It was an odd sensation, but she felt she was following in the footsteps of the figure she’d seen on the lawns earlier.
Seen? Imagined?
She found herself glancing back at the façade of the hotel, at one point stopping to figure out which was her window, and whether she could possibly have seen what she thought she had from such a long way off.
As she completed the path around the left-hand side of the lake, the ground began to rise. She climbed up a grassy slope to a small promontory that overlooked the water, straight across to the hotel. It seemed crazy, but she was convinced this was precisely where she had seen the figure standing earlier.
Imagined.
There was a curved stone bench, in the shape of a crescent moon. The surface glistened with dew. Meredith wiped it with her gloves, then sat down. As always, by deep water, thoughts of Jeanette rushed into her mind, and the way she had chosen to end her life. Walking into Lake Michigan with her pockets weighted down with stones. Like Virginia Woolf, Meredith had learnt years later at high school, although she doubted her mother had known that.
But as Meredith sat looking out over the lake, she surprised herself by feeling peaceful. She was thinking of her birth mother, but it wasn’t accompanied by the usual feelings of guilt. No thumping heart, no rush of shame, no regret. This was a place of reflection, to be calm and private.
The rattling of the crows in the trees, the higher-pitched twitterings of thrushes in the thick, high box hedge at her back, isolated from the house by the expanse of water, yet still in plain view.
She lingered a while longer, then decided to carry on walking. Two hours earlier, she had been frustrated not to be able to rush out and start looking for the ruins of the sepulchre. Given how Shelagh O’Donnell had been in the hotel, she figured Hal would have his hands full. She didn’t expect him back much before one.
She pulled out her cell and checked she had a signal, then put it away. He could call if he needed to get in touch with her.
Careful not to slip on the wet grass, she made her way back down to the level ground close to the side of the lake and took stock of her surroundings. In one direction the path led around the lake and back towards the house. In the other, a more overgrown track went into the beech woods.
Meredith took the left-hand path. Within minutes, she was deep into the trees, winding through the dappled sunlight. The track led to a crisscross of interconnecting paths, all pretty similar. Some led uphill, others seemed to slope down towards the valley. She was intending to track down the ruins of the Visigoth sepulchre, then working out from there, looking for a place where the cards could be hidden. Anything too obvious and they would have been found years ago, but she figured it was as good a place to start as any.
Meredith set off down a path that led to a small clearing. After a few minutes, the hillside dipped away sharply. The ground beneath her feet changed. She braced her legs, taking it slowly on the slippery stones and gravel, jolting down, dislodging pine cones and fallen twigs, until finally she found herself standing on some kind of natural platform, almost like a bridge. And underneath, intersecting it at right angles, was a strip of brown earth leading down through the green woodland all around it.
In the distance through a break in the trees, Meredith could pick out on the far hill a cluster of stone megaliths, grey amongst the wooded green, possibly the same ones Hal had pointed out to her on their way to Rennes-le-Château.
The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.
She realised that from here, pretty much all the natural landmarks Hal had mentioned - the Fauteuil du Diable, the bénitier, the étang du Diable - were visible. More than that, from this one spot, all the locations used as backdrops to the cards were also evident.
The sepulchre dated back to Visigoth times. So it stood to reason there might be other Visigoth burial sites within the grounds? Meredith looked around. And this, to her inexpert eye at least, looked much like a dry riverbed.
Trying to keep her excitement in check, she looked around for a way down. There wasn’t an obvious one. She hesitated, crouched, and manoeuvred herself round, then lowered herself over the edge. For a moment, there was nothing, as she hung suspended in the air on her elbows. Then she let herself go, dropping for a fraction of a heart-stopping second, until her feet found the ground.
She took the impact in her knees, then straightened up and started to make her way down. It looked like the bed of a winterbourne at the end of a dry summer, but slick with light autumn drizzle. Meredith, working hard not to slip on the loose stones and film of wet topsoil, cast her eyes about her for anything out of the ordinary.
At first, there seemed no break in the undergrowth, all tangled and dripping with dew. Then, a little further, just before the track took another sharp dive down like a helterskelter at a fairground, Meredith noticed a shallow depression. She moved closer until she could make out a flat grey stone, peeking out from beneath the tangled roots of a spreading juniper bush, with its scratchy needle-like leaves and green and purple fruit. The depression wasn’t big enough to be a grave itself, but the stone didn’t look like it had been put there by chance. Meredith got out her cell and took a couple of photos.
She put her cell away, then reached in and pulled at the knotted undergrowth. The thin branches were strong and wiry, but she succeeded in pulling them far enough apart to peek into the damp green space around the roots.
She felt a spark of adrenalin. There was a ring of stones, eight in all. The pattern set a memory chasing in her mind. She narrowed her eyes, then realised the shape of the stones echoed the crown of stars on the image of La Force. And now that she was standing here, she could see the landscape right here was especially reminiscent in colour and tone of that depicted on the card.
With growing anticipation, Meredith thrust her hands into the foliage, feeling the green slime and mud seeping through the tips of her cheap woollen gloves, and dragged clear the biggest of the stones. She wiped the surface clean, then gave a sigh of satisfaction. Painted in black tar or paint was a five-pointed star set within a circle.
The symbol for the suit of pentacles. The treasure suit.
She took a couple more photos, then put the stone to one side. She pulled the stolen trowel from her pocket and started to dig, scraping against stones and shards of unfired clay tiles. She pulled out one of the larger pieces and examined it. It looked like a roof tile, although she wondered how such a thing was buried out here, so far from the house.
Then the metal head of the trowel hit something substantial. Concerned not to damage anything, Meredith put the trowel to one side and finished the job by hand, burrowing at the mud and worms and black beetles, pulling off her gloves and letting her fingers be her eyes.
Finally she felt a piece of heavy material, a waxed cloth.
She pushed her head under the leaves to look and peeled the corners back to reveal the beautiful lacquered lid of a small chest, with a crisscross of mother-of-pearl inlay. It looked like a jewellery case or a lady’s workbox, pretty and clearly expensive. On the top were two initials in dull corroded brass.
LV.
Meredith smiled. Léonie Vernier. It had to be.
She went to open the lid, then hesitated. What if the cards were inside? What would it mean? Did she even want to see them?
In a rush, she felt the solitude press down upon her. The sounds of the wood that had been so gentle, so reassuring, now seemed oppressive, threatening. She pulled her phone from her pocket, checked the time. Maybe she should give Hal a call? The desire to hear another human voice - his voice - stabbed at her. She thought better of it. He wouldn’t want to be disturbed in the middle of his meeting with the police. She hesitated, then sent an SMS, and straight away regretted it. Displacement activity. And the last thing she wanted was to come over all needy.
Meredith looked back down at the box in front of her.
The story is in the cards.
She wiped her palms, greasy wi
th exertion and anticipation, once more on her blue jeans. Then finally, slowly, she opened the lid. The box was full of spools of thread, ribbons and thimbles. The inside of the padded lid was studded with needles and pins. With grimy fingers, raw from the cold and the digging, Meredith removed some of the cotton reels, burrowing through felt and cloth, as she had previously dug through the earth and dirt.
Then there they were. She saw the top card with the same green back, the delicate patterns of tree branches threaded through in gold and silver, although the colour was chalkier, clearly painted by hand with a brush rather than made by a machine. She ran her fingers over the surface. A different texture, rough not smooth. More like parchment than the modern plastic-coated reproduction deck.
Meredith made herself count to three, summoning the courage to turn the top card over.
Her own face stared up at her. Card XI. La Justice.
As she gazed at the hand-painted image, once more she was aware of whispering inside her head. Not like the voices that had hounded her mother, but gentle and soft, the voice she had heard in her dream, carried on the air slipping between the branches and trunks of the autumn trees.
Here, in this place, time moves away towards eternity.
Meredith stood up. The most logical move now would be to take the cards and go back to the house. Study them properly in the comfort of her own room, with all her notes, access to the internet, the reproduction deck to hand to compare them with.
Except now she could hear Léonie’s voice again. In the turning of a moment, the whole world seemed to have shrunk to this one place. The smell of the earth in her nostrils, the grit and soil under her nails, the dampness that seeped from the earth and into her bones.
Except this is not the place.
Except something was calling her on deeper into the woods. The wind was getting louder, more forceful, carrying something more than just the noises of the forest. Music heard but not heard. She could pick out a faint melody in the rustling of the fallen leaves, the tapping of the bare branches of the beech trees a little further off.
Single notes, a mournful melody in a minor key, and always the words in her head leading her on to the ruined sepulchre.
Aïci lo tems s’en, va res l’Eternitat.
Julian left the car unlocked in the parking area on the outskirts of Rennes-les-Bains, then walked quickly down to the Place des Deux Rennes, diagonally across the square, and into the small side street where Dr O’Donnell lived.
He loosened the tie at his neck. There were patches of sweat under his arms. The more he’d thought about the situation, the more his concerns had grown. He just wanted to find the cards. Anything that prevented that or delayed it was intolerable. No loose ends.
He hadn’t thought about what he was going to say. He just knew that he could not allow her to go with Hal to the commissariat.
Then he turned the corner and saw her, sitting cross-legged on the low wall that separated the terrace of her property from the deserted public footpath that led along the river. She was smoking and pushing her hands through her hair, talking on a mobile phone.
What was she saying?
Julian stopped, suddenly dizzy. Now he could hear her voice, a grating accent, all flat vowels, the one-sided conversation muffled by the pounding of the blood in his head.
He took a step closer, listening. Dr O’Donnell leaned forward and with sharp stabbing movements extinguished a cigarette in a silver ashtray. Certain words leapt out at him.
‘I’ve got to see about the car.’
Julian put his hand out to steady himself against the wall. His mouth felt dry, like dried fish, unpleasant and sour. He needed a drink to take away the taste. He looked round, no longer thinking straight. There was a stick lying on the ground, half sticking out of the hedge. He picked it up. She was still talking, on and on, telling lies. Why wouldn’t she stop talking?
Julian lifted the stick and brought it down, hard, upon her head.
Shelagh O’Donnell cried out in shock, so he hit her again to stop her making any noise. She fell to her side on the stones. Then there was silence.
Julian dropped the weapon. For a moment, he stood dead still. Then, horrified, disbelieving, he kicked the stick back into the hedge and started to run.
PART XI
The Sepulchre November 1891-October 1897
CHAPTER 88
DOMAINE DE LA CADE
SUNDAY 1ST NOVEMBER 1891
Anatole was buried in the grounds of the Domaine de la Cade. The spot chosen was the little promontory overlooking the valley at the far side of the lake, in the green shade, close by the crescent stone bench where Isolde often sat.
Abbé Saunière officiated at the meagre ceremony. Léonie - on the arm of Audric Baillard - Maître Fromilhague and Madame Bousquet were the only mourners.
Isolde remained under constant watch in her chamber, unaware even that the funeral was taking place. Locked within her silent and suspended world, she did not know how fast or how slowly time was passing, if indeed time had ceased or if all experience was contained in the chime of a single minute. Her existence had shrunk to the four walls of her head. She knew light and dark, that sometimes the fever burned in her and sometimes the cold tore at her, but also that she was trapped somewhere between two worlds, shrouded in a veil she could not draw aside.
The same group paid their respects a day later to Dr Gabignaud in the graveyard of the parish church in Rennes-les-Bains, this time the congregation swelled by the people of the town who had known and admired the young man. Dr Courrent gave the address, praising Gabignaud’s hard work, his passion, his sense of duty.
After the burials, Léonie, numb with grief and the responsibilities thrust suddenly on her young shoulders, withdrew to the Domaine de la Cade and ventured little out. The household fell into a joyless routine, day after endless day the same.
In the bare beech woods, snows fell early, blanketing the lawns and the park in white. The lake froze and lay a mirror of ice beneath the lowering clouds.
A new medical recruit, Gabignaud’s replacement as Dr Courrent’s assistant, came daily from the town to monitor Isolde’s progress.
‘Madame Vernier’s pulse is fast tonight,’ he said gravely, packing away his equipment into his black leather bag and unhooking his stethoscope from his neck. ‘The severity of grief, the strain upon her due to her condition, well, I fear for the full restoration of her faculties the longer this state persists.’
The weather deepened in December. Blustery winds drove in from the north, bringing with them hail and ice that assaulted the roof and windows of the house in waves.
The Aude valley was frozen in misery. Those without shelter, if fortunate, were taken in by their neighbours. Oxen starved in the fields, their hooves caught in the mud and ice, rotting. The rivers froze. The tracks were impassable. There was no food, for man nor beast. The tinkling bell of the sacristan rang out over the fields as Christ was carried through the countryside to grace the lips of another dying sinner, over paths concealed and made treacherous beneath snow. It seemed that all living things would, one by one, simply cease to exist. No light, no warmth, like candles blown out.
In the parish church of Rennes-les-Bains, Curé Boudet preached masses for the dead and the bell tolled out its mournful passing note. In Coustaussa, Curé Gélis opened his doors and offered the cold flagstones of the presbytery floor to the homeless as shelter. In Rennes-le-Château, Abbé Saunière preached of the evil stalking the countryside and urged his congregation to seek salvation in the arms of the one true church.
At the Domaine de la Cade, the staff, although shaken by what had taken place and their part in the matter, remained steadfast. In Isolde’s continuing indisposition, they accepted Léonie as mistress of the house. But Marieta grew alarmed as sorrow stole from Léonie her appetite and rest, and she grew thin and pale. Her green eyes lost their shine. But her courage held. She remembered her promise to Anatole that she would protect Isolde and
their child and was determined not to let down his memory.
Victor Constant stood accused of the murder of Marguerite Vernier in Paris, the murder of Anatole Vernier in Rennes-les-Bains and the attempted murder of Isolde Vernier, formerly Lascombe. There was also a prosecution pending arising out of the attack on the prostitute in Carcassonne. It was suggested - and accepted without further investigation - that Dr Gabignaud, Charles Denarnaud and a third comrade in the sorry business - had been killed on the orders of Victor Constant, even if it had not been his finger on the trigger.
The town disapproved of the news that Anatole and Isolde had married in secret, more at the haste of it rather than the fact that he was the nephew of her first husband. But it seemed that, given time, the arrangements at the Domaine de la Cade would come to be accepted.