by Michelle Wan
They were passing through open woodland along a road so narrow that at one point they had to pull over and stop when they met an oncoming Deux Chevaux. The other car stopped as well. Two men and a spaniel were in it. Hunters, from the look of them. One of them held a shotgun between his knees. The driver leaned out the open window.
“Salut. Just thought I’d let you know. There’s been another possible sighting of the Beast near here. A group of us have been combing the woods for it since dawn. You haven’t seen anything, have you?”
“No,” said Julian.
“Well, keep your eyes open. Are you armed? Too bad. If you plan on hanging around these parts, you’ll want to be careful. The accursed thing is moving around in broad daylight now.”
The driver raised a hand in farewell and edged forward. The car was soon lost to sight.
“Why the hell do they insist on calling it ‘the Beast’,” Julian said in disgust as he put the van in gear, “when everyone knows it’s nothing more than a feral dog?”
“Tell that to the man who was killed. Or the woman who got mauled.”
“In both cases it was protecting its kill.”
“So what are you saying? Don’t bother it when it’s eating? Quite honestly, Julian, do you think this is a good idea? That man said the thing was spotted around here this morning.”
“Miles away by now, with all those hunters after it. Anyway, you’ve got me and Jazz to protect you.”
“It eats dogs, too.”
“Good. Maybe it’ll eat Bismuth.”
They drove on. Eventually, the road deteriorated to a rutted track. They were now in deep forest. Julian stopped and consulted a Série bleue map. He drove slowly, hanging his head out of the van window, for another couple of hundred meters before he spotted what he was looking for: a trailhead. They parked the van opposite it and got out. Julian checked his equipment: camera, binoculars, map, botanist’s loupe, provisions, water bottle. He slung his backpack over one shoulder, and they started out on foot, making their way along a path that led at an incline toward the eastern face of Aurillac Ridge. Along the way, Jazz flushed a rabbit and disappeared in a noisy wake of barking. Bismuth crashed after him but at least held his tongue, a restraint no doubt inherited from his pointer mother. It was one thing about his dog that Julian really did appreciate.
“Too much cover around here for anything of interest,” Julian said, meaning orchids. “But we should be coming out of this pretty soon.”
Mara, remembering the hunter’s warning, did not like the way the trees seemed to crowd in on them. She was relieved when they broke into a large, sloping meadow. At the top of the meadow, more woods ran up to the crest of the escarpment.
“This is the back side of the estate.” Julian pointed. “The house is up there, off to the left, although you can’t see it through the trees. All this is old pasture. Christophe still rents the land to farmers in the area.”
The dogs had arrived before them. Their tails could be seen thrashing above the waving grass.
“So where do we begin?” asked Mara, sensing that this orchid hunt was going to be like no other that she had done with him. Before, they had been looking for a sequence of identifiable flowers. This time it was down to a single plant, if not illusory, at least unknown.
“Right here.” He grinned and swung an arm in a wide arc about them. “If Cypripedium incognitum needs an environment similar to Cypripedium calceolus, it’ll do best in mottled shade. This means the transition zone between trees and clearing.” He designated the perimeter of the field.
“Why not the field itself?” The grassy expanse looked like much easier walking.
“Because it’s been used for grazing. Any orchid that might have grown there wouldn’t stand much of a chance of survival. Once destroyed, orchids don’t come back that easily because, as I told you, they require years to develop. Lady’s Slippers are one of the slowest. They can take more than fifteen years just to put out their first flower. That’s why it’s such a crime to pick them, let alone dig them up, like you-know-who.” He paused, reflecting unhappily on the many grievances he had with Géraud. “My idea is to search in parallel around the field. You take the margin. I’ll walk a bit farther into the woods because the tree line will have shifted over the years. The important thing is to go slowly and look carefully either side of you. This flower could be highly localized, and it could be down to a single representative. Oh, and here, I brought along a copy of Iris’s sketch if you need it.”
Mara knew the orchid in all its sinister beauty by heart, but she studied the sketch all the same. If it had finished blooming, she would have to be on the lookout for anything with similar leaves. Iris’s drawing showed three smooth, broad ones with strong parallel veining, narrowing to a point and sheathing a single stem.
“Also,” Julian went on, “keep your eyes open for Monkshood.” He told her that the bushy plant stood about hip-to-shoulder-high and put out cowl-like purple flowers, hence its name. It wasn’t yet in bloom, but the foliage, dark green and sharply toothed, was easily identifiable.
“What happens if we don’t find anything?” Mara asked.
“We move on to the next field.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What next field?”
“There are—er—three of them, didn’t I tell you?”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Ah. Well, this is the northernmost meadow. The other two are strung out in a line from here across the ridge flank. Don’t worry”—he slung an arm cheerfully about her shoulders—“I have a feeling this is going to go really well.”
They set off. At first the dogs accompanied them but soon lost interest and went about their own business, reappearing at intervals and disappearing again. Mara had the easier line of search; Julian, moving along to her right, the harder job of working around trees and pushing through undergrowth.
Julian was, Mara decided as she scanned the ground, at his best and worst at such times. On the one hand, his instinct for orchids was almost awe-inspiring. “Orchid Eyes,” she called him. It wasn’t just that he had an uncanny ability to sense their presence (undoubtedly his botanical knowledge and experience enabled him to make sense of clues like other flowers, soil, moisture, and light conditions). It was his intense way of relating to orchids—in fact, to all growing things. He was sensual, like a lover, when he stroked a flower head; tender as he stooped to right an injured plant; gallant in stepping wide to avoid treading on a humble clump of Poly-galavulgaris, Common Milkwort to people like her. The tiny flowers, blue and pink, were the kind of thing she walked right over. Emily Dickinson, a poet Mara had once liked (in the days before she became too busy redesigning space to think about poetry), had said it all:
To him who keeps an Orchis’ heart
The swamps are pink with June
Julian kept an Orchis’ heart, and his world was ablaze with color. It was hard for Mara not to be seduced by his passion. She was only regretful that so little of it found its way to her.
But he could also be cranky. At one point, he had yelled, “For heaven’s sake, Mara, watch where you put your feet. You’re trampling that Neottia.” Unnerved, she had jumped back and sat down painfully in a patch of nettles.
He irritated Mara by constantly encroaching on her territory to point out things that she had overlooked. “Nice stand of Epipactis right there. You walked right by it.”
And he was insufferably pedantic. He found Ophrys and Orchis, Platanthera, and Himantoglossum, all possessing equally unpronounceable last names. But, he warned her as they went along, this was changing because orchid classification, hitherto based on morphological characteristics, was being overturned by DNA analysis. Thus, Orchis ustulata was now Neotinea ustulata, while Coeloglossum viride, the little Frog Orchid, had been folded in with the genus Dactylorhiza. It was something, he said with satisfaction, old Géraud was going to have a lot of trouble with, mired up to the eyebrows as he was in the old taxonomy.
Pâté or h
am?” Julian asked. It had taken them almost two hours to go around the first field, and they were now sitting side by side on a log, taking a breather and sharing the sandwiches that he had packed. “One down, two to go.”
Mara assumed his last statement referred to meadows. “Ham,” she sighed. Ruefully, she examined her arms, scratched from the embrace of a hawthorn bush.
“You do know, Julian,” Mara said after a long silence, “that it’s a long shot. If your orchid and Devil’s Clog are the same thing, and if people dug it up everywhere, it’s probably been wiped out.”
The look on his face told her that she had voiced the unthinkable. “It’s out there,” he said very seriously. “And I’ll find it. I’m not just on the trail of something rare and beautiful, Mara, but something botanically tantalizing as well. When I first saw Bedie’s photo, I knew it was some kind of Slipper Orchid. The question was, what? Although it was a bit of a stretch, I toyed with the idea that it might be a mutant of Cypripedium calceolus, since I knew efforts had been made to establish the plant here. If so, it probably was a one-off because the chances of a mutant reproducing are generally slim. The new characteristics would have to offer some kind of evolutionary advantage, and they would also have to be dominant for them to persist. I expect you know about genes as the basic units of heredity? They come in pairs, one from each parent. A dominant gene will always override a recessive gene, so that a recessive trait can never show up unless you have two paired recessives.”
She nodded, vaguely remembering something to that effect from her high-school biology class.
“But the embroidery changes everything. It tells me the plant has a living track record, going back god knows how long. Moreover, the separate lateral sepals, if they’re truly representative, put it in a group with your North American Ram’s Head Orchid and Cypripedium plectrochilum, found in China. But in all other ways, Cypripedium incognitum is nothing like those two. So, for now, I have to treat my Mystery Orchid as an entirely distinct and unknown species.” He shifted about on the log to look at her with glowing eyes. “I know of no other orchid like Cypripedium incognitum anywhere in the world, Mara. You see why I have to find it, don’t you? And when I do, it’s going to make botanical history, no matter what that chameau Géraud says.”
Oh well,” said Julian, trying to boost their spirits. They had finished their circuit around the last pasture, and he was now leading them on an oblique line through the forest. It was the more direct way of making their way back to the road, but it meant a lot of pushing through the dense understory of the trees. “We’ll find it. Next time. An orchid hunter always believes in the next time.”
Mara, following unenthusiastically, made no reply. Even the dogs lagged behind.
“I forgot to tell you,” she said after a while. “Thérèse phoned last night. Christophe is still missing. It’s been five days now. I think she should call the police.”
“Ridiculous,” scoffed Julian. “If I know Christophe, he’s tucked up comfortably in a three-star hotel somewhere, waiting until the noise around Baby Blue dies down.”
“But Thérèse said Christophe’s assistant editor in Bordeaux is also worried because he’s had no feedback on the author’s proofs for the de Bonfond history he sent over last week. And that’s one thing Christophe really cares about.”
Julian, climbing over a fallen tree, called back to her, “It’s as plain as your nose he planned to go away all along. Otherwise, why would he have delegated you to deal with Lover Boy Fournier? He’ll turn up in a couple of days. You’ll see.”
Mara, detouring around the tree, found herself wading hip-deep through a sea of ferns. “He’s your friend. How can you be so dismissive? Oh, damn!” She tripped on a root and went sprawling.
A deep, warning grunt rumbled out of the earth. Something large and dark, like a nightmare, lurched up out of the greenery a short distance in front of her: a massive head covered in dark bristles, two piggy eyes, and a couple of sets of nasty, upward-curving tusks. The wild boar, wakened from its afternoon nap, glared, ears flicking, its nose disk twitching a wet warning.
“Julian!” Mara screamed and scrambled backward on hands and knees faster than she thought possible. Not fast enough. The animal charged. In the same instant, a frenzied barking exploded as Jazz and Bismuth sailed past her right ear. Julian yelled and came running. The boar, beset by the cacophony of noise and two hurtling dogs, checked its attack a meter from Mara’s face, wheeled, and thundered away, leaving a broken swath of bracken in its wake.
“Don’t let them—” Julian roared, but Jazz and Bismuth were already on its trail. Julian raced after them, shouting.
Mara sank back shakily onto the ground. “Next time?” she yelled up to the trees. “What next time?”
17
SATURDAY, 8 MAY
Mara was limping. Julian, supporting her while keeping both Jazz and Bismuth on the lead, was describing graphically what an adult boar could do to a dog, the slashing power of its tusks, and so on. Although, he assured her, they rarely attacked people.
“Ha!” said Mara, with very ill humor.
They broke out of the trees onto the road.
“Wait here,” Julian said. “I’ll get the van and pick you up.”
“I am not,” Mara declared through gritted teeth, “staying alone in these woods.”
So they made their way as a sorry group slowly down the road. They had rounded a bend when a glint of metal buried deep in the foliage off to their right caught Julian’s eye.
“Hello,” Julian said. “There’s a car in there.”
It was a gray Citroën that had been driven off the road and parked up a slip trail. Julian left Mara to investigate. He walked around it, trying the doors. It was locked up tight.
“Someone else is out here,” he called back, staring about him.
Mara hobbled forward to have a look. “Maybe another hunter. Looking for the Beast.” Then she said something that made him almost physically sick. “Doesn’t Géraud drive some kind of gray car?”
Julian stared at her, pushing down a sense of panic. He slammed his hand down on the car roof. “I swear, Mara,” he said hoarsely, “if that bastard finds the orchid—if he so much as touches it—I’ll kill him. I’ll choke him with my bare hands!”
She forgot her own discomfort and regarded him with sympathy.
“We need help,” she said after a moment. “It’s more than two people can do.”
“What, organize a search team? I’ve thought of that, but then Géraud would hear of it. You know he’s already been over every nook and cranny of Les Colombes. What are my chances, what are the orchid’s chances, if he realizes I’ve switched my focus to Aurillac? Although,” he concluded darkly, “by the look of it, he already has.”
“Not a search team,” Mara said. “One person who knows the woods and valleys for kilometers around. Someone who prowls the forests like a bear.”
“Who?” Julian’s face showed his despair.
“Vrac,” said Mara.
They first sought Vrac out at his grim farmhouse, situated below Les Colombes, but found no one there. So they drove up the steep, winding road to the château, where Jeanne de Sauvignac was living, according to Iris, under the dubious care of the Rochers.
Les Colombes was more dilapidated than either of them remembered it. Some of the shutters hung at crooked angles, and the windows looked grimy. Julian parked the van in the rear courtyard, where no attempt had been made to curb the weeds growing up between the flagstones. Mara thought with pity that Jeanne’s existence in the great house must now be like that of a poor ghost, twittering in shadows. The house looked so still, so abandoned, that they really did not expect anyone to answer their summons. They were startled when the door jerked open before they had even had a chance to knock. A large form stood before them in the dim opening.
“You,” growled la Binette. “What do you want?” Her face, with its disfiguring mulberry stain over one eye, was expressionle
ss. The straw-colored wig she wore, which gave rise to her nickname, was tipped slightly askew. She grunted as Jazz and Bismuth slipped past her into the cool depths of the great kitchen.
“Vrac,” said Mara.
“Not here.”
“Where is he?” Julian asked, hoping desperately that the halfwit had not gone walkabout, for Vrac often was away for days at a time, wandering the woods, sleeping rough, and eating whatever he could catch or steal.
“What business is it of yours?”
“Well, can you give him a message?”
“Maybe.”
“Tell him I want to see him.”
“Why?” said the mother as the son loomed out of the shadows behind her.
“Ah, Vrac,” Julian said, much relieved to see him and trying hard to sound sociable.
“What?” Vrac Rocher coughed out his harsh inquiry. He stepped up beside la Binette. As big as she, he had a large head, hair standing up in tufts, and a misshapen face covered in gray bristle. Although he played the village idiot when it suited him, Mara and Julian knew him to be surprisingly skilled at poaching livestock and beating defunct farm machinery into some kind of working order. He was in his fifties, his mother not much older, for she had borne him young. Together the two kept to themselves in their corner of the world, quietly doing their worst.
Julian held up Iris’s sketch.
“There’s a hundred euros in it for you if you can find this flower. It may be growing around Les Colombes or in the Sigoulane Valley or up on Aurillac Ridge. But I want you to look for it everywhere you go. And I want it living, mind. Don’t pick it, don’t step on it, don’t dig it up, don’t touch it at all. Just find it and lead me to it. And if you do find it, for god’s sake don’t tell anyone else.”
“Two hundred,” said la Binette.
“One fifty.”
“Two fifty.” The woman moved back into the kitchen to drive the dogs forward with a swipe of a booted foot.
“One seventy-five. It’s my final offer,” Julian said firmly.