by Michelle Wan
Scowling murderously, Géraud strode off into the house. He returned with a long wooden file drawer. It was labeled E–N, suggesting a wealth of other material spanning the rest of the alphabet. The older man riffled through tightly packed, minutely inscribed index cards while Julian looked on with obvious envy.
“As I said”—Géraud surfaced after a moment—“nineteen eighty-two.” And since Julian was eyeing him meaningfully, he reluctantly imparted minimal directions.
This interchange put their host in a bad mood. He sneered at the shots of Anacamptis pyramidalis—“Common as straw!”—and quarreled angrily with each of Julian’s subsequent identifications.
“Platanthera bifolia, Lesser Butterfly Orchid,” Julian said.
“Bifolia my elbow!” This aimed at a graceful stalk of spiky white blooms. “It’s Platanthera chlorantha, or Greater Butterfly, if you must. Use your eyes, mon vieux. Regard the positioning of the pollinia!”
“You can’t see the pollinia. At least, not very well. I make it out to be bifolia.”
“Rubbish. When was this taken?”
“Early May.”
“That proves it. Clorantha blooms before bifolia.” Géraud flashed a look of triumph in Mara’s direction. Julian looked huffy.
One–one, Mara tallied over the rim of her glass.
Iris created a temporary diversion by snatching up the next photo in line and interjecting, “Ooh, look, a pigeonnier! I once lived in a converted pigeon house.”
“You would have,” intoned her temperamental consort through gritted teeth.
“I also painted a lovely series of them. For greetings cards. Sold very well.”
“Did you?” Mara was immediately interested. “You don’t recognize this one, by any chance, do you?”
“Oh dear.” Iris studied it lengthily. “I don’t think so. I mean, it was years ago, and there are so many, and one is very like another, don’t you think?”
But the two men were off again, sparring over the distinguishing features of subspecies of Dactylorhiza and arguing heatedly about a plant that Julian said was one variant of Marsh Orchid and Géraud another. Géraud’s temper grew shorter as the condition of the photographs deteriorated. “What did you do with this film? Flush it down the toilet?”
Iris, on the other hand, was unperturbed by the awful quality. She crooned over a discolored clutch of fat, velvety blossoms. “Bee Orchids. The darlings, so sweet, with their little furry bodies. And Snakes!” She pounced on a blackened portrait of a tall spike just coming into bloom, the lower blossoms of the spike releasing what looked like pale, wildly flying ribbons. “My absolute favorites.”
Géraud closed his eyes and pushed air noisily out his nostrils. “Do me a kindness. Himantoglossum hircinum. What you English refer to as Lizard Orchid, although the locals call it orchidée bouc because it smells damnably like a billy goat in rut.”
“Don’t be pedantic, dear. Snakes, Lizards, whatever. But so dramatic, don’t you think, with their twisty things?”
Géraud glared. “Those ‘twisty things,’ as you call them, happen to be much-elongated median lobes.” He said for Mara’s benefit, “Thinly but widely distributed. They typically populate open fields and sometimes roadside verges, but where, my dear, is anyone’s guess.”
He waved in disgust at the rest of the shots. “What the devil do you expect me to do with these?”
Julian said acidly, “Well, I was hoping you had some sightings.”
“Sightings?” Géraud threw up a pair of short, hairy arms, demonstrating that he had reached the end of his limited patience. “Parbleu, what do you think? I have been hunting orchids in the Dordogne for forty years. Of course I have sightings!” Fulminating, he picked up and slapped down each of the remaining photographs in turn. “Aceras anthropophorum? At least three dozen stands between here and Bergerac. Orchis purpurea? Ditto. Aha, Serapias lingua, what my beloved here would call Tongue Orchid”—he roared out the word “Tongue”—“well, I can give you a damned fine spread of them on a hillside above Le Grand Mas dating back to 1972, but the land was bought last year by some Belgians, so you can’t get in there anymore!”
Iris shook her head at Mara. “You see? Absolutely impossible. I really shall have to go. I was saying, dear”—she raised her voice over her lover’s bellows—“that I shall have to leave you. Oh, no point looking like thunder, Joujou. It’s for your own good.” She turned back to Mara: “Always pulls him up short, and gives me a break. He’s as good as gold after.”
Julian struggled to get the conversation back on track. “I was talking about sightings that could tie in with the others.”
“Bof!” Géraud slammed his hand down on the table so hard that the glasses jumped. Then he said what Mara was most afraid of hearing: “What you’re asking is impossible. You can’t seriously expect me to take this garbage and give you a location.”
At that point Iris leaned forward confidentially. “If I tell you something, you two, will you promise to keep it a secret? There’s a lovely little cluster of Fly Orchids right behind the Chapel of Our Lady of Capelou that I can show you if you’re interested. I visit them every year around this time, when I go to get spring water.”
“Ah, ça, enfin!” exploded Géraud.
There was one photo left: the Lady’s Slipper. Géraud seized it irascibly. Mara held her breath.
“What in the name of le bon dieu is this?”
“It’s probably,” said Julian carefully, “a very bad photo. I was just curious to know what you make of it.”
“Julian thinks it’s a Lady’s Slipper,” Mara cut in, tired of the verbal fencing.
“What?” Géraud roared.
Julian said stiffly, shooting her a furious glance. “Well, yes, I did rather think it might be—er—some form of Cypripedium.”
“Impossible!”
“I know. But you have to admit the structure is awfully similar.”
“You’re mad. First, Cypripedium is exceedingly rare. Second, it doesn’t grow here. It likes cooler, sub-alpine conditions.”
“Only the labellum isn’t yellow but deep pink,” Julian persisted. “And these appear to be unusually long lateral petals. I thought maybe a mutant, and if so, did it propagate, and where?”
“Balivernes!” shouted Géraud. “Absolute rot! I tell you it doesn’t grow here. If it doesn’t grow here, how can you have a mutant?” He paused, frowning intensely. Despite himself, he was intrigued. “C’est ça? No other photo?”
“Unfortunately, no.”
“And you think you’ve made a rare find. What do you plan to call it? Cypripedium woodianum?”
The tone to Mara’s ears was viciously mocking, revealing a seriously nasty side to Géraud’s intense competitiveness about floral matters. As he held the photo up to catch the light, the reddening sky behind him outlined his head with its hairy horns, giving him an infernal, demonic look.
“Oh, Julian.” Iris clasped her hands in suppressed excitement. “A find. How wonderful for you!”
“Cease the raptures, woman,” Géraud muttered wearily. “And this, I suppose, is what the charade has been about? If you wanted me to help you locate this dubious specimen, why didn’t you say so straight off, man?”
“Come on, Géraud. Admit you’re fascinated.”
The other glared at the photograph again. “Let me put you out of your misery. If this is some kind of Cypripedium, I can tell you it wasn’t taken here. C’est final. Don’t get visions of grandeur yet, mon vieux. Come.” He reached into the ice bucket for the second bottle of Vouvray and turned to Mara with a ghastly grin. “We’ve had enough of orchids and execrable photography, wouldn’t you say, my dear? More wine.”
•
“You didn’t make things any easier,” Julian said coldly as they drove away, “telling him I thought it was a Lady’s Slipper.”
“Oh dear,” snapped Mara, “and here was me thinking that was what it was all about.”
•
; By the time they had picked up a selection of deli items from a charcuterie and returned to Mara’s house to assemble their findings, an unspoken truce had been established between them. They ate their food hurriedly, sitting cross-legged on the Aubusson, which in Julian’s opinion was a damned sight more comfortable than her chairs. The Série bleue maps were spread out edge to edge before them, showing the entire region in cartographic detail. They were able to follow the lazy looping of the Dordogne, flowing west through a patchwork flood plain of fields and farms. Its ancient bed wound between limestone cliffs crowned with stark medieval fortresses (black dots) and pleasure châteaux (more black dots) built by the gentry over the centuries. Gentilhommières, they were called. Julian traced the path of the D703 with his finger. It followed the contours of the river from Souillac as far as the town of Siorac-en-Périgord, where it swung north. Westward traffic was carried along the D25 on the next map of the series, until it turned south at Le Buisson. Jazz, banished to the hardwood floor, looked on, deeply offended.
Julian got right down to business. “We have to make a critical assumption: that Bedie took the photos in one go. After visiting the castle in Beynac”—he circled the town on one of the maps with a red marker—“your sister somehow found herself on a shady footpath. Where is the question, and how she got there, of course, the missing piece. But once there, she was likely walking through light woodland, say, something like a second-growth copse, which is where she found the Helleborines, Limodorum, Common Spotteds, and Military Orchids. From there she went into dense tree cover for the Bird’s-nests.” He gestured widely, indicating numerous green areas on the maps affording a plentiful choice of forests.
He went on. “But then she came out into open country again. That’s indicated by field dwellers like the Pyramidal and Butterfly Orchids.”
“And after that,” Mara put in, “she found the pigeonnier.”
“Right. Then the water meadow, where she saw the Marsh Orchids. The maps show contour lines and elevations, so they’ll be some help in locating low-lying bogs. The rest of the flowers suggest a transition onto higher, drier ground, and again we can use the contour lines: Bee, Lizard, Man, Lady, and Tongue Orchids are all pretty adaptable, but they prefer sunny, well-drained areas—hillsides, high meadows, embankments, that kind of thing.”
“And the Lady’s Slipper?” Mara asked.
Julian frowned. “The Lady’s Slipper would have probably grown on even higher ground, say a cool, shady, north-facing ridge. And that,” he finished abruptly, “is where the trail ends.”
Mara stared at him. “But—but that could be anywhere!”
“It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” Julian found her dismay intensely satisfying. “Worse than that. If Bedie took the photos at different times and in different places, then, like I said before, we have no continuity at all, and even less to go on. Which brings us back to the Lady’s Slipper. You heard Géraud. He thinks I’m mad to even think it was locally occurring mutant of Cypripedium calceolus. So we have to consider the possibility of another discontinuity—your sister found it in an entirely different location. Or we’re looking at something quite different.”
“Are you saying it’s not a Lady’s Slipper?”
He shook his head. “More like an unknown variant of Lady’s Slipper. You see, the genus Cypripedium consists of around a hundred and ten species. Only one, Cypripedium calceolus, is native to Western Europe. But who’s to say your sister didn’t stumble on an unknown, highly localized type that grows in one spot in the Dordogne and nowhere else?” For a moment Julian let his mind drift as he considered the possibility. “Blimey, wouldn’t that shake up the botanical world!”
Mara regarded him somberly for a moment and then called him back to more practical considerations. “So how should we go about this?”
He sighed. “Right. Well, we have three distinctive photos to go on. First the pigeonnier. Then the Neottia or Bird’s-nest Orchids. And, finally, the Lady’s Slipper. Let’s try your idea of identifying possible pigeon houses using the maps. But, rather than looking for any isolated dot, we can narrow things down a lot, at least at first, by focusing on dots in the vicinity of known sightings of Bird’s-nests. We’ve got three sightings, two of my own and one from Géraud. Let’s start with Géraud’s. It’s just about here, above Le Double”—Julian drew a red “X” on the map—“which, interestingly enough, is only a few kilometers north of Beynac.”
“I tried to tell you that.”
“What? Oh. Well, I hope you realize it’s the only useful piece of information that bloody man gave us, and you saw how I practically had to pull worms out of his nose to get an exact location. Now, if we concentrate on a walkable area within a radius of, say, ten or twelve kilometers around this point—”
“That’s walkable?” Mara asked faintly.
“Nothing for an experienced hiker,” he replied breezily and penciled in a rough circle around the “X.” “What does that give us in the way of single black dots?”
Together they scanned the map.
“Here’s a couple outside Le Glandier.” Mara pointed at two specks that Julian duly marked. “And one there, north of La Fage, and another south of Lavergné.”
In all, they found a dozen candidates. Several Julian rejected straightaway. “Too big for a pigeon house. Things may not be labeled, but they’re more or less to scale. And these are probably cottages. You can tell by their orientation to the road. Luckily, we’ll be able to check most of these out by car, or with the aid of binoculars. Except this one.” He tapped a spot on the map. “It’s in the middle of woodland. Have to walk in for that.” He eyed her severely. “You’d better come prepared to trek, you know. Even if we’re lucky enough to find your pigeon house among this lot, we’ll still have to hike in for the Neottia.”
“I don’t see why, if we have the pigeonnier,” she objected. “Why not just go from there? Look for the orchids that come after it?”
“Because finding both will help us establish that Bedie took these photos in a single walk, which, don’t forget, is the critical assumption. The other orchids, except the Lady’s Slipper, are simply not rare enough to go on. Also, the pigeon house and the Neottia together will give us the direction of Bedie’s approach, since we know the Bird’s-nest is before the pigeonnier. Any evidence of orchids that come after the pigeonnier, say, like the Marsh Orchids in the water meadow, will help us fix her forward path.”
Mara was silent for a moment. Finally, she said, “It all boils down to the Lady’s Slipper, doesn’t it?”
Julian frowned. “Unfortunately, yes. Without that, we can’t really know where she ended up. We’re always faced with the possibility that your sister began the roll of film in this area, and finished up somewhere else, like in the Lozére.”
She said somberly, “I don’t think you understand what I mean, Julian. You told me Bedie was systematic about photographing her orchids. She took them close up and at a distance, right?”
“Sure. It’s standard practice.”
“Except the Lady’s Slipper. She only took one shot of it. I’ve been asking myself why. There were at least a couple of frames left on the film. It occurs to me that the only explanation is that something must have interrupted her. Julian, I think the reason Bedie didn’t take any more photos was that she couldn’t.” Mara paused. “By then she may have been dead.”
NINE
They agreed to meet at eight the following morning behind the Parc Archéologique in Beynac. Mara arrived first. She parked her car and let Jazz out to mark trees while she leaned against the front fender of the Renault. A thin mist, rising from the river, hung delicately in the air. Below her, the town, stacked against the face of a jutting cliff, still slept. The tour buses would not appear for another two hours. A fat woman in slippers came out of one of the houses, threw open the ground-floor shutters, and waddled inside again.
Above Mara soared the massive ramparts of Beynac Castle. French stronghold duri
ng the Hundred Years’ War, the fortress glared upriver in the direction of equally hulking English Castelnaud. Both fortifications had played key roles in the bitter fighting. At Castelnaud, Mara had once seen a full-scale working model of a trébuchet, a giant medieval catapult, with which the English had once hurled boulders at the French. She had found the brutish engine of war daunting, even at a remove of five centuries.
Mara wondered how the day would go. She felt energized, finally having something concrete to focus on: Géraud’s Neottia and a scattering of black dots. At the same time, she was wary of entering Julian’s turf, his world of leaves and flowering plants. Julian had a deadly seriousness and quick irascibility where botanical things were concerned. Would he tell her to keep her mouth shut while he stared at the ground? Make her walk until she dropped? Would he even notice? She was sure that the only thing that mattered to him was his damned Lady’s Slipper. Fixated, that’s what he was. And, curiously, alone. Like her, she had to acknowledge. Her world was bound by work, the reconstruction of dank water closets and primitive kitchens. And Bedie, nineteen years gone. It occurred to her that, viewed from this perspective, she and Julian had a lot in common after all.
He came roaring up twenty minutes late with a bump and a screech of brakes. He jumped out, looking harried.
“Sorry I’m late.” He traded quick pecks with Mara and sidestepped Jazz’s snout, directed at his crotch. “Had to get Bernard started on some digging for Prudence. The lad works hard, but he’s got a very short attention span.”
He wore jeans, sturdy boots, and a wide-brimmed hat. He bristled with equipment: binoculars, camera, compass, canteen, rucksack. She wore cotton slacks and light canvas running shoes. Her only provisions were a tube of sunscreen and a couple of ham sandwiches that she stowed in Julian’s pack.
They left her car and went in Julian’s van, Mara navigating them along the edge of the Abrillac Forest, down bumpy lanes, past wood lots and pale-green fields of newly planted maize. It took them over an hour to locate six dots, all of which they could see from the car. Two were in fact pigeonniers, but square structures unlike the one they sought. The others were a barn, a couple of sheds, and a conical shepherd’s hut built of darkly weathered stone.