Lindsay turned back.
‘He’s in the chapel—with Philippe.’
He stared, amazed.
‘Yes, I know; it’s lunatic, isn’t it? Five o’clock in the morning! God knows how long he’s been there; his bed’s quite cold.’
Lindsay was angry suddenly, and, angry, he wanted action. ‘This is absurd,’ he said. ‘You’ve got your key; let’s go and . . .’
Françoise was shaking her head. ‘The key’s no good. Someone must have found out; the door’s nailed up from inside. I . . . Oh James, I heard his voice—that’s all.’
They stared at each other, almost unbelievingly, while the light grew stronger around them. Outside, a cockerel began to crow, welcoming the day—welcoming Bellac’s Day of the Thirteen Days.
11
The Twelve Dancers
It was as though, suddenly, out of a mist of question and surmise and suspicion, they had stumbled upon reality; and yet the reality was like a smooth pinnacle of rock upon which they could gain no hold.
The nursery maid was lying. She stood with her back to the door in her mistress’s blue-and-gold sitting room, and lied, and lied. She had slept very soundly—she always slept soundly. If the boy had left his bed during the night she knew nothing of it; all that she knew was that he had been there fast asleep when she had waked up. It was all plausible and all untrue; her eyes, the pose of her whole body gave her away.
But this was nothing. It was the small boy himself who took their breath away. He had had a dream, he said—a dream about Gogo, his pony; Gogo was ill, Gogo was dying; and so he had got out of bed and gone down to the stable. Yes, he had stayed down there a long time; as a matter of fact he had fallen asleep down there.
The horrifying thing about this recital was not so much that he lied, not so much that he told so plausible a story (because he had obviously been taught it), but that—unlike the nursery maid—he lied so beautifully. Only the agony that was revealed in his mother’s face prevented Lindsay from believing every word of it.
And yet the child lying because he had been told to, and the maid lying because she was afraid of losing her job, might have been bearable; it was the groom who took the whole thing out of the realms of the nursery and into a world of organized adult conspiracy. Oh yes, he said, certainly the boy had come down to the stable in the middle of night. What time? Well, that was hard to say, but somewhere around four perhaps. Scared stiff he had been—some tale about his pony being ill; and nothing would satisfy him except that he must sit in the stall with the pony. Fallen asleep in the stall, he had. Why, it was pretty to see.
Françoise and Lindsay faced each other across the elegant sunlit room. Nightmare had emerged from the shadows and now walked with them in daylight.
Outside on the terrace and downstairs in the hall, there was a crush of people; every minute cars were arriving, voices were raised in greeting. This was Bellac’s day, and the neighbors of Bellac meant to make the most of it. Golden sunlight carpeted the valley. Even the dark bluff above the shimmering lake had clothed itself in a haze of heat that softened its harsh contours and the dull, dead green of conifer and yew and ivy. The mountains were merely a blue shadow on the horizon.
All Bellac smiled; all Bellac’s guests laughed and chattered and drank their host’s very excellent chilled white wine. From the village came the sound of bells and the distant oom-pa of a brass band. Bellac was en fête. In the small blue-and-gold sitting room Lindsay and Françoise stared at each other, lost for words, seeking in each other’s eyes a reassurance which neither could give.
The little clock on the mantelpiece chimed eleven o’clock. Françoise glanced out of the window. Already, across the lawns and down the side of the formal garden, there was a movement of guests towards the village. She said, ‘It’s time for Mass. Oh James, I can’t; I can’t face it.’
He went over to her and put his arms round her, holding her tightly. ‘You must,’ he said.
‘He’s never lied to me before. I can’t bear it.’
He thought it better to ignore this. ‘You must go, because if you don’t it’ll be so obvious that you know something—something which they’re very keen to keep secret.’
She swung away from him angrily. ‘They, they! Who, James?’
‘They.’ He repeated it musingly. ‘We don’t know who, yet.’
Françoise stood at the window, looking out, glaring out. ‘Why not all of them?’ she asked bitterly. ‘Isn’t that what you feel? All of them—against us.’
Her maid tapped on the door and came in apologetically. ‘It’s time, madame,’ she said. ‘Monsieur le Marquis and the children have started.’
Françoise nodded absently.
When the woman had gone Lindsay said, ‘I imagine someone’s already had a nasty shock to find that I wasn’t in bed and comatose this morning; if, on top of that, you don’t appear at the church . . .’
‘Yes, you’re right. What about you?’
He suddenly thought how absurd this was; how ridiculous that they should be talking to each other like conspirators—like members of a resistance movement—on this bright morning with the calm note of the bell calling them to Mass across sunlit lake and meadows.
‘I’ll be there,’ he said. ‘But I think I’ll keep well out of the way.’
Françoise still hesitated, smoothing her immaculate gloves nervously. ‘I hate him for this,’ she said. ‘I’m horrified to find how much I hate him.’
Lindsay nodded. ‘I understand that; and yet somehow I feel that he . . . he doesn’t deserve hatred.’
She did not reply, but crossed the room, kissed his cheek, and went to the door; she paused there, looking back. ‘Such a lovely day,’ she said, ‘and I feel as if I were going out into a fog. What’s going to happen, James?’
He spread his hands. ‘I wish I knew.’
Upstairs in her barricaded apartment, Tante Estelle said to her maid, Marianne, ‘Get out my gray hat. I’ve decided to go to Mass after all.’
Lindsay was rather surprised by the large number of people still left in the great hall of the castle when he finally went downstairs. In the village the churchbell was still tolling. As he looked at the assembly, standing round talking very loudly and all at once with glasses in their hands, it struck him that the sound was more like an interval bell in a theater than a call to worship.
He saw Natasha standing by herself, beautifully posed against a piece of tapestry as if waiting for a photographer; he joined her, hoping that she might be able to bring him up-to-date on his knowledge of Bellac’s guests.
‘They can’t all be staying here,’ he said.
Natasha’s large eyes widened. ‘Oh no!’ From the horrified tone of her voice he gathered that possibly those who were staying had been enough for her. Yet, when he pressed her for details, she seemed curiously at a loss to point out anyone of interest. He received an impression that a natural curiosity, a natural love of scandal was warring inside her with a far from natural discretion; not for the first time he found himself wondering exactly what did go on behind locked doors when she had retired with her prince for the night. There was no doubt at all that she had been told to keep her mouth shut when talking to the Englishman. A moment later Cottanero himself confirmed these suspicions by swooping down on them and bearing her away to church without so much as a glance at Lindsay.
He wondered whether Betty, Comtesse de Vignon, might prove more communicative.
Walking down to the village with her, he realized that she, like himself, like Françoise, was an outsider; he was becoming increasingly aware that at Bellac on this Day of the Thirteen Days the guests were sharply divided into those who knew what was afoot and those who did not. The Countess Betty was full of information, but it was blind information; he had to make of it what he could.
‘Between you and me,’ she said, in a whisper that might have carried half a mile on a quiet day, ‘both English, you know, and all that, where in heaven’s name do Philip
pe and Françoise get such a crew from?’
‘Odd?’ Lindsay suggested.
‘Odd!’ she snorted. ‘They’re a damn lot of cranks, half of ’em.’
He wondered whether this merely meant that they found other things more interesting than horses. ‘My dear,’ she was saying, ‘it takes a lot to frighten me, but there’s one feller—Polish, I gather, wonderful war record and so on, face all cut to pieces—he doesn’t open his mouth; hasn’t said a word, as far as I can see, since he arrived last night. Titled, too; ought to know better. I tell you, my friend, I’ll be damn glad to get away from the place. I mean to say, I’m fond of Philippe and Françoise, no nonsense about them; wouldn’t be about a man who could breed horses like he does. But some of their guests!’
Lindsay was interested. ‘You’re going then?’
‘My dear, of course I am. Women definitely not required after today. I can’t think why not, I bet I’m as good a shot as any of that lot; however—apparently it’s a tradition. After Les Treize Jours the men have a jolly good booze-up and go hunting during the day. Though why the French call shooting ‘hunting’ I’ll never know. Tried to get Françoise to come to my place for a few days, but she wouldn’t. Must be deathly dull for her—only that mad old aunt to talk to . . .’
Lindsay let her ramble on. He realized that he himself had progressed beyond the point where what she said was of any interest at all. The night that had passed had been a turning point; the time of conjecture was over; now, soon, revelation would begin. The woman beside him, irritated, disturbed by something she could only just sense, belonged to another world; whereas he . . . he was beginning to understand something of the meaning of the shapes in the darkness.
He managed to elude her in the crowds that were moving along the little streets of the village; instinctively he knew that his place on this day was among the simple (or was that the word?) people of Bellac.
Everywhere he looked there were flags, posies of flowers, thick garlands of evergreen. In the square the several hundred people who had been unable to find room in the church itself were sharing in the Mass, somewhat vicariously, through the good graces of a rather ancient loudspeaker which had been rigged up over the door. Under the green shade of the plane trees, trestle tables were laid with great flagons of wine, with boards bearing cartwheels of the flat local cheese, huge dark red hams which had been smoking all the year in pungent chimneys; there were dishes of olives and short, fat cucumbers, sheaves of long loaves, a small mountain of dark green melons, a shroud of white muslin that covered row upon row of open tarts filled with apple or plum or apricot. A small crowd of children stood in front of two vast wine barrels, draped with bunting and filled with sawdust, out of which would eventually emerge their presents. The band, their uniform jackets unbuttoned to expose sweaty chests, were already broaching the wine, presumably to recompense themselves in advance for the dry hours of puffing and blowing which were to come.
Standing well back in the shadow of the plane trees, Lindsay found it hard to believe that anything lay beneath the jolly, ordinary surface of the day, let alone anything sinister. Watching the brown country faces as they listened to the Mass or gossiped quietly in corners or admonished the darting children, he could find nothing which he had not seen a hundred times before: the young men in their best shirts and trousers eyeing those girls who were not in church, and the girls pretending that they were unaware of the eyes, yet each already planning how to appropriate this or that young man, and the old people withdrawn, remembering other summers, and the children simply excited and impatient beyond endurance for the fun to begin—these were the same all over the world.
Birds quarreled in the plane trees; wasps gathered about the wine; the ancient liturgy droned on, blurred a little by the age of the loudspeaker. There was not, there could not be, a mystery behind all this. And yet, if his suspicions were right, there was something here of such importance that he had been brutally drugged in order that he should not witness it.
Suddenly his pulse quickened; he had seen a face. Yes, there on the other side of the square was Christian; he was pausing to talk to some local people, and there was something in his attitude toward them as well as in theirs toward him which Lindsay could not quite grasp: a kind of . . . What? Almost a kinship. Certainly an easier, altogether more intimate reciprocity than he would have expected.
Laughing, the boy dodged past one of the men beside the trestle tables, stole a peach from a golden pile of them and ran out into the sunlight. And then an odd thing happened.
The people began to boo him, to jeer at him, to shout out names which were at one and the same time insulting and friendly—in much the same way that the word bastard in English can be almost a term of endearment.
The boy crossed the square, laughing, and this ripple of mockery, of what Lindsay could only define as mock mockery, followed him—followed him until he was lost to view.
Lindsay had no time to wonder at this extraordinary incident because immediately following it there was a flurry of movement; people began to move towards the church. After a moment the figure of Père Dominique appeared in the doorway; he came out and stood in the middle of the path—just where the three Montfaucons of long ago had chosen to be laid to rest. Lindsay’s first thought was that he would give the blessing to those outside, but in this he was wrong; he began to speak the opening verses of one of the Gospels, Lindsay was unsure which:
‘ “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God . . .” ’
Now, Lindsay knew that his nerves were on edge—that he was standing there only to find whatever was strange or untoward in what he witnessed; yet he was totally unprepared for the impact which these well-known words had upon the people around him. A silence fell that was so profound that it even affected the children, even (he could have sworn it) the birds. And was it his imagination, or had a kind of electric spark of anticipation run through the crowd? He thought that faces which a minute ago had been relaxed, even drowsy in the murmurous heat of midday, were now sharp, attentive to the point of . . . Yes, almost to the point of fear.
‘ “. . . He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not . . .” ’ The priest’s voice droned on.
Quite suddenly Lindsay was afraid. The spark of emotion in the people around him became too strong; it leaped the space between his body and theirs and transfixed him.
‘ “. . . But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God . . .” ’
Only later would he be able to understand the meaning of the words—or rather the meaning they had for this poised, utterly silent crowd; at this moment he was so much a part of them that he only felt the excitement, the hysteria, and it was utterly unnerving because it was soundless—the hysteria of a yelling mob was easy to understand; what he experienced here was not.
Now the priest was moving down the steep slope from the little church. Behind him people were streaming out of the doorway. Lindsay found that the square, which had a moment ago seemed spacious, was suddenly packed to suffocation; in that clenched silence he had a shrill desire to cry out, but he realized that his mouth was too dry to accommodate him, even if he had been able to find the strength of will to oppose the mass will which gripped him.
‘ “. . . not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” ’
Now even that one voice was silent. Lindsay was aware of the thudding of his own heart; but it was the sound that broke the silence which really struck terror into him: a man began to sing, and not only the song but the voice that sang it were known to him; he had last heard them as he stood undecided by the black-marble gravestone in the darkening forest.
There was another surge of movement in the crowd; for a moment his view was obscured, and when he could see again, there were the dancers.
Perhaps Françoise had not described them very well, or p
erhaps he himself, not knowing for what he searched in her description, had ignored the important details; he knew, before he counted them, that there were twelve. It was a moment before he noticed the thirteenth figure, which did not dance; the thirteenth man was the singer, and he wore a golden half-mask which was not quite human, not quite animal. He walked slowly, singing, and his twelve companions, also masked, circled round him; there was no abandon in the dance and no jollity; these men, in their masks and dark-green tabards, were performing a solemn act of worship.
The two numbers, twelve and thirteen, were performing leap-frog in Lindsay’s brain; the two ideas—no, they were less ideas than certainties—occurred at the same moment. Les Treize Jours, he thought. The thirteen days which were so absurd because they were one day. Jours . . . Joueurs. Of course that was it—not jours, meaning days, but joueurs, meaning players, meaning performers. The day took its name from the thirteen men gyrating so solemnly in the square before him, watched in such a tense, anticipatory silence by the people of the valley. And the other thought, reaching out to him from that slab of black marble in the forest, was: ‘The Twelve dance on high, Amen. The Whole on high hath part in our dancing. Amen. Whoso danceth not, knoweth not what cometh to pass. Amen.’
His brain reeled; he was aware that a hundred things which had mystified him were now tugging at the edges of his understanding.
But all these rioting thoughts and discoveries were swept out of his mind by what happened next. He was aware that the singing had stopped, as abruptly as it had begun; the dancers were standing perfectly still, looking away from him. He realized that the center of interest—of this passionate absorption—had shifted; all heads had turned as if blown by the same gust of wind. Craning, he caught a glimpse of Philippe de Montfaucon at the edge of the crowd; he seemed to be bending down. He thought he saw Francoise, her face very white. A second later Philippe straightened up. Lindsay saw that he was holding his young son in the crook of his arm; his breath caught in his throat.
Day of the Arrow Page 14