by Aaron Elkins
“Never? Does he have any women friends?”
Elissa laughed. “He’s not gay, if that’s what you’re getting at. Or maybe he is. I really wouldn’t know. But I think he’s just a guy that isn’t that much into sex one way or another. It just isn’t that high priority for him, you know? He’s very busy, very involved with the dairy, and his DNA work takes time, and he’s really devoted to his work in the Senate, although you wouldn’t think it to hear him talk about it. When he gets an evening off from government work, he likes to spend it at home, all alone with his books and his music and a couple of glasses of cognac. Even on warm nights, he’ll light a fire in the big fireplace, just for the feel of it, you know?”
“I’m a little surprised by all that,” Julie said. “I know he struck us as being pretty sociable.”
“Sure did,” John contributed from the back.
“Well, I don’t mean to say he’s not sociable,” Elissa said, “it’s only . . . he’s like one of those wealthy nineteenth-century gentleman bachelors, you know? I mean, who else do you know who talks like someone out of P. G. Wodehouse? Who else do you know who changes into a smoking jacket in the evening when he gets home? Where do you even get a smoking jacket? And he puts on one of those, those . . . what do you call them?” She made motions at her throat.
“Ascots,” Julie supplied with a smile. “I bet Rafe looks great in an ascot.”
“He does, yes. And then, once a week or so, he likes to have friends for dinner. You’re this week’s contingent. Whatever you have tonight, it’ll be good, I can guarantee that much. He’s got a live-out housekeeper who’s a fabulous cook. You’ll see.” She turned off the undulating, two-lane “main” road, the Rue de Bas, into a narrow, unmarked dirt track boxed in with hedgerows on either side. “The thing is, he lives exactly the life he wants to live, he knows he’s lucky to be able to do it, and he’s about the happiest, most contented, sweetest man I know.”
“Sounds like you kind of like him,” Julie said, smiling.
Elissa glanced over at her. “I love Uncle Rafe. We’re here, folks,” she said as they turned through an open livestock gate and onto a graveled parking area. “Le Manoir des Fontants.”
As Rafe had told them, the stone structure didn’t quite match up to one’s idea of a manor, let alone a manoir. “An old farmhouse” was what he’d called it, and that was what it was. It did, however, exude a rustic charm. Easy to imagine it on a snowy day, with plumes of peat-scented smoke rising out of a chimney (there were two of them) from the fire in the big stone fireplace. Two stories tall, with a mossy roof and two wood-shuttered dormer windows on the upper floor, it was about the size of a modern middle-class family home, a small one. Caught in the slanting rays of early twilight, the stones were honey-colored, their ridges limned with gold. The stone was unpainted now, but here and there were faint patches of yellow or white left from when it had been painted over in the past. To complete the picture of rural domesticity, a trailing green vine crept prettily up the front wall.
“What a beautiful place!” Julie said. “Is that honeysuckle?”
“Clematis,” answered Elissa. “I do the pruning. And behold, cometh the lord of the manor.”
“Hello, hello, everyone,” was Rafe’s smiling, pleased greeting as he trotted down the two steps from the modest front door. To Julie’s disappointment, he was not attired in silken ascot and velvet smoking jacket. He had changed from the blue suit he’d had on earlier, though, and was now wearing a newly pressed tan one with a brown vest. His diagonally striped tie was as perfectly knotted as the one he’d worn this morning had been.
“Thank you so much for coming,” he said as they climbed out of the Rover. “Isn’t it a beautiful sunset? I thought we’d have our drinks in the gazebo while dinner’s being prepared.” He took their orders—Scotch and water for Gideon, white wine for Julie, beer for John—then said, “I say, Elissa, what would you like? And why don’t you join us for dinner?”
“Thanks, Uncle Rafe, but I have other things I need to do,” she said, as she was surely expected to say.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. But would you mind stopping in and asking Gussie to bring out the drinks and things?”
“Not me, Unc. I know better than to intrude on Gussie when she’s cooking. But what I will do is get them for you myself. You lot just go on out to the gazebo.’’
“Ah, Elissa, what did I do to deserve you for a niece? Yes, that would be wonderful. And there should be a platter of hors d’oeuvres in the cooler. Could you possibly bring those as well? I promise not to notice if one or two are missing. And a glass of sherry for me, please? The amontillado, I think. No, make it the oloroso. No, the amontillado. Thank you, my dear.”
He led them around to the back of the house, where a well-cared-for, mildly sloping lawn led down to the gazebo, a simple wooden affair with a shingle roof and four rattan armchairs arranged around a small table in the center. From the raised floor they overlooked what had been the Carlisle Tar Pits until Rafe’s mother had had them transformed into these two linked, pretty ponds. In the channel that ran between them—an artificially made one, they now knew—a few mallards, emerald-headed males and their dowdy mates, were babbling softly among themselves and dipping for underwater nourishment. Not far beyond the larger pond was a jumble of rocky outcroppings, presumably the ones from the base of which the pitch had flowed for more than a century and then stopped. A little farther off, cows could be seen in rolling pastureland, tranquilly nuzzling the grass. Refined, pastoral serenity at its best.
Rafe encompassed it all with a wave of his hand. “Isn’t the view lovely from here? Mother couldn’t have done a better job situating it. I never tire of coming here.”
“Oh, it couldn’t be prettier,” Julie said, after which came an uneasy silence. They were standing yards from the spot where Rafe’s father had been murdered and where his body, and then his bones, had lain undetected for five years, but nobody had mentioned it yet. It was practically all Gideon, John, and Julie had been thinking about for the last few days, and now here they were. Were they supposed to ignore it and talk about how pretty the scene was? Everybody was a little tongue-tied.
Everybody but Rafe, who couldn’t wait to talk about it. “Now, the bones came up from that area over there,” he said, pointing to the opposite side of the smaller pond, directly across from them. If anything, he was even more chipper and upbeat than usual. “I thought seeing the site for yourselves would be of interest. Does anyone have any questions?”
“Yeah,” John said. “Didn’t you say they found the gun in a nearby hedge? I’m not seeing any hedges. Is it gone now, or were you talking about the one behind the house?”
“No, it’s gone all right. Mother had it taken down when she redid the ponds. A gnarly, tangled old thing, must have been planted years and years ago, a screen to hide the pits, I suppose. I don’t really remember it all that well, but I know it ran along there for a few meters.” He pointed to the border of the smaller pond.
“Which would have been right near where your father was found,” Julie said. “I wonder why it took so long for them to find the gun in the first place. You said weeks, I think.”
“Yes, that’s right. I really don’t know the answer to that.”
“Well, why would they look there at the time?” John asked. “George was shot over at his place, and your father had taken off, or so they thought. No reason to search here.”
Elissa now wheeled up a serving cart with their drinks and several plates of simple but elegantly prepared hors d’oeuvres. She put them on the table one plate at a time: Spanish olives arranged on a wreath of wonderfully aromatic fresh rosemary, dates stuffed with creamy white cheese and studded with crushed walnuts, prosciutto-wrapped melon balls, each with a single flawless mint leaf on top, and an elaborate pewter dish with what must have been two dozen oysters on the half shell, carrying their own briny smell and set artistically among lemon halves and tufts of parsley on a bed of ice.
“E
njoy,” she said, setting out the glasses. “I can’t recommend the oysters strongly enough, and I speak from recent experience. Unc, ring me up when you want me to take your friends back. Oh, Gussie wants you in there in thirty minutes, no more, no less.”
“We shall synchronize our watches. Thank you again, my dear.”
Elissa having left, the chairs were pulled up to the table, at which all helped themselves to the hors d’oeuvres.
“Those crags out there,” said Gideon, who had been looking at them for a while, “would they be—”
“Indeed they would, the very crags from which the fatal shot was not fired by my father.”
“So the farmhouse just beyond them—that was George’s house?”
“It was. Abbott’s too, but he sold it some years ago to move into the city.”
Gideon nodded. “I assumed it was much farther away from your house. It’s practically right on your property.”
“It was on my property, or I should say the Carlisle property. My grandfather made a present of it to George’s father, Willie, as thanks for Willie’s taking care of my father when he was a child during the war. And the considerable acreage behind it went with it.”
“Some nice present,” John said.
Julie nodded. “I’ll say. Must be a story there.”
“A long one,” said Rafe, and proceeded to tell it: How with the German invasion imminent, Howard Carlisle had feared for the health of his sickly son, Roddy. He’d prevailed on Willie Skinner to secretly exchange their young children—Roddy and George—so that the frail Roddy would be relatively safe in England, with the Skinners, for as long as the Occupation lasted, while George, robust and resilient, remained in Jersey with the Carlisles to endure the deprivations that were to come. The boys adapted to their situations as only two-year-olds can and quickly came to believe in their new identities and that they were living with their own families. It was only when the Skinners returned to Jersey at the end of the war, five long years later, and the boys were reexchanged that they learned who their real parents were. They were told to keep it to themselves, of course, and after a while, apparently, they forgot it ever happened. The house and property were Howard’s gift to Willie for agreeing to go along with the idea and following through on it.
“Amazing,” Gideon said. “Any repercussions when the story did get out? I assume the government wouldn’t be interested in taking any action, but I wonder how other people—their friends, their neighbors—felt about being lied to all those years.”
“Well, it didn’t get out, not then. Georgie did slip up at school early on—he asked his teacher whether he was to be called George or Roddy, and when she prodded him, it all came out. But she was good enough to keep it to herself too.”
“Best for everyone,” said Julie, nodding.
“Until,” Rafe continued, “1999 or thereabouts, when she was well into her eighties and took it into her head to include it in a collection of wartime memoirs that the Occupation Society put out. And somehow”—he paused for a sip of sherry and a roll of his eyes—“Granada TV got wind of it and decided it would make a terrific story for one of those appalling docudramas of theirs.”
Gideon smiled. “You have to admit, it is pretty good fodder for one. Did it ever get made?”
“No, thank goodness, but the newspapers got hold of the story. ‘Granada is coming to Jersey!’ and so on. That was when everyone found out about the exchange—including me.”
John swallowed the oyster that he had just slurped up. “Wait a minute—you mean you didn’t know anything about it until then? Until 1999?”
“I’m telling you, nobody did. That was when Abbott learned about it too. Well, you can imagine that I wasn’t about to permit our family’s being made a television spectacle of, and fortunately I was able to do something about it, although I had to threaten a suit to get them to stand down.” His mouth curled downward. “Switcheroo. How’s that for a title? Gives you an idea of how seriously they took it.”
For a while the hors d’oeuvres and drinks were consumed in silence. That had been a lot of new information to absorb.
“And how did everything work out for the two boys?” Julie asked at last. “Over the long run.”
“About as expected, one would have to say. Unfortunately, George was as feckless as his father before him, not a man to let pass an opportunity for a wrong turn or a misadventure or—”
“A screwup?” John suggested.
“Exactly. And so, more out of compassion than anything else, I believe, my father took it on himself to find positions for him at the various Carlisle enterprises. He felt a sort of familial responsibility for him, just as Grandfather Howard had for George’s father, Willie.”
“Pretty important jobs for a screwup,” Gideon said, “sales manager . . .”
Rafe nodded. “Yes, too important. Mother never trusted him, you know, and in the end Father had to agree.” He seemed on the verge of enlarging on this, but instead he glanced at his watch, then drained his glass and rather indelicately smacked his lips, signaling the end of a conversation that was obviously depressing him. “And now we’d better report for dinner as instructed. Annoying Gussie is to be avoided at all costs. I’ve asked her to prepare what I hope will be a treat for you, the most British of all dinners, the very emblem of Old Blighty.”
“Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding?” John asked hopefully.
CHAPTER 28
John got his wish: roast beef; carrots, parsnips, cabbage, and broccoli, all roasted with the meat; mashed potatoes; and, of course, Yorkshire pudding—in this case in the form of popovers crisped on the outside, with their centers hollowed out to hold generous lardings of drippings. Gussie, a petite but sinewy Asian woman wearing a white smock over blue jeans and sandals, set the earthenware platter on the table and told Rafe: “Leftover beef goes in the refrigerator. You can leave everything else as is. I’ll take care of it in the morning.” She waited a couple of beats and dourly added: “Like I always do.”
“Thank you, Gussie,” Rafe said, “what a splendid feast you’ve made for us.”
“Enjoy,” Gussie ordered, and was gone.
The two bottles of wine on the table, Rafe informed them, were a 1991 Saint-Emilion from Château Cheval Blanc—“a claret, naturally, and in my opinion, finer even than the Pétrus or Pomerol of that year. But you can try it for yourselves and make your own decisions.”
Gideon, John, and Julie tried it for themselves and, unsurprisingly, pronounced it very fine indeed. The roast had already been carved into impressively uniform slices, which Rafe deftly lifted to individual plates, along with portions of vegetables, and handed around. Somehow, he had found the private time to change to a velvet burgundy smoking jacket and pale-salmon ascot, and he looked very much the lord of the manor.
Because Le Fontant had only three rooms on the ground floor—kitchen, sitting room, and a bedroom—there was no separate dining room, so they were eating in the kitchen, the largest of the rooms, the working area of which looked like an exhibit from a twenty-first-century cooking exposition—stainless steel appliances, including a refrigerator the size of a UPS truck; two skylights; dozens of modern, polished copper and aluminum pots hanging from the ceiling; and three work islands, one a vintage butcher block and the other two with pale quartzite work surfaces. The smaller eating area was in marked contrast and could have passed for one of the seventeenth-century rooms at Mont Orgueil Castle, with its rough, thick-legged, old wooden table and chairs to match; bare rock walls; and worm-eaten, adze-carved beams above.
In general, the inside of the manor suited the four-hundred-year-old exterior: small rooms, low, lumpy ceilings with half-buried roof beams in them, and unplastered stone walls. But aside from the eating area, there was nothing humble about it. What had been earthen floors were now covered either with wood or smooth, amber terrazzo tiles. Electrified sconces, placed every three or four feet along the walls, provided the lighting, throwing warm, evocative sh
adows over the rough granite stones. And the requisite fireplace, carved blackened stone mantel and all, took up almost an entire wall of what was now the living room.
The furnishings had a look often to be seen in the homes of the truly patrician. Everything was cared for and of high quality, but most of it was so old it was just this side of falling to pieces: cracked leather on the chairs and threadbare tapestries, some with holes in them, on the floor and on the walls. Mismatched furniture was thrown together, ostensibly at random. In a poor man’s home, it would have been squalid and unkempt; in Rafe’s, it was a kind of laid-back, country house chic.
Rafe had just filled his own dinner plate and set it down in front of him when the pleasant flow of casual patter he’d had going abruptly stopped. His mouth dropped open, and rather than sitting down, he more or less fell into his chair—from which he immediately sprang up. “I have proof!” he exulted. With a lighthearted laugh, he smacked his forehead. “I can prove he’s Peltier!” With that, he ran for the corner stairway to the upper floor.
John and Julie were understandably puzzled. “Does anybody know what he’s talking about?” John asked.
Gideon barely had time to give them a forty-second précis of Rafe’s Randy-Campion-is-Bertrand-Peltier hypothesis before Rafe came barreling back down the stairs, brandishing a suit jacket and gloating. “I gave him my lighter to light a cigar yesterday. His fingerprints must be all over it. I didn’t want to take it out of the pocket myself because I thought I might do it the wrong way. John, will you do the honors?”
“Sure.” John took the jacket. “Have you handled the lighter yourself since then?”
“Ah . . . no, I didn’t have a cigar last night, so it would only have been when I took it back from him.”
“Good. Got a pair of tweezers I can use? And a plastic bag?”
Rafe got the bag from a kitchen drawer and the tweezers from the bathroom, and John delicately extracted the lighter from the suit coat’s inside pocket.