot where Jean-Claude’s body landed, and the bullet they recovered from Didier’s lung as well as the one that went through my shoulder came from his rifle, so they’ve charged him with murder and two counts of attempted murder. Considering his antecedents, it’s easy to see where he gets his propensity for violence. Wild wolves and werewolves are off the hook, and so am I
.
Didier, amazingly, is mending. He’s a tough old bird and is being nursed at Aurillac by Thérèse and Stéphanie. They’ve put him in the big house, so Christophe is around, too, fussing like a hen. Laurent Naudet also spends his spare time there, making a nuisance of himself. Stéphanie, however, doesn’t seem to mind
.
I should also tell you that Nathalie Thibaud likes my lycanthrope explanation for the Gévaudan-Sigoulane Beast and plans
to develop it into a book, when she has time. As for the wolf belt, until Antoine decides to talk, we won’t know where he dumped it. But I don’t like the thought of that thing lying around. Like Jean-Claude said, those things have a life of their own
.
Christophe has decided to go ahead with the gallery, thank god. As for how he’s doing, well, let me just say he’s not a de Bonfond. Which creates a curious situation …
Her last conversation with the little man had left her shaken.
“You shut yourself in your room. You disappear mysteriously. You stay away without letting anyone know where you are. You say it’s none of my business. Well, you made it my business. You involved me, and then you left me holding the bag. I deserve some answers, Christophe. So where exactly do you go, when you’re not hiding out at Aurillac?”
Christophe had turned pale. He fidgeted in his chair, eyes swiveling left and right. “Oh, very well,” he gave in irritably.
“I’m waiting.”
“It’s just that it’s terribly sensitive.”
“Go on.”
“I-I’m under treatment for a rather rare condition. Let’s just call it a form of hysterical neurosis. It’s triggered by stress as well as the lunar cycle, which brings on quite frightening physical manifestations: hairiness and—ah—other inconvenient characteristics. It’s all in my head, of course, but it seems terribly real. Whenever I feel the symptoms coming on, I lock myself in my room. Or I go to stay for a few days at a clinic. That’s why I asked you to deal with Jean-Claude for me. I was in no position to see anyone.”
Mara stared at him. “Are you telling me you really are a lycanthrope?”
“Heavens!” uttered the little man, dismayed. “Only partially. I certainly don’t
believe
I turn into a wolf or any such thing, and that makes all the difference. I’m in the care of a wonderful doctor—
she has a small private practice in Cahors—and she assures me I’m making good progress toward recovery. She’s absolutely first-rate, one of the world’s foremost specialists in the field. Of course, you won’t have heard of her—”
“No,” Mara cut in. She stood up, suddenly feeling very tired and no longer wanting to know. “You’re right. I won’t have.”
… because, although Christophe has no blood tie to the family, he is, in fact, a lycanthrope. Or as he says, a partial lycanthrope. And if he is, he must have come by it independently, since he couldn’t have gotten it from Xavier. He’s also behaving very badly about Baby Blue …
“Pooh,” Christophe had countered airily when Mara had confronted him with the lie he was intent on living. “Who does it hurt? And why should it matter?”
“It matters,” Mara had answered, “because that child deserves his true identity. One that only you can give him.” It was something she felt strongly about. Baby Blue merited better than being consigned to oblivion as a footnote to Christophe’s vanity.
“And mine?” Christophe had shrilled. “What about my identity? If he’s the real Dieudonné, where does that leave me? Or is that of no account to you?” The anguish on his face was so apparent that Mara almost wavered. Baby Blue had hit him where it most hurt.
“The trouble with you, Mara,” he went on, “is that you have no passion. Everyone needs to feel passionate about something. My passion is my family—yes,
my
family—and this house. Julian’s is his orchid. What do you really care about? I mean, care about so much it goes right to the core?”
At one time Mara might have answered: “Bedie.” But her sister was dead. The pain of not knowing was over. She looked into herself and wondered if nineteen years of searching for her missing
twin had somehow sucked her dry, leaving her like an abandoned shell, sounding emptily.
… Speaking of Baby Blue, the vote’s still split on who killed him. Mado, Prudence, and I think it was Cécile. Julian, Paul, and Loulou back Odile. It’s something, I guess, we’ll never know. We gave him a quiet little burial last week, no one but Julian, me, Paul, and Mado in attendance. I found it sad, but Julian’s over the moon because he finally has his shawl with the embroidered
Cypripedium incognitum
on it. And of course he’s still looking for the real thing every chance he has
.
The truth is, Patsy, Julian and I have been bumping along pretty rockily of late, and now we’ve had a serious disagreement that I don’t think we can patch over. I mean, how do you deal with someone who has a bungee-cord notion of right and wrong? I can understand why he’s prepared to keep quiet about Guillaume Verdier’s murder. Even if Didier testified against Antoine, the statute of limitations has passed, and the man will probably spend the rest of his life in prison anyway for the murder of Jean-Claude. But to let Christophe get away with publishing a knowingly fraudulent version of his family’s history (among other things, he’s passing Baby Blue off as a maidservant’s bastard) strikes me as terribly wrong. Christophe says my problem is I lack passion. Maybe I do, and maybe that’s why I don’t understand those who have it. Write soon. Desperate in the Dordogne, Mara<
Patsy’s reply was swift and reassuring. It was why Mara loved her:
>… Passion is good. But it shouldn’t take the place of truth. And truth is good, but absolute truth can be a tyrant and makes a cold bedfellow. Don’t worry, kid. If the fire in your belly is on simmer, it only means you’re recharging. After what you’ve been through
with Bedie, you’re entitled to a breather. Relax and smell the orchids
.
P.S. I don’t see why Christophe can’t have come by his lycanthropy honestly. You said yourself Dominique had it on with every willing wench in the valley. If you think one of Adjudant Compagnon’s forebears might have been a Dominique by-blow, why not Christophe’s grandfather, the false Dieudonné, as well? Fact is, it would be true to form for Dominique to have knocked up one of the Aurillac maidservants and for Henriette to have done a deal with the girl to take the kid off her hands. Christophe might be a little bastard, but maybe he’s not such a fraud as you think.<
Julian sat on a mossy rock. The evening sunlight hung in the trees like golden fruit. The only sounds were the intermittent, ringing call of a cuckoo and the trickle of water. The spring (the original from which Domaine de la Source got its name) gushed out of a rocky crevice before him and ran away in a clear stream at his feet. Tiny ferns grew in abundance along the streambed.
The pavilion project had been abruptly discontinued. He had managed, only with a lot of arm-twisting, to collect from Pierre for the work and materials he had put into it. However, he was now free to spend his days prowling the valley in search of his orchid. Typically, he was methodical and exhaustive, poking about in every likely habitat. He had walked the banks of the Rauze end to end, had come across a splendid clump of parasitic Toothwort growing on a stump in a water meadow, and had even discovered several plants of
Aconitum vulparia
, Wolfsbane, which he was able to identify by their yellow buds. Julian had asked Didier if it was Wolfsbane the old ones had planted in the place of Devil’s Clog. The old gardener, comfortably propped up in his convalescent bed, had shaken his head. He didn’t know. It was before his time. In his continuing search, Julian had found no
Cypripedium incognitum
.
As he searched, he thought occasionally about Eloïse. He didn’t much like the picture he had formed of the woman, but he recognized that he owed her an immense debt. Without her and her needlework, he would never have seen his Mystery Orchid whole, never associated it with Aurillac. Her embroidery and Didier’s information on Devil’s Clog had given him a shadowy history of the flower he sought, but he was still left with more questions than answers.
It had taken seventy-seven stitches to sew Julian up after his encounter with the feral dog, about a tenth the number required for Antoine. His jaw, where the viticulturist had kicked him, was still extremely painful, the bruising lingering as an ugly purple welt. But these things were nothing compared with what he had been through with Mara. It boiled down to a simple difference in philosophical and ethical perspectives: he was inclined to leave well enough alone, Mara wanted truth to out. Simple things, Julian had come to realize, could be terribly complex.
“A quoi bon?”
he had asked. To what good? “If we go public with what we suspect about Guillaume Verdier’s murder, the public backlash will be so bad the winery will probably go under and take a lot of jobs and innocent people with it.”
“Denise? Innocent?” Mara had nearly screamed.
“I didn’t say she was
nice.”
As far as Baby Blue was concerned, again Julian had asked,
A quoi bon?
At that point, Mara had exploded. “Right and wrong don’t matter? Or is that the orchid nerd’s philosophy of life?
Orchis, orchis über alles?
In case it slipped your mind,” she had thundered on, heedless of the hurt in his eyes—the “orchid nerd” gibe had hit him between the legs, figuratively speaking—“Christophe is about to publish a self-serving, purposely fabricated tissue of lies. It’s a question of intellectual honesty.”
“No,” Julian had retorted angrily. “It’s a question of friendship. Something you might want to think about.”
“And something you might want to think about, Julian Wood, is why you hide behind a flower you’re never going to find. Is it safe because it’s unattainable? Does chasing after it let you sidestep reality? Does it let you avoid facing the truth about yourself, that you run from relationships because you’re scared to death of failure?”
“For Christ’s sake,” Julian had yelled. He’d had just about all he could take. “If you’re so hung up on truth, why don’t you look at yourself? You’re inflexible and stubborn and damned judgmental. Worst of all, you just can’t let things
be
. You always want to arrange things. You say I can’t face reality. Maybe it’s just that you don’t like my brand of reality. Worst of all, you have one set of rules that you want everyone to play by, as long as it’s convenient for you. You expect unquestioning loyalty from your friends, but you sure can’t handle it when they give it to someone else. That, as far as I’m concerned, is what your issue of right versus wrong boils down to.”
“Ha!”
And that was pretty much the last word he had heard from her, if “ha” could even be considered a word.
However, Julian had one small triumph. In return for keeping quiet about the
maquisard sans tête
, he had wrested from Pierre and Denise a commitment to work out a fair agreement with the other winegrowers in the valley to enlarge the Coteaux de Bonfond
chai
to accommodate local production. It took a bit of wooing to bring Michel Verdier back to the table, but it was worth the bother just to see the expression on the Crotte’s face when he realized that he had no choice, that, in addition to paying Julian what he owed him, he was going to have to spend even more money. Denise, quicker to size up the situation than her brother, had simply snapped, “Do it,” sounding eerily like her father as she said it. The
look of malice in her black eyes, however, told Julian that he’d better put a lot of space between her and himself for the rest of his life.