Murder in Lascaux

by Betsy Draine

  “That must have been hard for her.”

  “It was, but she and her brother get on very well. Marianne has her cooking school, and he has his girlfriends. Though if he doesn’t marry soon, there won’t be an heir.”

  I raised my eyebrows, and Roz continued. “Marianne says she wants to see him settle down, but every time he starts getting serious about someone, Marianne finds fault with her. To tell you the truth, I think she’s a little leery at the prospect of having to share him with a wife.”

  She suddenly sensed my distraction. “This probably isn’t the time to talk about it. It’s Nora, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, and Toby.” As I looked in his direction, Toby turned and joined us. “And does your sister-in-law also live in Baltimore?” I asked, spotting Dotty flouncing back into the hall in her silky, clinging pants and low-cut top.

  “For the moment,” Roz replied, with a voice that noticeably cooled. “Now that my brother is gone, she’s shopping for condos in Florida and New York. But it hasn’t been that long. She may decide to stay based in Baltimore, and just spend a good part of the year traveling.” She seemed to remember her better self and looked around the room with admiration. “I might do the same thing in her shoes. In fact, I was the one who talked Dotty into coming along with me on this trip. We both like to cook. We’ve had a little rivalry over who makes the better grits soufflé.” She smiled, and then paused again, studying my face. “I’m sorry, you’ve had an awful experience, and here I am rattling on about food and family.”

  “Please, that’s what I need,” I replied. “It’s a relief to talk about ordinary things.”

  As Marianne waved us in to dinner, I walked alongside Roz and confessed I was feeling a lack of confidence about the cooking school, because I was out of practice. “These days, it’s usually Toby who makes our dinners.”

  “Well, why not? It must be very nice to come home to a man-cooked meal.”

  “It’s not that I don’t know my way around a kitchen,” I explained. “I was a decent cook before graduate school, but I’ve been working nonstop at writing or teaching till recently, when I got tenure. The last few years, I’ve baked the week’s bread every Saturday, but that’s it.”

  In a lowered voice, Roz confided, “That’s going to be a surprise for Marianne. She thought that, coming from the Bay Area, you’d be a disciple of Alice Waters and worship at the shrine Julia Child made for herself over there in Napa.”

  “Not too far off. I learned to cook young, from my Irish grandmother, working with her in our kitchen. No recipes. My mom was totally uninterested in cooking, so we didn’t have a single cookbook. But when my little sister was born and I took over as supper-maker, I bought a paperback copy of Julia Child’s TV-series and learned the basics from that. So I do sort of worship old Julia. She saved us from eating nothing but soda bread and lamb stew.”

  I didn’t add that all through those years when the kids were growing up and I was in charge of supper, I looked forward to the daily food preparation as a way of bringing order to an unruly household. Mom worked late hours at a gift shop to bring in extra money, and Dad flopped into bed early, exhausted from his postal route. Most days, I was the de facto parent for my sibs. But cooking always set my mind to rest, and tonight I hoped thinking about cooking would help assuage the trauma of the day.

  We were shown to assigned seats at the table, and Roz looked disappointed that the place cards forced us to separate. Marianne had put herself at the head of the table, with her father opposite. I was seated at Marianne’s right, which I took as an honor. At the other end of the table Lily and David were seated flanking the baron. Guillaume, the brother, was on my right, and Roz was on his, while across the table Dotty turned on the wattage as she nodded to her swains, Patrick on one side of her, Toby on the other, and Guillaume directly across, with the best view of her cleavage.

  Marianne silenced a buzz of polite chatter by tapping her knife on the side of her wine glass. “My father and brother join me in saying, ‘Welcome to our table, and bon appétit!’” She moved graciously into her instructor’s mode: “In spite of the unfortunate events of today, we hope you will enjoy our first meal together.” Lily managed a smile, and I hoped mine was warmer. Marianne continued: “Even though it is Monday, we have decided to provide an abbreviated version of a Perigordian Sunday dinner. All the courses are typical, but we’ll have only four, instead of the usual seven. We’ll start with soupe de fèves, served as at home.”

  With that, Marianne lifted the top from a giant china tureen. This meal may have been intended to feel homelike, but the dish hardly looked like a peasant’s pot. The china was bone white, decorated with the same elaborate cross that was incised on the lintels of the horse stalls outside. Here it was embossed in red over a band of gold around the tureen’s rim. I was sure the china was Limoges; there’s something unique about the color of Limoges ware, a balance of unmistakable depth and delicacy. With a long silver ladle, Marianne dipped into the soup, filled our bowls, and handed them to us to pass carefully down the table, family style.

  True to the formal spirit of the china, we politely waited for Marianne to raise her spoon, and then we took up ours to sip a wonderfully creamy soup.

  “It’s delicious,” said Patrick enthusiastically. During drinks he had hovered quietly in the background, but at table he suddenly came to life. To Dotty he said, “You know, there’s nothing like tasting local food on the spot, especially this kind of cooking that’s been passed down from mother to daughter.”

  Marianne looked hesitant and then seemed to overcome her misgivings. “But, you know, I did not learn to cook from my mother. It was Madame Martin’s mother, Susanne, who was my teacher. Her greatest joys, she always said, were her ‘two daughters,’ as she called Agnes and me, and her work preparing meals for the baron’s table.”

  Agnes, I thought. That history of closeness in childhood could make for an awkward employer-employee relationship. But it didn’t seem to. I looked around to see if Madame Martin was in evidence as a server, and she wasn’t. There hadn’t been any servant present at the start of the meal, and that did give the air of a family dinner.

  “I think I taste fennel or celery underneath the fava beans. Am I right?” Patrick asked seriously. He was more attractive frowning, with his soup spoon held speculatively in front of him, than he had been earlier, coming in like a trophy boyfriend on Dotty’s arm.

  “Both!” Marianne confirmed. “Very good, Patrick. You’ve got excellent taste buds, which every chef needs.”

  Trying to enter the conversation, since Guillaume, to my right, was occupied with Roz, I asked Patrick, “So you’re a chef ? Whereabouts?”

  “Chicago, Evanston, though up until now,” Patrick admitted, “I’ve never run a kitchen on my own. But next fall I’m planning to open a bistro in Madison, where I went to college.”

  “Will you feature Perigordian cooking?”

  “That’s the idea. Yes, with Marianne’s help, I hope to learn enough to apply the traditional techniques to local Wisconsin ingredients. The two regions are closer than you’d think in what they produce—you know, cheeses and milk, walnuts and apples, and all the farm-raised meats.”

  “A new fusion cuisine,” interjected Dotty, who had been following our conversation. I wondered again if she and Patrick were a couple.

  At my end of the table, the talk continued about food and was all very agreeable, although it couldn’t erase the shock we had suffered earlier. I tried hard to blot out images of death and to focus on Patrick’s questions and Marianne’s explanations, but I lost track until our server entered. It was the luggage-slinging Fernando. With the same angry expression he’d had outdoors, he abruptly removed the soup bowls. As he took Guillaume’s, I thought I might as well try out my French on Marianne’s brother.

  “Monsieur de Cazelle,” I ventured, “your château is very beautiful. When was it built?”

  He dabbed at his mouth with his napkin and answered e
nergetically, “That depends on which part you are interested in. There has been a château on this site since the thirteenth century, but it has been rebuilt on several occasions, so some sections are older than others. This section dates from the seventeenth century,” he added, tossing a hand carelessly in the air. “Other changes were made in the nineteenth. Then there were the modern renovations.”

  “I see.”

  “You know, Madame, these great houses are very expensive to maintain. The roof alone—” Though poised to continue on this subject, he was interrupted by Fernando’s reentry with a huge platter of what looked like overdone fried chicken.

  As Fernando stood at her side, presenting the dish to the table, Marianne addressed us all: “Here we have the main course for a traditional Sunday dinner, confit de canard. This is duck that was preserved last fall in its own fat in a jar, then refried in the jarred fat this evening. Though the description sounds greasy, if the duck pieces are fried at a properly high temperature and removed at the right moment, they should be light and crispy.” She waved Fernando to start serving me, and she got up herself to take a bowl from a sideboard. It contained a mass of tiny string beans glistening with a thin coating of oil.

  When he’d taken his beans and passed the bowl on, Marianne’s brother turned to me again and launched into a discourse on the tradition of preserving duck. Listening politely, I observed that Guillaume was rather well preserved himself. He appeared to be pushing sixty, but he affected the pose of a much younger man. He wore his dark hair slicked back and longish; the color at his temples suggested some recent touching up over gray. His cheeks had vertical wrinkles and pink blotches, possibly owing to too much wine. His voice was gravelly, his manner assured. While everyone else was casually dressed, Guillaume wore a dark, formal blazer and sported an ascot. All in all, he had the air of a practiced roué.

  “Are you pleased with the confit ?” he inquired, leaning over my plate.

  “Excellent,” I replied, sitting back a little in my chair.

  “You won’t find this kind of food in Paris,” Guillaume sniffed. “Parisian cooking is not the real cooking of the people. For duck you must come to Périgord.”

  “Yes, it’s delicious,” I agreed. “Of course, I like all kinds of French cooking.”

  Guillaume’s face clouded over. “French cooking?” he sneered. “There’s no such thing! Here in the Languedoc we had our own cuisine and culture and language for centuries before France ever existed! And we still have them!” His insistent voice cut through the talk around us, but after a moment’s hesitation, everyone returned to their conversation partners. Everyone but Marianne. She eyed her brother warily.

  What made her nervous about Guillaume’s little rant? I might be able to say if I knew what had set him off. I had done some reading about the history of the region and remembered “Languedoc” was an old term for the southern half of France. The northern and southern regions had strong differences of politics, religion, and even language. In the local dialect, the southerners pronounced the word “yes” as “oc,” in contrast to the northerners’ “oïl,” which later became “oui.” And that gave rise to the distinction between the tongue of oc in the South (the Languedoc) and the tongue of oui in the North (the Languedoïl). Obviously, Guillaume still respected the old division.

  He must have observed my recoil from his bombast, because he continued in a less agitated manner. “I’m sorry if I have shocked you,” he went on, “but I believe very strongly we must preserve our ancient traditions. My sister finds my attitude … old-fashioned, but that is how I am.” Marianne indeed was looking worriedly at her brother.

  “Guillaume, you’ll make our guest uncomfortable with all your talk about the old ways. Nora has only just arrived, and you’re already lecturing her.”

  “I thought our guests were here to learn about our cooking traditions. I was only making a comment about cuisine.”

  “Yes, but there’s no need to be so insistent. You’ll put our new friends off.”

  “Insistent, am I? Very well, we can change the subject; however, if you would like to learn more about our ancient culture and traditions, my dear lady, I would be honored to oblige.”

  “Yes, I would like that very much,” I replied. “Perhaps at another time. Thank you.”

  “À votre service.” Guillaume nodded, smiled a small, cold smile, and concentrated on his dinner, spearing a morsel of duck with his fork and raising it to his mouth, all with his left hand.

  “You’ll have to excuse Guillaume,” said Marianne. “He has rather firm beliefs.”

  “Not at all,” I said. It was an awkward moment, but I had been waiting for a lull in the conversation to talk to Marianne about my research using the family archives. Perhaps now was the right time. “In fact, I’m interested in learning everything I can about Périgord for my work on Jenny Marie Cazelle. I was wondering when I might begin.”

  Marianne seemed to welcome the question. The horizontal lines on her forehead relaxed. “Tomorrow the inspector will be using the library for his interviews. When he’s finished, I’ll show you where the archives are located, and we can talk about your project. I’m curious about your opinion of Jenny Marie’s work. Do you know you’re the first foreigner who has ever expressed an interest in her career? How did you discover her?”

  “Purely by chance,” I explained. I had run across a beautiful little painting by her at an art fair in San Francisco. Toby was willing to buy it for his antiques shop, but in the end, we liked it so much we decided to keep it. A small oil panel, no more than eight by ten inches, it sketched an intimate scene of two women with their children sitting under a tree in a park. The style was impressionistic, with creamy, loose brush strokes. There was a signature, tiny, yet clear enough to read, but I’d never heard of the artist. And of course, that was the hook.

  A quick check disclosed that during her lifetime (1870–1944), Jenny Marie Cazelle had exhibited in Paris at the Salon—a considerable achievement, for few women artists ever reached the level of Salon exhibition. But aside from a brief entry in The Dictionary of Women Artists, hardly anything was known about her life. The most interesting fact in the entry was that she was the daughter of a prominent aristocrat and had been raised in the family château near the town of Beynac in the Dordogne. That was enough to send me to the Internet. Castles don’t disappear in France, I told myself, so it was possible the Cazelles still owned the château and that a descendant might be willing to provide additional information about the family artist—which proved to be the case.

  I thanked Marianne again for allowing me to view the archives, and I wondered aloud whether there were any paintings by Jenny Marie in the château. I had not seen any in the dining room or the salon.

  “Yes, of course. A couple of Parisian scenes, as you’ll see, in the library, and an interesting portrait, as well. You know, she made her living chiefly as a portrait painter, but nowadays no one seems interested in portraits of forgotten people. The little landscapes and park scenes are the popular ones, and every once in a while a new one turns up. We own several. You can see them tomorrow. As for the portrait, it is at the end of the corridor, outside your room.”

  We had passed a dark portrait hanging in the corridor as we came down to dinner, but the hallway had been dim. Now that I knew it had been done by “my” artist, I would want to look at it closely.

  The dinner party broke up shortly after the coffee had been served, and we all headed back to our rooms. As we mounted the stairs, we heard urgent voices floating up from the dining room. The louder Guillaume thundered, the softer and more urgent Marianne’s voice became. I couldn’t make out the words, but the pitch of the argument mounted until it ended with the sound of a palm slapping the table and an exasperated “Oh!”

  “What was that about?” I whispered to Roz, who was by my side.

  “You know, I noticed when we arrived that Marianne seemed prickly. She went through a very bad patch when her husband di
ed, and she’s had her ups and downs. The smallest thing can set her off, like that little contretemps she just had with Guillaume. And then she’ll be perfectly fine again and even sunny and charming like her old self. She just needs some time, I guess. This cooking school is just the thing for her. I’m glad she’s taken it on.” We had reached the landing. “Well, Nora, it’s been a long day. I’m ready for bed.”

  “Me too.”

  The hallway on the second floor leading into the east wing, where the bedrooms lay, was dark. Toby, who had gone ahead, fumbled for a light switch and found a dial on a timer and gave it a good turn. A harsh ceiling light flashed on, hummed audibly, and after a minute shut off automatically to save electricity. Toby gallantly stood by the switch and turned it over several times as we all said our good-nights and sought our respective quarters. When everyone else was behind their doors, I asked Toby to stand at the switch a little longer, so I could get a good look at the portrait, which hung just opposite our door.

  To my shock, I found it repellent. The style was realistic, bitingly so, with harsh shadows raking the face of the sitter. He was a severe-looking man in a tie and jacket in the style of the 1930s, seated at a desk and grasping a sheet of rolled paper in one fist, which rested on a blotter. His wavy blond hair was combed back to show off a high forehead and deep-set eyes. He was staring straight at the viewer. An unforgiving man, used to getting his own way. For all that self-assurance, he seemed young—maybe in his thirties. The background was black, the jacket brown, and the tie green, as was the desk blotter: a bilious color scheme. Who was the subject, I wondered, and why had Jenny Marie Cazelle rendered his portrait with venom? Was he a family member? If so, what had he done to incur her displeasure? At least it was clear why this portrait was hung in a dark corridor rather than in one of the public reception rooms.

  “Mean-looking bastard,” said Toby, making a sour face. I had to agree. The timer light clicked off again, and Toby fumbled with the key to our room. We were both exhausted.