Lost Children

by Willa Bergman

  The entrance to the courtyard is overlooked by a square tower topped with a high roof where the Harlois family archives were kept. It casts a long shadow across the ground in front of me.

  This is where it ends.

  9

  I stand in open ground. I am absolutely silent, listening. I shout out to my father, unsure if he is even here. I get no response. I wait again. With still no response and unsure what to do next, I hear a noise by the entrance door to the chateau and realise someone is unlocking it. The large door slowly creaks open and reveals Masoud, dressed as immaculately as ever and made all the more noticeable juxtaposed against the wreckage that surrounds him. He looks at me from his raised vantage point at the entrance, caution and suspicion written over his face.

  “Did you come alone?” He asks me. I tell him yes. He’s silent a moment more before he’s comfortable enough that it’s only the two of us. Then he tells me to follow him.

  As I step inside the chateau I feel like I’ve walked into another world, a parallel universe or another life. It’s familiar and yet completely changed. The hallway is cold and the air is thick with damp. In one corner part of the ceiling has collapsed. Every part of it looks and smells of decay and abandon.

  Masoud leads me forward, deeper into the chateau towards the grand salon. Cold, wet air blows in from more than one broken window. Plaster peels off the walls and the once beautiful herringbone oak flooring is now scuffed and infested with woodworm and mould.

  The doors to the grand salon stand slightly ajar in front of me, a glimmer of light flickering through them. Masoud pushes them open and directs me to go inside.

  The room is bare, stripped of all the fine things that once lived here. Its grand proportions only emphasise how empty the space now is. Where once there were treasured and beautiful things now there is only dead space. I remember there were two great chaise longues in the centre of the room either side of an enormous gold leaf table, all sat upon an ornate Persian rug that spanned the length of the entire room. One solitary, threadbare armchair remains, pointed towards the fireplace where I can see a small makeshift fire now burns and provides some light in the otherwise dark room. Arnaud is sitting in the armchair.

  Masoud announces my arrival to him, like some willing manservant. “Your daughter is here Arnaud.” He rises to greet me, a large glass of whisky in his hand and a bottle beside him, he seems in a good mood. “Welcome Eloise, how wonderful it is to see you.”

  “Do you live here?” I ask him in disbelief.

  “Of course I do, this is my home. My family’s home. We’ve lived here for over eight hundred years. Do you think I’d just let you take it away from me?”

  “I have the painting.” I tell him plainly.

  “Tschh, tschh, this is a special moment Eloise, let’s not rush it.” He wants to enjoy his victory. He asks me to walk with him and he leads me out onto the overgrown parterre, now more of a field than a garden, where the Prince once played all those centuries ago. I look at Arnaud. He looks out into the sky but seems to know what I’m thinking. “I can see you have questions in your mind, I guess that is understandable. Now is the time if you want to ask them.”

  “You’ve been alive all these years, how have I not heard anything about you? There were press articles about you. You were dead, you’re legally dead. I’ve checked the records myself.”

  “That’s right. Yet here I stand.”

  “How?”

  “Because of Joseph. All my friends deserted me, all except one. I spoke to him from my death bed and told him that if I survived I wanted no one to know. He brought me back to life, but with a few legal tricks that meant the outside world didn’t get to know about it. All I had was my life and what was left of this place.”

  “Do you own this place?”

  “I do. After my death and your flight into hiding, with no will or legal heir the chateau became the property of France. With nobody standing to make any money out of it little happened. It was eventually put on the market after a couple of years but it had already begun to fall into disrepair and given its history and isolated location they were unable to find a buyer. So, empty and derelict it stood until I was healthy enough to return to it. I waited my time. It took me ten years but now it’s once again mine.”

  “How? You can’t own something if you’re dead.”

  “It’s true that my creditors tried to take it from me for a time. But now it is mine again.”

  “How?”

  “I will leave it to Masoud’s more capable legal mind to explain, but I understand it is called ‘acquisitive prescription’.”

  Masoud offers mechanically, “The continuous, uninterrupted possession of something resulting in transfer of legal title. In English Law they call it adverse possession or squatters rights.”

  “That’s what I’ve had to become because of you, a squatter in my own home.”

  “You did that yourself when you drank and gambled away your family’s future. You have no one to blame but yourself.”

  “You left me with nothing.”

  “You were in so much debt nothing would have been a significant improvement in your fortunes.”

  “Ah, there’s your mother talking, poisoning you with her untruths about me.”

  I don’t want to make him angry but I can’t help it. I try to take his thoughts away from my mother but I have too many questions unanswered.

  “How did you survive?”

  “How did I survive? You mean after your brother shot me and you left me for dead in my own home? With extreme difficulty and enormous pain. I lay on the floor dying where you left me for two days, until a groundsman walked into the chateau looking for me and found me lying there. I was shot in the abdomen, the bullet penetrated my lower intestines so there was only a limited amount of blood loss, that’s what kept me alive. But the bullet hit my spine and left me unable to move. It took me four years of rehabilitation before I could walk on my own again and I’m condemned to use this cane for whatever years I have left.”

  “On that floor I assumed I was dead, my only wish was for the pain to end. But as I lay there, minute after minute, hour after hour awaiting my death, I began to dream of something else: of justice, of an avenging angel come to rescue me so I could set right the wrongs done to me. I never should have let your mother into my life. I gave her everything she could have wanted, and she took everything I had to give and more.”

  “You expect me to believe that? I was there, I wasn’t blind. I know what you did to her.”

  “I loved your mother as much as I loved anything in the world. I could have spent the rest of my life in this chateau, just the two of us and I would have been happy. But it wasn’t enough for her. It was never enough. I gave her everything but she always wanted more.”

  “You have a very warped memory of the past.”

  He looks at me, a deep anger rising up in him, but something holds him back.

  “But enough talk, you’ve brought me my painting, I want to see it. I want to see it where it belongs.”

  I’m ushered back inside into the Grand Salon. I cut open the brown paper packaging of the painting with the pocket knife and hang it above the mantelpiece, its rightful home. We both stand there in silence staring at it, the light from the fire flickering over the canvas. The room is all but empty but there is something about seeing the painting above the fireplace that makes the room feel whole again. But where once it was a jewel in a room fit for such an object, it’s beauty now jars with its surroundings, framed as it is by the decay and ruin around it.

  “This painting is the soul of my family. It has hung on this wall, through fourteen generations of my family, for almost four hundred years. It endured through two World Wars and the French Revolution. But it couldn’t survive you. Now it has been returned to me I can begin again.”

  He looks at it as if in a trance. He has his painting.

  There’s nothing else here for me now. I don’t want to stay here any lon
ger than I have to. I tell him it’s time for me to leave; I’ve met my side of the bargain, our business is concluded.

  He breaks his trance and turns his head towards me.

  “I’m afraid not Eloise. Both you and I know that is not how this story ends.”

  From his jacket pocket he takes out what I can clearly see is a handgun.

  “Did you really think, that returning the painting would absolve you of everything you did to me? This is the end for you Eloise and it will be as unpleasant and painful as the end you tried to give to me.”

  His gun is pointed at me. I don’t dare make a run for it.

  “What will you do?” I ask him, trying to stall him in whatever I can.

  “I will enjoy my painting above the fireplace for a few last days, and then I will sell it.” Even with a gun to my head I’m shocked by his answer.

  “What? Is that what this is all about, money? What about your great family history, how does that survive if you sell it?”

  “It doesn’t. Like I said, the painting couldn’t survive you. I am the last Harlois, I have no heir so the line dies with me. Now the painting is just a luxury that I can’t afford.”

  I know these are my last moments. All I can think to do is grab the painting. I have it off the wall before he can react. I hold it in front of me like a shield. He hesitates. He may not care about the painting anymore but he still wants to get paid for it.

  “Come now Eloise, both you and I know you’re not going to do anything to the painting.”

  I’m not getting out of here. There are two ways out of the room and Arnaud is in front of one and Masoud the other. They begin to close in on me. This is the end, there aren’t any outs. My only card left to play is the painting. I hold it in my hands, clasping it tighter and tighter. It’s now or never; but I can’t, it’s against everything I believe. I look again at Arnaud, my anger and hatred for him burning inside me. With a scream of anguish I take my pocket knife and plunge it into the heart of the painting. Arnaud reaches out in desperation but he is too far away and too slow to stop me. I tear the knife through the length of the painting, I break it in two over my leg and then throw both shattered halves into the fire where they instantly burst into flames.

  Arnaud screams in anger. He raises his right arm, points his gun at me and fires. What feels like two hot metal rods are pushed through me. The impact from the shots pushes me backwards but my legs give way under me and I collapse to the floor. I black out from the pain but it’s only for a moment. When I open my eyes he is standing over me with a conquering grimace.

  I can barely move. He gets to his knees and leans in towards me, so he can whisper in my ear.

  “You fucking bitch… does it hurt? What about now?” He pushes the muzzle of the gun into the bullet wound in my right arm and I feel another intense shot of searing, unbearable pain. “Know this, whatever I do to you, it’s nothing compared to what you have done to me.”

  I can feel the life being pulled from me with every beat of my weakening heart. He slaps me in the face to keep me conscious. “Don’t you pass out yet, you’re not getting away that easily. I’m going to drain every ounce of pain I can from you. And then when you do finally die it will be in the knowledge that I’m going to do the same to your mother and your little fucking brother too.”

  My body is failing me and going into shock, but his words shoot into my core and release a final death rattle of rage and adrenaline in me.

  My right arm is immobile from the bullet wound but I can still feel my fingers and I constrict them around his hand which rests next to mine. With my left arm I reach for the pocket knife which is still there lying by my side. He’s too close to me to aim the blow anywhere but his side, but I don’t care and before he can move I plunge the blade deep inside him.

  He recoils in pain but with my right hand I hold him fast and plunge the blade into him again. In his scrambling efforts to escape my grip he gives me more space to strike him and this time I plunge the blade into the side of his neck, before pulling it down and tearing through into his throat releasing a fountain of blood.

  I feel his muscles go limp. I release him and he collapses by my side, his final breaths already escaping him. Through the corner of my blurring vision I see the coward Masoud running for the nearest exit. I rest my left arm back to the floor with the rest of me, the final shot of energy in me now gone. I feel a calmness now in me and a stillness. I begin to die.

  10

  There should be a sixth sense for time. When I closed my eyes to die I lost that sense, along with all the others. I didn’t dream some waking dream. I didn’t exist in any kind of surreal cognitive state. I wasn’t somehow aware of my surroundings but unable to move my body. There was nothing at all. There was no darkness, no silence, no awareness at all. Just nothing.

  And then there was something.

  As I emerged from death the first thing I could feel was the smell of disinfectant and the taste of rubber in my mouth. For a moment these two senses were my entire world. Looking back on it now I wouldn’t have thought those would be the senses to return first, but there they were. Then like a record player slowly turning back on in the middle of a song my other senses began to twitch into life too. First I could hear. Nothing in particular at first, just ambient noise. Then I started to notice more individual sounds, the intermittent beep of a nearby machine, the whirr of a ventilation fan and the distant chatter of people at work. Next came touch, the touch of a mask and tubes covering my face, but nothing else, no hands, no feet, no legs or arms. And then last is sight, but it doesn’t come yet. I just lie there, breathing, feeling, listening. I still don’t know what is happening or where I am. I can’t feel any part of my body, I don’t know how to move.

  I’m scared to open my eyes, I don’t know what awaits me out there. Somehow none of this is real until I open them. So I tell myself I’ll just wait in this dark limbo like a coward, too frightened to venture any further. But even as I think it I know I can’t escape the world that is waiting for me, whatever it is that it looks like now. So I relent and ever so slowly I start to open my eyes, if only to take a small glimpse at what lies beyond. As I open them the harsh light pours in and the brightness causes a sharp pain in my dilated pupils. Opening and closing them, it’s minutes before my eyes have adjusted enough for me to make out anything properly. And when I do, I see what I quickly realise was obviously what I was going to see, if I saw anything at all, the inside of a hospital wing.

  I can’t see much and I can’t move to look around but from what I can see I’m alone. I can’t see any outside light but it looks like there’s a window out to a corridor and I can hear people walking by. My eyes glance down towards my body and I start to realise quite how many tubes are attached to me and how many machines I’m plugged into, each one methodically beeping, repeating, doing something to help keep me alive. And there I lie, in stasis. For all the various contraptions around me, my return to consciousness hasn’t triggered an alert on any of them and there’s no one in the room to notice my Lazarus-like return to the living, so I’m permitted to lie in silence before the next frenzy begins.

  It’s a nurse who finds me back amongst the living first. When she realises she actually drops the clipboard she’s holding and runs straight out the door. She’s not gone long before she’s back, bringing with her a small army of doctors who want to examine me. And then while they all look at me, prod me and ask me questions that I can’t answer with a tube down my throat, through the tiny cracks of light between their crowded bodies I see Jack walking towards me. He has a croissant and a coffee in his hands and a newspaper tucked under his arm, but when he sees the doctors crowded around me he drops them all to the floor and rushes towards me. I can’t reach out to him or talk to him, I just look at him and he looks at me. A tear rolls down my cheek.

  After a little while things start to settle down. The doctors go away and huddle in the far corner of the room to talk about me. I can’t hear what t
hey’re saying. Jack is told to wait outside. When they’re finished they all leave the room except for one of the older looking doctors who seems to be the man in charge. He walks over to me so he’s directly in my line of sight. He looks kind.

  “Eloise, my name is Doctor Renard. You’re at the Chubert Hospital in Vannes and I am the chief physician here.”

  He asks me to blink if I can understand what he’s saying. I do it. He tells me I’ve been in a coma for six days. The doctors had no idea how long I was going to be out for, a day or a lifetime. It turns out it was six days.

  He tells me my body has suffered massive trauma from the gunshot wounds. The first bullet hit me near the base of my stomach. It ricocheted off a metallic button on my jacket and fragmented. There are pieces of it still in me and Doctor Renard tells me they won’t be removed. The button deflected the core of the bullet sideways through my body. It kept going, exiting on my right side before entering my arm and finally lodging itself in my forearm. One bullet, three holes.

  The second bullet hit the brachial artery in my right arm, that’s what caused most of the blood loss and brought me closest to death. If it wasn’t for Jack using a makeshift tourniquet to stem the blood flow I’d have died right there on the floor long before the emergency services arrived.

  He tells me I’ve come as close to death as anyone he’s ever seen, but the surgery was successful and I’m now stable. He says if I’ve made it this far then I must be a fighter and if I can keep fighting then somehow I’m going to be able to walk away from this.

  I can live with a long road to recovery, I’m not a doctor but I didn’t need one to know the state I’m in is not an easy fix. The question was whether there was any kind of fix at all and I’m very happy to hear what he’s saying.

  But even as the doctor says his words of hope, I’m given no chance to enjoy them as my mind is already coming back to life and thinking about every other problem. Coming back from the dead brought me right back to the mess of the life I left behind. I’m a fugitive in this country and there is no chance the authorities haven’t worked out exactly who I am. Are they going to get me healthy just so they can send me to jail? What about Jack, what about our mother?