The Orchid Shroud

by Michelle Wan

  18 October 1870

  My dear Cécile,

  I will, of course, continue to be your friend, although you must understand that relations between our families are irrevocably altered. I will also endeavor to give such support as I can to my aunt Odile, for I know that she struggles to swim against the tide of social censure. Hugo’s disastrous alliance must henceforth bar the de Bonfonds from all decent society, despite my aunt’s attempts to buy back lost respectability with her “entertainments.” I pity your family, and you particularly, from the bottom of my heart …

  “Sententious bitch,” Mara commented.

  “Well, she did get dumped. And at least she dated her letters,” said Julian.

  Mara took up the 1871 folder. By the summer of that year, Cécile, in her inimitable style, reported that Henriette was with child. Mara read aloud:

  … The whore keeps to her bed and complains of feeling ill. The temperature soars, causing her to break out in a prickly heat all over her body. Maman has ordered the cook to serve spicy foods in the hopes it will worsen her discomfort …

  … Henriette has taken the downstairs servant, Marie, for her personal femme de chambre. As a result, Marie gives herself airs and allows herself to be openly courted by the gardener’s lad, Jacquot Pujol. Yesterday she actually talked back to Maman, and Maman would have sent her packing but that Henriette complained loudly and persuaded Hugo to forbid it.

  “Jacquot Pujol. An ancestor of Didier?” Julian wondered.

  Mentions of hot weather gave way to references to a rainy fall. Cécile continued to provide descriptions of domestic scenes in which Dominique behaved disgustingly, Odile sought to make her daughter-in-law’s existence a misery, and Henriette, getting bigger by the day, gave as good as she got. Mara began to feel something like an exasperated affection for the writer, who had the knack of telling it like it was. Indeed, Cécile offered the same unadorned treatment to death as to life.

  “Oh my god, Julian,” Mara said. “Listen to this.”

  … Today Papa choked on his food in the middle of our Advent luncheon. It happened so quickly that he was dead before anyone could do a thing … It was right after the hure de sanglier had been served. Everyone was already upset because our régisseur had just burst in to tell us that Garneau’s little girl, Yvette, had been found in the woods, her throat torn open, like the others … Maman is prostrate, but I think less for Papa than because she fears for Hugo. Dear God, calamities fall on us like rain, and just when we had all begun to hope that the scourge had passed.

  “Julian, three children went missing and three known victims had their throats ripped out during Hugo’s lifetime. A teenage boy, Emile Joubert, who was tending his father’s cows, an old washerwoman named la Claudine, and Yvette Garneau.”

  “And Maman Odile was frightened for her son. I wonder why.”

  “I think we know.”

  “Does Cécile say more?”

  Unfortunately, she did not. That entry was Cécile’s last.

  32

  4 DECEMBER 1871

  The luncheon was held on the day of the Feast of Sainte-Barbe. The guests came to Aurillac in closed carriages, the horses steaming and stamping in the cold air. Henriette, big with child, had refused to be confined to her room, as decency demanded. She had put on a loose gown of rose-colored satin and was on hand to greet (and scandalize) the guests with her smile, her unseemly dress, and her swollen belly. Abbé Fortin, wrapped like a mummy against the weather, arrived first, in an ancient black cabriolet. The others who followed were people whom Henriette had also met: Hugo’s uncle and aunt; Maître and Madame Caillaud; the Saint-Anselme headmaster; the fat, velveteen-jacketed squire and his wife, a broad-hipped woman with the ruddy cheeks of a milkmaid.

  The only stranger to Henriette was Hugo’s other sister, Catherine, on exeat for the holidays from the Abbaye des Eaux. Henriette studied this member of the family with interest. She had little else to divert her. The tall, pale religieuse, with her otherworldly air, seemed indifferent to her surroundings and oblivious of her pregnant sister-in-law. She kept herself entirely to a long, murmured conversation with the old abbot, who huddled in a high-backed chair near the fire.

  Odile sat with the women guests on sofas in the middle of the grand salon. Henriette sat in the same area but somewhat apart. Cécile slouched ungainly in a bergère next to the piano that no one played. On his feet for a change, Dominique stood in another part of the room with the notaire and the headmaster, making desultory talk. Hugo, who had gone hunting that morning, had not yet returned. Odile expressed herannoyance, or perhaps her anxiety, by looking frequently for him to arrive through the double doors of the salon. They remained shut.

  Eventually, unable to contain herself any longer, Odile rose and approached Henriette, who was positioned too far away for her to address without raising her voice.

  “Shameless! This is your fault,” hissed the mother. “But for you, he would be here. He tires of you already.”

  Henriette’s riposte was swift. With a terrible sweetness, she responded loudly enough for the aunt, Madame Velveteen Jacket, and Madame Caillaud to hear, “Oh, belle-mère, you know he stays away only because of you. He has often complained to me that you keep such a poor table that he must hunt daily to keep us all in meat.”

  Odile went rigid with rage and returned to her chair. Henriette’s words were partly true. The family and household staff numbered fifteen, including three outdoor servants, all of whom had to be fed. Except for her social entertainments, when it was necessary to make a good impression, Odile was notoriously mean with her fare.

  Henriette nodded archly at the open-mouthed female guests and rose. Her porcelain exterior hid the facts that she felt unwell and that she was now furious. Furious with Odile, with Hugo for not being there. She therefore sought a victim in Cécile, who immediately struggled out of her armchair to move away the moment she saw her sister-in-law approaching the spot where she sheltered.

  “Don’t go.” Henriette followed the large young woman across the room, cornering her in a window bay. “I want to talk to you.”

  “What about?” Cécile looked warily at her belle-soeur. Henriette only ever spoke to her to make wounding comments.

  “Is it true you leave for the nunnery in the new year?”

  “None of your business,” said Cécile, sensing a trap.

  “Oh, la! Am I about to uncover more nasty family secrets? Are they making you do it, ma pauvre? Surely you’re not in the family way? Or is it simply that no man will have you? It will be good for the family coffers, you know, because you will be made, like your sister, to give upyour rights to the estate, and there’s little enough left to go around as it is. Poor sacrificial goat, your father’s excesses make it necessary to bury you alive in that god-hole. No more riding for you.”

  Cécile maintained a mulish silence.

  “Very well,” said Henriette cheerfully. She was feeling better already. “Tell me about your sister.” Henriette gestured at the religieuse, deep in her tête-à-tête with the abbot. “Was she also forced to take the veil?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. You shouldn’t talk like that. She gave herself to God.”

  “Cats more likely, else why take the name Sister Gertrude?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Oh, you are such a ninny, Cécile. Gertrude is the patron saint of cats.”

  Cécile, who did not know how to answer this, said the only thing that came into her head: “You think you’ve made such a good marriage, don’t you. But you don’t know Hugo.”

  “Indeed?” Henriette for once was intrigued. And vaguely troubled. She did not, in fact, know her husband well at all, except that he was a heavy man, heavy in bed, hard of hand—but, then, weren’t all men?—who spoke little except to talk about the hunt, and who brought with him the smell of damp woods and horses and earth.

  Cécile, having captured Henriette’s attention, was unable to sustain it, howe
ver. In answer to her sister-in-law’s inquiring look, she responded weakly, “He—he does things.”

  Henriette continued to stare at her mockingly.

  “He drinks the blood of animals he kills,” Cécile blurted out in desperation. It was something she had never told a soul. “I’ve—I’ve seen him.”

  “Oh, ma chère,” said Henriette, destroying any element of shock Cécile’s revelation might have had. “I’ve known that for ages!”

  In the end they were thirteen to table—Hugo unpardonably had still not made an appearance—an inauspicious number sitting down to aponderous meal unleavened by wit, news, or repartee. The one spot of color was Henriette (in her shameless pink gown), whom Dominique had insisted on placing to his right, thus offending protocol and Madame Caillaud. The menu consisted of six courses, beginning with a thin leek soup, followed by a cheese soufflé. They had just finished a rather tough ragout of goose, and the table was being prepared for the fourth course, when the de Bonfonds’ steward rushed in to inform the company of a terrible piece of news: the naked body of the youngest daughter of a neighboring farmer had just been found in a field. The child’s throat had been torn open.

  “Mon dieu!” shrieked Madame Caillaud, clutching her napkin to her breast. “The Beast again!”

  A group of hunters was combing the woods in the hope of catching the thing that had done it, and the steward wished to know if he could dispatch all available menservants to join the effort.

  “Certainly not,” snapped Odile from the other end of the table. “The child is dead. Nothing more can be done for her. It will have to wait until the boar’s head has been served.”

  She referred to the pièce de résistance, and, Beast or no Beast, she was not being entirely unreasonable, for the head was set out on an immense platter that required two serving men to carry it in. Hugo had killed the boar, of course, and the stripping of the skull, together with the preparation of the forcemeat and the salpicon of chicken, bacon, nuts, and pigs’ tongues with which the head skin was stuffed, had taken two days.

  But the horrific news had cast a pall on the company. They sat in silence as the dish was paraded around the table for all to admire, and then placed before Dominique to be served. Eventually, the abbot spoke. In his reedy voice, he told the party of a time some fifty years ago when, as a young curé newly arrived in Sigoulane, he had been given to understand that he had come to a place where something very evil lived. His rambling recollections did nothing to lighten the mood.

  It was one of the boar’s ears that did Dominique de Bonfond in. They had been cut off earlier and simmered in a jelly stock, then skewered back in place and coated with a cold brown sauce. The host had been eating one of the ears while telling an off-color story (about a sexton who had lost his trousers) in an attempt to enliven the party. Fortunately, Abbé Fortin, because of his deafness, heard very little of the lengthy tale. He sat bemused and thoughtful throughout the account. Sister Gertrude, to his right, bowed over her plate. Her lips moved, as if in prayer. Dominique had just delivered the punch line and had thrown his head back to roar with laughter, when a piece of the ear lodged in his throat. He coughed, gagged, reared out of his chair, clawed at his neck, turned purple, and finally pitched forward onto the pièce de résistance with a sickening thud and a spectacular splattering of forcemeats.

  It was at this point that the doors to the terrace flew open, admitting a cold blast of air. Hugo entered, a dazed expression on his face. His boots were muddy, and his neckcloth and the front of his hunting jacket were covered in blood. He must have made some attempt to wash himself, however, for most of his face was clean, except for some faint smears around his mouth and under his chin. His hands were also moderately clean, although the nails were rimmed in red. The horrified company stared speechless from the father, lying in the ruins of the boar’s head, to the son.

  “Heaven save us,” gasped Madame Caillaud. “The child—”

  Madame Velveteen Jacket crossed herself and began to weep. Odile went pale and gripped the table’s edge. Hugo’s uncle half rose and sat down again. His wife let out a low moan.

  Henriette salvaged the moment and what remained of her husband’s reputation. “For heaven’s sake, Hugo,” she said coolly, “come and sit down. What was it this time? A stag or a chevreuil?”

  Crazily, Cécile laughed.

  33

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON, 15 MAY

  Mara closed the last folder of Cécile’s diary and checked her watch. They had been at it over four hours. She pulled off her glasses and rolled her neck. Then, with a puzzled frown, she said:

  “You know, Julian, it’s really odd. If Cécile did have it on with her army captain in Paris, she should have given birth sometime around February or March of 1871. I don’t remember seeing a mention of her pregnancy anywhere, do you?”

  He shoved his glasses to the top of his head. “Come to think of it, no.”

  She scanned the pages of the 1871 folder again. “You’d think she would have written about something as important as that. I mean, the woman’s existence was utterly bleak. Apart from seeing animals slaughtered, nothing happened in her life. And of course there’s no official record of a birth.”

  “Well, there wouldn’t be, would there? I mean, if she or the family killed the kid. Maybe that applies to the diary, too. Perhaps parts of it are missing.”

  “Someone destroyed the bits that referred to the baby? I suppose that’s what they would have done. The problem is, it’s hard to tell if there are gaps because most of the entries aren’t dated. The organization of the material is entirely Jean-Claude’s guesswork.” She took up the 1870 folder from Julian’s stack and began riffling through it. “The only hint of Cécile being in a family way is this comment in Eloïse’s letter about ‘given your circumstances.’ And I’m not even sure about that. The woman sounds so self-righteous, you’d think she’d have delivered a full-blown moral lecture, given the chance.”

  “I didn’t see a thing about my orchid, either.” Julian’s tone was aggrieved. “In fact, Cécile made no mention of flora of any sort. I’m beginning to wonder if the damned woman had any feeling at all for nature, let alone flowers. I mean, even her horse was called ‘Money.’ Or I suppose ‘Argent’ could have meant ‘Silver.’ Anyway, I doubt if she ever embroidered so much as an initial on a handkerchief, let alone an accurate depiction of a Cypripedium on a shawl.” He stood up. Hands in his pockets, he strolled slowly past the paintings of the de Bonfond ancestors. Mara had earlier given him the family tour. He paused before Henriette, Odile, and Cécile. “Quite frankly, none of them looks like a flower-lover or an embroiderer.”

  “No,” Mara agreed. “They don’t.”

  She joined him in a second circuit around the room.

  “Nasty-looking beast,” Julian commented, stopping before Xavier’s portrait. He meant the dog. “I could see it as a man-killer.”

  Mara, scowling up at the baron’s features, sucked her breath in sharply. “Julian, I just realized who Adjudant Compagnon reminds me of. Xavier de Bonfond. He has the same red eyebrows and sticking-out eyes.”

  “Hmm. Well, seigneurial rights and all that, you know. And his grandson Dominique seemed to have been a skirt-chaser in his own right. Maybe they both spread the family genes about a bit.”

  Then Mara said, “You know, maybe we’re not getting the full picture. If Eloïse wrote to Cécile, then surely Cécile must have written to Eloïse. Jean-Claude said something about the Verdier family papers.”

  “You think we should pay a visit to Christophe’s Verdier cousins and find out if they have any of Cécile’s letters?”

  “Right. Come to think of it, I suspect that’s exactly what Jean-Claude did. Even though he promised not to deal with them, I think he talked his way into the Verdier archives and discovered something that got him killed.”

  The house was a large stone structure located just off the square in Sigoulane Village. Guy and Mariette Verdier received them
with a mixture of wariness and affability. Both knew that Mara was working in some capacity for Christophe, and that Julian was landscaping the Coteaux de Bonfond pavilion. Both seemed to regard their visitors as emissaries of the enemy who could be persuaded, with the right treatment, to switch allegiances. Julian found himself staring at the wife. He could have sworn Mariette had been a brunette when he last saw her. Her hair was now a brassy blond. Maybe she had dyed it to go with the banana-skin-yellow spandex halter top she wore.

  “You’re lucky you caught me in.” Guy waved the visitors over to a fake zebra-hide sofa. “I usually golf on Saturday afternoons.”

  “And Sundays,” Mariette mouthed to Julian. “I’m a weekend widow.” Julian half suspected she would have dug her elbow into his side if he had been within digging distance.

  The plump, pink-faced lawyer gave a whinnying laugh to show that he knew his wife to be a great kidder. Mara caught a glint of gold in one of his back molars.

  “It’s really your father we came to see, Maître Verdier,” said Mara, careful to use his title. The pair lived with Michel Verdier, or perhaps it was the other way around. “We really don’t want to trouble you.”

  “Oh, I’m sure I can answer any questions you may have about the de Bonfonds just as well.” He obviously preferred it that way. “Anyway, Papa is out with the vines right now. Now, how about some coffee?”

  Mariette laid on the works: a silver tray with a silver pot, porcelain demitasses and saucers, a plate of pastel-colored macaroons. Since she assumed they were there to talk about Baby Blue, she launched right into the matter as she poured. “C’est une très mauvaise affaire. The villagers are very upset about it. You were there that morning”—a nod in Julian’s direction—“you saw how worked up they were. Why, if it hadn’t been for my husband, I think they would have torn Antoine and Denise apart.”