by Sarah Smith
Mademoiselle Françoise had been growing poisonous plants.
And she locked Mr. Blantire in the cage--
In the kitchen, on a shelf by the stove, Mademoiselle Françoise kept cookbooks: four of them, handwritten black-bound books spotted with grease. Among the mixtures for killing bedbugs with chrysanthemum petals and removing red-wine stains with salt were ones that made Ruthie catch her breath.
Mademoiselle Françoise had been making potions.
It was dreadful here; one could almost breathe evil.
Ruthie wrapped all four books in her apron and dropped them into her knitting bag. She needed to talk with someone about this. Dr. Reisden.
She looked around the kitchen. Table and kitchen chairs, shelves in the chimney-corner, stove blocking the old fireplace, door to garden, stone sink with a window over it, painted wooden cupboard. It looked so ordinary. On the shelves were ranged canisters of flour and sugar and coffee, jars of preserved green beans and tomatoes, jams and spices and condiments. She stood on a chair and felt on the shelves. Behind the nutmegs and pickling salt were two or three small unlabeled tin canisters. One held rose hips, one ashes; the third contained some kind of salve, rancid like mutton fat and smelling of green herbs and mint. She dipped the fingers of her right hand into it and brought her fingers to her mouth, touched her tongue to the salve.
Nasty! It almost numbed her mouth. She wiped her fingers carefully on the hand towel and scrubbed her tongue, but to her overheated imagination, the skin of her hand tingled. She dropped the tin of ointment into her bag, too. She did not feel capable of thinking about this. Dr Reisden could have it analyzed.
The church bells were clinking from St.-Laurent-Blangy and with a deeper boom from Arras. She locked the gate behind her and pushed her bicycle away from the house. She had errands at the film office; then she and Jules were going to have dinner, celebrating their first completely carefree moment since the blackmail.
She didn’t feel at all carefree now.
She pedaled her way along the road toward Arras. The sun pounded down, the light bouncing off the road up under her hat. Her mouth was dry; she should have drunk some water in the house. Her right hand tingled where she had touched the ointment. Then it was as if the hand were going to sleep: It went numb entirely, and it flopped, so strange. She was using one hand to keep her knitting bag in the bicycle basket. She tried using the numb hand but she could not steer the bicycle.
What had she done? She shouldn’t have tasted the salve, that was so stupid--
She got off and let her bicycle fall into the tall grass at the side of the road, by a tree. She leaned against the tree. I must take off my hat, she thought, and keep my head cool, but with only one hand she could not untie the strings. Her heart was pounding. She slid down the tree and lay in the grass and wildflowers, her hat tilted over her face and blocking her view. She could not feel her body at all; she felt as if she were floating, or flying.
Cowboy, socialist, spy
THAT DAY, THE DAY after Bastille Day, Reisden had nothing to do. No filming, no need to find the secret of Montfort. Katzmann was staying here and talking with André. Reisden went out on the walls and sat looking at the Fortifications of Montfort. He wanted to feel relieved. Gehazy was gone. Gilbert was—
Gone.
What happens to Gilbert now, he thought. He goes back to Boston, to Harry and Efnie. And we won’t know what happens after that. But my son will be safe.
What happens to Perdita and me?
Zeno Puckett hunkered down beside him. “Heard I’d find you here. You got a couple minutes?”
Puckett was wearing a rusty black suit of French cut, made for a man somewhat heavier and very much shorter. “Blantire’s funeral was today?” Reisden asked.
“Yep,” Puckett said, “we boxed up old T.J. and sent him off to Chicago.—I hear you’re old Pétiot’s best friend now.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“I wondered what he’s doing, is all.” Puckett took off his hat, sat it on his knee, and flicked the brim with his finger, stirring little puffs of dust. “My land, he’s taking a casual attitude. Old T.J. up and dies, and a couple weeks later his lady friend dies. And the police just don’t seem to pay it no mind, it ain’t no more to them than drowning kittens.—Your friend Pétiot talked ’em into chuckin’ the investigation.”
Pétiot turned off the investigation? Reisden said nothing. If Blantire were a spy, Pétiot would have had the investigation taken away from the ordinary run of Sûreté cop.
“S’pose you don’t know why.”
“He thinks Blantire’s death was an accident. He doesn’t want police because of Cyron.” A good enough explanation.
Puckett scratched at his long nose. “I guess I’m going to tell you what else I know about ol’ T.J. ‘Cause I do think there’s more to it. You ever heard of the January Manifesto? Amiens Congress? Educational Society?”
This at least did not sound like the secret of Montfort. Reisden shook his head.
“Bureau of Investigation?—What d’you think of the labor movement?”
“What is this?”
“January 1905,” Puckett said, “Chicago, conference of miners working themselves up to strike against the mine owners. T.J. was there. Some folks say the Germans was behind it. Most of the folks there were Germans, ’s all I know, and there’s been plenty of strikes in America since then, mining strikes.” He took a breath. “So the U.S. government got together some guys, ex-Pinkertons mostly, to find out what it was about. The Bureau of Investigation.”
“Do they break strikes?” The Pinks did.
“They investigate,” Puckett said. “They got regular agents, and then there’s special agents, like deputies, who go round and investigate.”
“Spy.”
“You could say.”
“And how does this connect with Blantire? Was he working for the Germans, or for this Bureau of Investigation?”
“I dunno. To my mind he wasn’t serious; I think it was just T.J. gettin’ into the biggest saloon fight around. That boy wouldn’t just hang round with any other man’s wife, it had to be the sheriff’s.—Them Oo-kry-eenies, they don’t like the Russians none.”
“Do you think he was a German spy or a labor agitator?”
“Same thing pretty much. But if ol’ T.J. was stirring up the miners,” Puckett said, “now I would think, that the French would be real interested in what he was doing hanging round the mines at Wagny an’ who sent him and how come he died.”
“But instead,” Reisden said, “Pétiot tells the police to wash their hands.”
“Seems suspicious.”
Reisden considered what he could say. “The story I’ve heard is that Blantire was a Russian spy, looking for a military secret.”
“Is that so,” Puckett said. “This is Pétiot talkin’? Well, you’re goin’ to believe him, you’re Pétiot’s pal.”
“He died of carbon monoxide poisoning, whatever he was. No mystery.”
“I don’t suppose it’s no matter, T.J.’s dead now. I’m just curious some.” Puckett gave his hat a final slap against his knee and jammed it back on his head. “He was all right, you know. Spite of his politics. It gravels me nobody cares what killed him.”
“No, he did die of carbon monoxide, and who kills anyone that way?”
“Ain’t that supposed to build up when folks use the pump a lot? How many folks was staying here when T.J. disappeared? None, I say.” Puckett unfolded himself and stood up.
“Busloads of guests come every weekend,” Reisden said sharply, standing up himself. “This is Montfort. The Friends of Montfort are distinguished old men with bad bladders; they come to visit, they dig, they drink, they get their hands dirty, they use the W.C. They’re important and Cyron is important, so Pétiot wants a quiet, controlled investigation. I presume your Bureau of Investigation lot are not actively trying to embarrass French security.”
Puckett knuckled his jaw, thinki
ng about it.
“I am tired of spying and rumors of spying,” Reisden said, “and second and third and fifty-fifth motives. Blantire died. People do. There is nothing suspicious.”
He felt he was being Pétiot’s dog, but only because Puckett thought he was.
“He didn’t just go in that Holy Well place and lie down and die. He could have got out. You got out.”
“I was lucky.”
“His girlfriend, this Mademoiselle Françoise. You know he wrote in his book he gave her that she was a witch? Well, he wrote me about her too. You ain’t read his book? T.J. couldn’t never resist a superstition. And he wrote me in this one letter I got? He said he’d met this gal who was a witch. She’d showed him tunnels, under her house, where the other witches met. And he’d took part in a witch ceremony.”
“Not only a labor agitator and a spy, but a witch?”
“He’s looking at tunnels and underground and that’s where he says the witches met and that’s where he dies. You’re Pétiot’s nearest an’ dearest. You tell him about that,” Puckett said. “Maybe he ought to investigate that.”
Reisden thought about Pétiot. Cyron’s friend, Cyron’s protector. Cyron and Pétiot wanted me to find something. Something “below.” Which I did not. I want Blantire to have simply died. I was bought. No doubt of that. I want to stay bought.
***
It was getting toward lunch. Reisden had brought Through Russia on a Mustang back from Françoise Auclart’s house. He found the book, took bread and cheese and a drink from the kitchen, and took it up into the abbey tower. Looking up sometimes at the Arras road and sometimes at the mine-tailings, he read about T.J. Blantire’s trip through Russia.
Blantire had not liked the Russian peasants; he preferred prosperous, industrious Germans. He had loathed Russian officialdom; every country officer wore “short jackets with the pockets well uncovered” to make bribe-taking easy. And officialdom had not liked Blantire. He had been arrested for spying (why would a foreigner ride across Russia, if not to spy?) and had once had to telegraph the American ambassador at St. Petersburg to get himself released.
But more often he had been taken for a supernatural being.
Blantire waxed eloquent about Russian superstition. Holy pigeons, werewolves, house-spirits, soul-witherers. Bread inscribed with messages to the dead and given to the ikons to eat. St. Elias the weather clerk making thunder with his chariot. Blantire had them all, and a few more that Reisden suspected the peasants had made up on his behalf. In his outlandish ten-gallon hat and decorated boots, Blantire had frightened the girl-ostlers at the inns, who thought he was the Devil and would sometimes refuse to touch his horse. Clearly he had enjoyed the attention.
Why had he come to Flanders? Why to Montfort? But once he was here, he would have heard about witches.
Far down the Arras road, Reisden could see a yellow speck, the wall of Mademoiselle Françoise’s farm.
Reisden finds a tunnel; the Fortifications of Montfort
MADEMOISELLE FRANÇOISE’S GARDEN DOOR was locked. Reisden parked his Renault off the road, out of view of passersby, and scaled the garden wall.
The house itself wasn’t locked. Its cellar was little more than a pit reached from a trap door below the kitchen. It held root vegetables, preserves and pickles, and a witchcraftly supply of cobwebs. He looked in the kitchen and found nothing sinister; no cauldrons, just an iron pot to cook a spinster’s stew. Most of the house was filled with costumes.
He went out into the neglected garden. Someone recently had started to weed, then given it up. He tossed the weeds on the rubbish heap.
A long brick-and-sandstone storage building formed one wall of the garden. An empty rabbit hutch backed up against it, flanked by bush-sized weeds. The shed was half roofless but still substantial, with an oversize Greek portico in the center. In the seventeenth century the French, the British, and the Spaniards had all been fighting along the Arras road; the shed had perhaps been a posting house for some army.
The door was a replacement tin sheet with a bright new lock. But the lock was merely for discouragement; the key was above the door. Reisden tugged the tin sheet back.
The inside of the building had been stripped to its stone walls. Sunlight streamed down from the rotten roof onto the floor, which was simply the chalk bedrock, covered in parts by grassy dirt. Along all the walls were piled chalk blocks and fragments of rock. More rock was scattered across the floor. And there was nothing else to lock up but a hole in the ground.
It was a capacious square hole with crumbling edges, about five meters to the right of the door, sheltered by the remains of the roof. Steps led down into darkness.
Under the shelter of the roof, hanging from pegs on the wall, were three ordinary kerosene lanterns.
Three, Reisden thought, for one Mademoiselle Françoise? He took down one; it sloshed heavily, full. He lit the wick. In the sunlight it gave no light at all.
The stairs were built for shorter men; he ducked. At the bottom of the hole a worn floor stretched away into darkness. He held up the lantern and looked, astonished.
The room looked like the dugout shelters that men retreat to during a siege. Under a primitive chimney near the wall stood a portable stove, not very old, and on top of that, an industrial-sized cast-iron pot. The walls were living rock, carved into benches and shelves, dark with centuries of resinous smoke. Heavy beams supported the ceiling; herbs hung from nails.
On his left the floor slanted up like a ramp. It ended in a wall, a thick and ancient wall of irregular chalk blocks and the remains of timbers. The beams were enormous—how long since trees that large had grown in Flanders?—and they were almost rotted away.
At the far end of the room was the entrance to a tunnel. It was narrow enough to brush his shoulders and low enough to make him half-crouch. He checked the lamp again and pressed forward. The tunnel led a little way downward and diverged into three branches like the root of a tree. In the left branch a blanket had been spread on the ground. Reisden shone the lantern at the crumbling roof. It was not shored up and was low enough to reach; he brushed it and a little avalanche of pebbles fell on his head from a seam of soft rock.
The right-hand tunnel was wider and looked much newer. It led to a storage room, also with shelves cut in its rock walls. Spades and pickaxes. A box of blasting caps, which Reisden looked at respectfully and did not touch. A roll of fuse. Miners’ safety lanterns, with wire gauze over the lamps. In a corner, on a low shelf, he found sleeping sacks and the dried end of a wheel of cheese.
There was a box of compasses, not the Peigne compass-sextant that the army uses, but miners’ brass compasses with a sliding indicator to mark direction. Taking one, he went back to the middle tunnel, sighted down it, and slid the indicator to mark where it led. Roughly east, in the direction of the frontier. He explored the tunnel for about a hundred yards. The tunnel stretched away farther than the lantern beam reached.
He locked the door of the stone shed and washed up with water from the well. Upstairs, on the wall of Mademoiselle Françoise’s bedroom, was the photo of her uncle in a shabby, well-used uniform; Reisden stared at it for a long time. He scaled the wall of the farm again, the compass in his pocket, and stood in the middle of the deserted Arras road, holding the compass.
The indicator showing the direction of the tunnel pointed straight down the road, toward Montfort.
The tunnel under Mademoiselle Françoise’s farm led toward Montfort.
***
Back at Montfort, Reisden climbed the abbey tower again for someplace to be alone and think. Sitting in the sun, with his back against the heavy irregular stones, he looked out on the fields and the countryside and Montfort, spread out like a map below him.
When he was fourteen or so, at one of the numerous military schools Leo had hoped would improve him, he’d read Caesar’s Gallic Wars. Caesar had fought here in Flanders and had described his enemies’ fortifications. Stone blocks and timber, murus gallicu
s. That stone-and-timber wall in Mademoiselle Françoise’s cellar was murus gallicus, two thousand years old.
If the dugout at the farm was older than Caesar, how old was Montfort?
Below him, the Vex-Fort sat at the top of the hill. Bits of ruined wall and lines in the grass marked abbey buildings now disappeared. St. Éloi was supposed to have founded the abbey, and St. Éloi had died in 660. But that was the abbey. Christian churches were built on the sacred spots of other religions, as Christian ikons ate pagan bread and saints drove Jove’s chariot.
How old were the tunnels, the boves?
The word boves isn’t French. The closest French word is bauge, which comes from Latin bovile, a stall. The boves in Arras had been used for animals, of course, and still were occasionally. But one would hardly go to the trouble to dig tunnels for cows, or extend wine and cheese cellars to take up the entire area under Arras.
The guidebooks said the boves had been Roman chalk mines. But most Roman chalk mines in this area were no more than a trench into the earth or a cave near a beehive limekiln.
And the Romans were unfamiliar with tunneling. When the Gauls had used the boves to ambush Romans, it had surprised Caesar, who had written that the Gauls seemed to come from nowhere.
The tunnels were military, and not Roman, but Gallic.
After the Gallic Wars, tunneling had become less important. At Agincourt, the field had belonged to archers. When the Spaniards had fought the English in Flanders, cannon and cavalry had carried the day. There was no more place in warfare for little bands of men popping out of the ground.
Until 1870.
In 1870 the Germans had invaded France, annexed Alsace and Lorraine, and conquered Paris; but not the North. Here in Flanders, a soldier named Maurice Cyron had declared his own private war. Cyron had seemed to possess the secret of invisibility. In the middle of the flat land, Cyron’s handful of men could appear and disappear.