The Orchid Shroud

by Michelle Wan

  “Didier? But why? I heard there were hunters about. Weren’t they shot by accident?”

  Laurent shook his head. “Madame Dunn and Monsieur Pujol were shot with a rifle. The hunters carried shotguns.” Realizing that he had probably already divulged too much, the gendarme turned official. “I’m sorry, monsieur, I can’t say anything more. Even what I’ve told you is confidential, strictly speaking.”

  “Incroyable!” Julian exclaimed, throwing up his arms. “All right. Keep your mouth buttoned, if you must. However, as one of France’s Bravest and Best, perhaps you’re not above receiving information? You might even find what I have to say of interest.”

  36

  WEDNESDAY, 19 MAY

  The hospital room was crowded. Julian sat at a little table wedged into a corner. Mara, cranked up to a sitting position, her right arm in a sling, worked on a portable bed desk. Both surfaces were covered with papers. Cartons filled with documents stood on the floor between them. One long uniformed leg, belonging to Laurent Naudet, on duty in the corridor, was just visible through the open doorway.

  Guy Verdier had been furious when Compagnon had turned up to subpoena his family archives. Julian had not only convinced both the adjudant and Mara’s twitchy juge d’instruction that the motive for Jean-Claude’s death might lie in those archives, he had persuaded both men (after an official perusal of the material had turned up nothing) that he and Mara were the best people to pick out the critical material. Unable to deny them access, Guy sought to obstruct: although several gendarmes had already pawed through the material, he had insisted that Mara and Julian wear gloves while handling the documents. They were fragile. He said that Jean-Claude had worn white cotton gloves.

  “Quelle merde,” Mara had snorted. The genealogist had not worn any kind of protective gear when he had flipped through Cécile’s diary.

  Mara found Cécile’s letters to Eloïse right away. There were sixteen of them, bundled together in a packet tied with a faded red ribbon. They covered the period between Eloïse’s departure from Aurillac in the fall of 1870 and June 1879 (fortunately, the writer was better about dating her correspondence than her diary) and confirmed Cécile’s talent for plain writing:

  27 October 1870

  Dear Eloïse,

  I write to tell you that you should not worry overmuch for my family’s reputation or take the matter so much to heart yourself, for all that Hugo left you in the lurch. No one really seems to care that Hugo did not marry you. They’re far too taken up with gossiping about Henriette’s décolletage …

  A moment later, Mara called out excitedly, “Julian, come here. This is it. It’s the proof you’re looking for.” He leaned in to read with her:

  4 November 1870

  Dear Eloïse,

  I cannot return the shawl as you asked because, even though you did the embroidery, I supplied the silk. You made it for my birthday last year, and I think it is too bad of you to demand it back. Besides, Henriette wants it for herself. She likes the color blue. Maman says for that reason I am to wear it as often as possible …

  “Brilliant,” said Julian, hungrily scanning the letter, as if Cécile’s ungainly scrawl would tell him more. It didn’t, and he realized with a sense of disappointment that it only confirmed what he already knew. However, the letter did raise an important point. Eloïse had made the shawl for Cécile in 1869. Was the orchid her idea or Cécile’s? He revisited the question he had asked coming away from the Wolf Cave: why choose that particular flower? If it had the werewolf associations that Mara suspected, and since the shawl had been specifically intended for Cécile, did it point to a lycanthropic side to Hugo’s sister that they had not suspected? She was, after all, a de Bonfond. Or was Eloïse making a nasty statement about the de Bonfonds in general? But no, she had done the needlework while she still had hopes of marrying Hugo. She would not have wanted to impugn the reputation of her future husband’s family. He shook his head. The soundest conclusion seemed to be that Cypripedium incognitum was simply an unusual flower that had attracted the embroiderer’s eye.

  He pulled his chair over to read the rest of the letters with Mara. The next one, dated 5 December 1871, informed Eloïse of the death by choking of Dominique. It was written with Cécile’s hallmark candor but provided no more insight into the death of little Yvette Garneau than had her diary entry on the subject. Another announced the birth of Henriette and Hugo’s son on 4 January 1872. The baby was named Dieudonné-Dominique-Christophe de Bonfond.

  Then, on 7 February 1872, Cécile penned:

  Dear Eloïse,

  I write to tell you that Hugo fell from his horse today and lies dying. His saddle girth snapped mid-gallop and he went over, dragging Beltrain fully down on him. The poor beast broke a leg and had to be shot. They say Hugo’s back is broken, for he can move nothing but his eyes. Maman heard the news while she was overseeing the preparations for Hugo’s thirty-sixth-birthday celebration. She set up a wailing like a bagpipe, and walks through the house like a blind person, wailing still, but I wonder now if it isn’t as much for the wasted food and expense as for Hugo. Our steward, who saw the fall, says the girth was frayed but looked also to have been partly cut across the underside …

  “Blimey,” said Julian. “Maybe Loulou was right. Maybe Cécile did for him. To get back for all the years of abuse.”

  “Or Eloïse,” said Mara. “Hell hath no fury, and so on. She knew about horses, too.”

  15 February 1872

  My dear cousin,

  Maman told me that you have been twice to Aurillac these past eight days without once troubling to see me. Henriette says you come to gloat over our misfortunes. First Papa, now Hugo. It cannot be to console Maman, for, as I have delayed the commencement of my novitiate to be with her, she does not need you, and Hugo, who grows weaker by the day, has no wish to see you, either, I’m sure. In any case, Henriette lets no one near him or her child, so really you needn’t come at all, unless it be to keep company with me.

  “Hugo died”—Mara referred to a page of notes she had made on key de Bonfond dates—“on the twenty-third of February. It took him seventeen days to do it.”

  The last few letters were thinly spaced out over the next seven years. Or perhaps they were the only ones that had survived. Cécile never entered the Abbaye des Eaux but remained at Aurillac, growing, as Jean-Claude had said, old, ill, and mad. A letter dated June 1879 informed her cousin that she had been

  … sick these last weeks, eating nothing but bread and broth. Today was the first time that I felt able to leave my bed. I spent it sitting by my window, watching water run from the dolphin’s mouth. It is like my life, draining away … Henriette’s brat constantly disturbs my rest. “God-given” he is named, but he is the devil’s own spawn, with a look as black as his nature. Today he had the effrontery to address me as tu, though he is only seven. Maman plots daily to drive Henriette from Aurillac, but I fear the whore has the whip hand of her …

  The final letter bore the date November 1879 and was written in an almost undecipherable hand:

  Dear cousin,

  Why do you not come to see me? I cannot come [illegible words] have tied me to my bed. The servants watch me constantly [illegible words] poison my food. Maman cares nothing for my suffering [illegible words] unable to fight back. I think of throwing myself from my window to end my misery. Eloïse, can you not help me?

  Mara leaned back against the bed, shaken by this final cri du coeur.

  “Bloody hell,” said Julian, thinking of the toxic brew that must have been created by those three women, Odile, Henriette, and Cécile, living and hating under the same roof. It was no wonder Cécile went insane.

  Wearily, Mara bundled the letters together and tied them up. Her right arm ached. It was ten past two. Fifty minutes before the nurse would come with her next painkiller. Julian returned to his corner. Ten minutes later, he said, “Ha!” and began ferreting about in a box. He pulled out, one after another, yellowed slips of pape
r which he laid out on the table.

  “Hello?” she called after watching him for a time.

  “Right!” Triumphantly he turned to her, holding up a clutch of the slips, like a handful of trump cards. “These are bills of sale, Mara, dating from 1815 through to 1833. Between those dates the Verdiers made outlays of cash for the construction of several cast-iron frames fitted out with leaded glass. Here’s a bill for a lean-to, and another for a bigger, free-standing structure. There are bills for the purchase of stoves and replacement glass “to be affixed with glazing putty.” They ordered cork, sphagnum, and peat, as well as charcoal and woven baskets on a regular basis. And in 1827, someone invested in the installation of a piped hot-water heating system. All told, they spent a tidy sum, in anciens francs of course. Now, what does all this suggest?”

  He gave her time to work it out. When she did not, he said, “Hothouses, Mara. Someone in the Verdier family took a keen interest in them. And people grew orchids in hothouses.”

  “Oh, I see … But wait a minute. They also grew other things. Oranges, for example. Big French estates often had an orangerie.”

  “Ah, but here’s the clincher.” He waved a bill at her. “This one’s dated 1830 and is for three large, made-to-order boîtes en verre.”

  “What’s so special about that?”

  “These, I suspect, were no ordinary glass boxes. If my hunch is right, they were probably the Dordogne equivalent of a Wardian case, a sealed glass container developed by a chap named Nathaniel Ward for transporting live plant material. You see, orchid mania in the nineteenth century was a hobby only the rich could afford. You had to have a hothouse for your plants. And you had to have the plants themselves. That was the harder part. You couldn’t just go out and buy your orchids from a nursery or order them by air express. You generally had to send someone out to the far ends of the earth to get them, because the orchids people wanted were tropical exotics, and they wanted ones no one else had yet brought back. Rich fanciers spent fortunes sending collectors around the world in search of new species. The collecting methods were generally disastrous, ecologically speaking, and the transportation conditions even worse. That’s where the Wardian case came in. Until the Wardian case was developed, most plants never made it back to Europe alive. Nor did a lot of the collectors, for that matter.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Oh, they drowned, or died of fever, or were shot. Who knows? Maybe some were even cooked and eaten. It was a dangerous occupation. Still is in some ways.” He reflected for a moment. “I think one of the Verdier ancestors was an orchid-fancier who either went himself or hired professional hunters to bring back orchids for his collection. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why the Verdiers went into hock. The hothouses were expensive enough to build and maintain, but it was getting the plants to go in them that probably drained the coffers. In Victorian England, fortunes were squandered on the acquisition and propagation of orchids. The same could have happened here.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Mara. “If your orchid was an import, then that solves the problem of where Eloïse saw it. In a hothouse.”

  Julian blew out a lungful of air. “Possibly. Although, we have to remember it also grew in the wild. So it’s either a naturally occurring plant, or a hothouse escapee. Either way, if Cypripedium incognitum developed a bad reputation as Devil’s Clog, I figure it did so only after Eloïse made her embroidery in 1869. She wouldn’t knowingly have put something discreditable on the shawl at a time when she was still planning to become a de Bonfond.”

  Mara considered this. “Then the plant couldn’t have been associated with werewolves in Xavier’s day. But it might have come to be toward the end of Hugo’s life. According to Cécile’s diary, little Yvette Garneau had her throat torn out in December 1871. Cécile implied her mother was afraid Hugo had done it. Well, if Odile was having her suspicions, maybe other people were, too.” Mara repositioned her shoulder, which was becoming painful. “You know, Hugo’s tie with Cypripedium incognitum makes sense on another level. If he didn’t use a killer dog, he might have relied on a drug to give his lycanthropic delusions an extra kick.”

  “If Hugo was taking Cypripedium incognitum as an hallucinogenic,” Julian muttered doubtfully, “he’d have needed a lot of the stuff.”

  “Then that’s it!” Mara exclaimed. “He cultivated it.”

  “I doubt it. You can’t grow orchids like Brussels sprouts, Mara.”

  “Well, then, he paid people to find it for him. And that could be where Didier got the idea that the old ones dug it up.”

  Julian remained skeptical. Nevertheless, he blenched at the thought of his orchid being harvested wholesale. “And the Wolfsbane?”

  “After people began to suspect that Hugo was a werewolf, they started calling it Devil’s Clog and tried to eradicate the plant. Putting Wolfsbane in its place was their way of making sure.”

  Julian sighed. It was all speculative, but it made a kind of terrible sense. He refolded the bills carefully along their original creases and put them back in the box. “Anyway, getting back to hothouses, there isn’t one at Les Chardonnerets. At least, nothing you can see from the road.”

  “It’s probably been destroyed by now, to make way for all those vines.”

  “That’s the trouble,” Julian complained bitterly. “It’s vines everywhere you look”

  “Well, it is a vineyard.”

  It’s really disappointing.” Mara tossed her glasses down irritably. “We’ve been at this for hours, and we haven’t come across anything that could have given Jean-Claude a reason to try blackmailing Christophe. Or anyone else, for that matter. Compagnon and that juge d’instruction are going to think we’re frauds.” She peered around her. “I’d like to have a look at Cécile’s letters again. Bring me that box, will you?”

  Julian did so.

  “That’s funny,” said Mara a few minutes later.

  “What?” He swiveled about in his chair.

  “Do you remember when Cécile complained to Eloïse about being ill? I’ve got the letter here. She talks about sitting at her window. Listen again to what she says: ‘… watching water run from the dolphin’s mouth. It is like my life, draining away.’”

  “So?”

  “Don’t you get it, Julian? Baby Blue was put in the wall by someone who had the upstairs end room in the north wing. Or at least by someone who could control access to the room. It would have taken time to pry the stone out through the back of the armoire, and that person couldn’t have people coming in at will. But that room can’t have been Cécile’s room.”

  His eyebrows curled like question marks. “Why not?”

  “Because she had a view of the fountain. There is no view of the fountain from the room where Baby Blue was put in the wall. It’s at the front of the house.”

  “Maybe he was put in from the other side of the wall in the next room down. You’d be able to see the fountain from there, wouldn’t you?”

  “But that’s not where the armoire was. Thérèse said the armoire was in the end room. Anyway, the most important thing is that Cécile wrote about seeing the dolphin’s mouth. The only way Cécile could have had a view of the dolphin’s mouth is if her room was in the south wing.”

  “But that’s on the other side of the house. If her room was in the south wing, then she—”

  “—wasn’t the one who put Baby Blue in the wall,” Mara finished for him. “Which explains why we haven’t been able to find any mention of Cécile’s pregnancy or proof of a birth. She never had a baby. Or, if she did, it wasn’t Baby Blue. This means we’re back to square one. We don’t know who Baby Blue was, and we don’t know why he was killed.”

  Julian sat down heavily on the bed, causing Mara to wince.

  “Okay,” he said. “Then it’s a process of elimination. Baby Blue died sometime between 1860 and 1914. If it wasn’t Cécile, the only other woman of childbearing age living at Aurillac at that time was Henriette, at least unt
il 1901, when Dieudonné married Léonie. So it’s down to those two.” Julian frowned, reconsidering. “Or maybe neither. Didn’t you say Henriette’s bedroom was on the ground floor, off the terrace in the main part of the house? And didn’t Thérèse tell you that the roof of the north wing leaked, so that the family has lived in the south wing for generations? That eliminates both Henriette and Léonie. So who had that end room in the north wing? Are we back to a maidservant with a bastard?”

  Thoughts were going off in Mara’s head like firecrackers. “No, we’re not. Christophe did say that his grandmother had the room off the terrace, the one that’s now called le petit salon. But I think that wasn’t until much later on. It’s one of the finest in the house, Julian. You should see the boiserie. You tell me: what are the chances that Henriette, when she first came to Aurillac, would have been given the best room in the house? Zilch, if Odile had anything to do with it. Much more likely that she and Hugo would have been given adjoining chambers elsewhere. Like in the north wing, under a leaky roof and up a narrow flight of stairs, so she could fall down and break her neck.”

  Julian pondered for a moment. “All right. What about this? After Hugo’s death, Henriette took a lover, got pregnant, and had to dispose of the kid because her annuity depended on her living in a state of exemplary widowhood. That’s got to be it. Why the hell didn’t we think of it sooner?”

  Mara remembered Jean-Claude’s dismissal of this theory when she had aired it. “It would have had to be after Odile died. There’s no way Henriette could have carried an illegitimate child to term, much less given birth, without Odile knowing, and Odile would have used anything like that as a means of dispossessing Henriette.” She referred to her notes. “Odile lived until 1899. Henriette would have been fifty-four by then. Pretty old to start having bastards. And don’t forget, we still have a second, headless baby to account for.”

  “Didier’s the only one who can tell us about that,” said Julian, sobered by the thought that Didier, with half his lung blown away and fighting for his life, might soon be beyond telling them anything.