Sepulchre

  ‘So I can either drop you back at the hotel,’ he continued, ‘or you could come with me and we’ll find somewhere to eat later. Only problem with that is I’m not sure how long I’ll be. They don’t always move fast down here.’

  For a moment Meredith was tempted to tag along. Give Hal moral support. But she figured it was something he needed to do on his own. Besides, she needed to focus on her own stuff for a while, not let herself get sucked into Hal’s problems.

  ‘Sounds like you might be a while,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind dropping me back at the hotel on your way, that would be fine.’

  She was gratified to see Hal’s expression falter, just for a moment.

  ‘It’s probably better I go alone in any case, since they are doing me a favour.’

  ‘That’s what I guessed,’ she said, briefly touching his hand.

  Hal fired the ignition and reversed the car.

  ‘Then what about later?’ he said, as he negotiated the narrow street out of Rennes-le-Château. ‘We could meet for a drink. Dinner, even? If you’ve not got plans.’

  ‘Sure,’ she smiled, keeping it cool. ‘Dinner would be good.’

  CHAPTER 49

  Julian Lawrence was standing at his study window at the Domaine de la Cade as his nephew turned the car and drove back down the long drive. He switched his attention to the woman who’d just got out and who was now waving goodbye. The American, he presumed.

  He nodded his approval. Good figure, athletic but petite, straight dark hair to her shoulders. It wouldn’t be such a trial to spend a little time in her company.

  Then she turned round and he got a proper look at her.

  Julian recognised her, although couldn’t place her. He dug into his memory, until it came to him. The pushy bitch from the traffic hold-up in Rennes-les-Bains last night. The American accent.

  Another flash of paranoia shot through him. If Ms Martin was here working with Hal, and had mentioned she’d seen him driving into the town, his nephew might legitimately question where he’d been. Might realise the excuse Julian had given for being late didn’t make sense.

  He drained his glass, then made a snap decision. He crossed the study in three strides, pulled his jacket from the back of the door and walked out to intercept her in the lobby.

  On the journey back from Rennes-le-Château, Meredith started to feel excited. Before, Laura’s gift had felt a burden. Now, the Tarot cards seemed full of intriguing possibilities.

  She waited until Hal’s car disappeared from view, then turned and headed up the steps to the main door of the hotel. She felt nervous, but fired up too. The same contradictory feelings she’d experienced when sitting with Laura were back and big time. Hope versus scepticism, the prickling anticipation versus the fear that she was putting two and two together and coming up with five.

  ‘Ms Martin?’

  Caught by surprise, Meredith turned in the direction of the voice to see Hal’s uncle striding towards her across the lobby. She tensed, hoping after their bad-tempered exchange in Rennes-les-Bains last night, he wouldn’t recognise her. But today, he was smiling.

  ‘Ms Martin?’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Julian Lawrence. I just wanted to welcome you to the Domaine de la Cade,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  They shook hands.

  ‘Also,’ he stopped, giving a slight shrug, ‘also I wanted to apologise if I was rather abrupt yesterday, in the town. If I’d known you were a friend of my nephew’s, I would of course have introduced myself then.’

  Meredith coloured up. ‘I didn’t think you’d remember me, Mr Lawrence. I’m afraid I was pretty rude myself.’

  ‘Not in the slightest. As I’m sure Hal told you, it was a rather difficult day for us all yesterday. It’s no excuse, I know, but...’

  He left the apology hanging.

  Meredith noticed how he had the same habit as Hal of staring right at a person with an unwavering gaze that seemed to blot out everything else. And, although some thirty years older, he’d got that same kind of charisma as Hal, a way of filling the space. She wondered if Hal’s father had been the same.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Mr Lawrence.’

  ‘Julian, please. And thank you. It was a shock.’ He paused. ‘Speaking of my nephew, Ms Martin, I don’t suppose you know where he’s disappeared off to? I was under the impression you were going to Rennes-le-Château this morning but that he would be here this afternoon. I had been hoping to have a word with him.’

  ‘We did go, but a call just came through from the police station, so he dropped me off before going on to deal with things. Couiza, I think he said.’

  She sensed a sharpening of interest, even though Julian’s expression didn’t change. Immediately Meredith regretted letting the information out.

  ‘What sort of things?’ he said.

  ‘He didn’t really say,’ she said in a rush.

  ‘Pity, I had hoped for a word.’ He shrugged. ‘But it’s nothing that can’t wait.’ He smiled again, but this time it failed to reach his eyes. ‘I trust you’re enjoying your stay with us? You have everything you need?’

  ‘Everything’s great.’ She glanced at the stairs.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I’m holding you up.’

  ‘I’ve got some stuff I need to ...’

  Julian nodded. ‘Ah, yes. Hal mentioned you were a writer. Are you here working on an assignment?’

  Meredith felt pinned to the spot. Kind of trapped.

  ‘Not really,’ she replied. ‘At least, a little research.’

  ‘Is that so?’ He offered his hand. ‘In which case, I won’t delay you further.’

  Not wishing to be rude, Meredith took it. This time, the touch of his skin made her uncomfortable. Too personal, somehow.

  ‘If you see my nephew before I catch up with him,’ he said, squeezing her fingers a little too tight, ‘do let him know I’m looking for him, won’t you?’

  Meredith nodded. ‘Sure.’

  Then he let her go. He turned and walked back across the lobby without a backward glance.

  Clear message. He was confident, sure of himself, in control.

  Meredith let a long breath escape from between her lips, wondering exactly what had just happened. She stood staring into the empty space where Julian had been. Then, mad at herself for letting him get to her again, she pulled herself together.

  Put it out of your mind.

  She glanced around. The desk clerk was dealing with a query and facing the opposite direction. From the noise coming from the restaurant, Meredith figured most guests were already in the dining room having lunch. Perfect for what she had in mind.

  She walked quickly across the red and black tiles, ducked round beside the piano and reached up and took the photograph of Anatole and Léonie Vernier and Isolde Lascombe from the wall. She slipped it beneath her jacket, then doubled back and ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

  Only when she was back in her room, with the door safely shut behind her, did her breathing return to normal. She paused a moment, narrowed her eyes and looked around the room.

  There was something about the atmosphere that seemed different. An alien smell, very subtle, but there all the same. She wrapped her arms around herself, remembering her nightmare. Then she shook her head. Don’t do this. The maids had been in to make up the bed. Besides, she thought, it wasn’t at all like what she’d felt in the night.

  Dreamed, she corrected herself.

  Just a dream.

  Then, there was a definite sense of someone being in the room with her. A presence, a chill in the air. Now, it was just . . .

  Meredith shrugged. Polish or cleaning product, that was all. It wasn’t so strong. Not really. Although she couldn’t help wrinkling up her nose. Like the smell of the sea washing stagnant on the shore.

  CHAPTER 50

  Meredith went straight to the closet and retrieved the Tarot deck, unfolding the four corners o
f black silk as if the cards inside were made of glass.

  The unsettling image of the Tower was on the top, the brooding grey and green of the background and the trees more vivid here in the clouded afternoon than they had seemed in Paris. She paused a moment, suddenly thinking that maybe it had been Justice on the top of the pile when Laura pressed the cards upon her, then shrugged. Obviously not.

  She cleared a space on the bureau and put the cards down, then pulled out her notebook from her purse, wishing she’d taken the time last night to transpose her scribbled notes about the reading from page to screen.

  Meredith thought for a moment, trying to figure out if she laid out the ten cards that had come up yesterday, in the peace and quiet of her own thoughts, then she might see something more in them. She decided against it. She was less interested in the reading per se than in the historical data she was gathering about the Bousquet Tarot and how the cards fitted in to the story of the Domaine de la Cade, the Verniers and the Lascombe family.

  Meredith searched the deck until she had found all twenty-two of the major arcana. Putting the remainder of the cards to one side, she then laid them out in three rows one above the other, placing the Fool at the top on his own, just like Laura had done. The cards felt different to the touch. Yesterday they’d made her nervous. As if she was committing herself to something even by handling them. Today they seemed - and she knew it sounded stupid - kind of well meaning.

  She slid the framed photograph from under her jacket and propped it on the bureau in front of her and studied the black and white figures, frozen in time. Then she dropped her eyes to the colourful images on the cards.

  For a moment, her attention rested on Le Pagad, with his blue, blue eyes and thick black hair, gathering all the symbols of the Tarot to him. An attractive image, but a man to be trusted?

  Then the tingling feeling on her neck started over, licking all the way down her spine as a new idea took hold. Was it possible? She put the Magician to one side. She picked up card I, Le Mat, and held it against the framed photograph. Now she had them side by side, she had no doubt the man was ‘Monsieur Vernier’ brought to life. The same debonair expression, the slim figure, the black moustache.

  Next, card II, La Prêtresse. The ethereal, pale, distant features of ‘Madame Lascombe’, although in an evening gown, cut low at the neck, rather than the formal day clothes of the photograph. Meredith glanced back down, seeing the two figures painted together as the Lovers and chained at the feet of the Devil.

  Finally, card VIII, La Force: ‘Mademoiselle Léonie Vernier’.

  Meredith felt herself smiling. She felt the greatest connection with this card, almost as if she knew the girl. In a way, she guessed, it was because Léonie resembled her mental image of Lilly Debussy. Léonie was younger, but there was that same wide-eyed innocence, the same thick copper hair, although loose on the card and tumbling down over her shoulders, rather than tied up in a formal style. Most of all, that same straightforward way of gazing directly into the lens.

  A glint of understanding rippled beneath the surface of her conscious mind, but was gone before Meredith could grasp it.

  She turned her attention to the other cards of the major arcana that had come up in the course of the day: the Devil, the Tower, the Hermit, the Emperor. She studied each in turn, but increasingly with the sense that they were taking her further away from where she wanted to be, not closer.

  Meredith sat back in her chair. The antique seat creaked. She put her hands behind her head and closed her eyes.

  What am I not seeing?

  She let her thoughts wander back to the reading. Allowed Laura’s words to flow over her, in no particular order, letting the patterns emerge.

  Octaves. All the eights.

  Eight was the number of completion, of successful outcomes. There was also an explicit message about interference, obstacles, and conflict. Both Strength and Justice, in older packs, carried the number eight. Both La Justice and La Pagad had the infinity symbol, like a sideways figure of eight.

  Music linked everything together. Her family background, the Bousquet Tarot, the Verniers, the reading in Paris, the sheet of piano music. She reached for her notebook, going back through the pages until she found the name she was looking for, the American cartomancer who’d linked the Tarot with music. She switched on her laptop, tapping her fingers impatiently as it sought a connection. Finally, the search box flashed up on the screen. Meredith typed PAUL FOSTER CASE. Moments later, a list of sites appeared.

  She went straight to the Wikipedia entry, which was thorough and straightforward. An American, Paul Foster Case became interested in cards in the early 1900s while he was working the steamboats playing piano and organ in vaudeville. Thirty years later in Los Angeles, he set up an organisation to promote his own Tarot system, the Builders of the Adytum, known as BOTA. One of the distinguishing features of BOTA was that Case went public with his philosophy, in sharp contrast to most esoteric systems of the time, which relied on absolute secrecy and the idea of an elite. It was also interactive. Unlike any other decks, the BOTA cards were black and white, the idea being that each individual could colour them in, put their own mark upon them. This, as much as anything, helped bring Tarot into the US mainstream.

  Another of Case’s innovations was the association of musical notes with certain of the major arcana. All of them, with the exception of card XX, the Sun, and IX, the Hermit - as if those two images alone stood outside the common run of things - were linked with a specific note.

  Meredith looked at the illustration of a keyboard, with arrows showing which card went with which.

  The Tower, Judgement and the Emperor were all assigned to the note C; the Devil was linked with A; D connected with the Lovers and Strength; the Magician and the unnumbered Fool were E.

  C-A-D-E. Domaine de la Cade.

  She stared at the screen, as if it was trying to trick her in some way.

  C-A-D-E, all white notes, all associated with particular cards of the major arcana that had come up already.

  And more than that, Meredith saw another connection that had been staring her in the face all along. She reached for her inherited sheet of piano music: Sepulchre 1891. She knew the piece backwards - the forty-five bars, the change of tempo in the middle section - in style and character suggesting nineteenth-century gardens and girls in white dresses. Echoes of Debussy and Satie and Dukas.

  And built around the notes of A, C, D and E.

  For a moment, Meredith forgot what she was doing, picturing her fingers flying over the keyboard. Nothing but the music existed. A, C, D and E. The final split arpeggio, the last chord fading away.

  She sat back in her chair. Everything fitted together, sure.

  But what the hell, if anything, does it mean?

  In a moment, Meredith was back in Milwaukee, Miss Bridge’s advanced music class in senior high, repeating the same mantra over and over. A smile came to her lips. ‘An octave is made up of twelve plus one chromatic tones.’ She could all but hear her teacher’s voice in her head. ‘The semi-tone and the whole tone are the building blocks of the diatonic scale. There are eight tones in the diatonic scale, five in the pentatonic. The first, third and fifth tones in the diatonic scale are the building blocks of root chords, the formula for perfection, for beauty.’

  Meredith let her memories come, leading her thoughts. Music and math, seeking the connections not the coincidences. She typed FIBONACCI into the search box. Watched as new words appeared in front of her. In 1202, Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci, developed a mathematical theory where numbers formed a sequence. After two starting values, each number was the sum of the two preceding numbers.

  0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377.

  The relationship between pairs of consecutive numbers was said to approach the golden proportion, the golden mean.

  In music, the Fibonacci principle was sometimes used to determine tunings. Fibonacci numbers also appeared in natur
al settings, such as branching in trees, the curve of waves, the arrangement of a pine cone. In sunflowers, for example, there were always eighty-nine seeds. Meredith smiled.

  I remember.

  Debussy had flirted with the Fibonacci sequence in his great orchestral tone poem, La Mer. It was one of the wonderful contradictions of Debussy that, although he was seen as a composer primarily concerned with mood and colour, some of his most popular works were in fact constructed around mathematical models. Or, rather, could be divided into sections that reflected the golden ratio, frequently by using the numbers of the standard Fibonacci sequence. So in La Mer the first movement was fifty-five bars long - a Fibonacci number - and it broke down into five sections of 21, 8, 8, 5 and 13 bars, all also Fibonacci numbers.