by Kate Mosse
The log pile against the scullery wall diminished. Isolde showed little sign of recovering her mental faculties, although the baby grew and flourished inside her. Day and night, in her chamber on the first floor of the Domaine de la Cade, a good fire crackled and spat in the hearth. The hours of sunlight were short, barely warming the sky before dark fell over the land once again.
Enslaved by grief, Isolde stood yet at a crossroads between the world from which she had taken temporary leave and the undiscovered country beyond. The voices that were with her always whispered to her that if she fared forwards she would find those she loved waiting for her in sunlit glades. Anatole would be there, bathed in gentle, welcoming light. There was nothing to fear. In moments of what she believed were grace, she longed to die. To be with him. But the spirit of his child wishing to be born was too strong.
On a dull and soundless afternoon, with nothing to mark it from those days that had come before or those that were to follow, Isolde felt sensation return to her delicate limbs. At first, it was her fingers. So subtle as to be almost mistaken for something else. An automatic response, not one of purpose. A tingling at the tips and beneath her almond-shaped nails. Then, a twitching of her pale feet beneath the covers. Then, a pricking on the skin at the base of her neck.
She moved her hand and the hand obeyed.
Isolde heard a noise. Not, this time, the ceaseless whispering that was always with her, but the normal, domestic sound of a chair leg against the floor. For the first time in months, it was not distorted or amplified or subdued by time or light, but knocking on her consciousness without refraction.
She sensed someone leaning over her, the warmth of breath on her face.
‘Madama?’
She allowed her eyes to flutter open. She heard the intake of breath, then feet running and a door flung open, shouting in the passageway, coils of sound winding up from the hall below, growing in intensity, growing in certainty.
‘Madomaisèla Léonie! Madama s’éveille !’
Isolde blinked at the brightness. More noise, then the touch of cold fingers taking her hand. Slowly she turned her head to one side and saw her niece’s thoughtful young face looking down at her.
‘Léonie?’
She felt her fingers being squeezed. ‘I am here.’
‘Léonie . . .’ Isolde’s voice faltered. ‘Anatole, he ...’ Isolde’s convalescence was slow. She walked, raised a fork to her mouth, slept, but her physical progress was unsteady and the light had gone from her grey eyes. Grief had detached her from herself. Everything she thought and saw, felt and smelt touched chords of painful remembrance.
Most evenings, she sat with Léonie in the drawing room talking of Anatole, her slim white fingers resting on her growing stomach. Léonie would listen while Isolde recited the whole story of their love affair, from the instant of their first meeting, to the decision to grasp at happiness and the hoax at the Cimetière de Montmartre, the short-lived joy of their intimate wedding in Carcassonne on the eve of the great storm.
But however many times Isolde told the story, the ending remained the same. A once-upon-a-time, a fairytale romance, but cheated of its happy ending.
The winter passed, at last. The snow melted, although by February a crisp frost still covered the morning in sharp whiteness.
At the Domaine de la Cade, Léonie and Isolde remained locked together in their sorrow, bereaved, watching the shadows on the lawns. They had few visitors, save for Audric Baillard and Madame Bousquet, who, despite having lost the estate on Jules Lascombe’s marriage, proved to be both a generous friend and a kind neighbour.
Monsieur Baillard, from time to time, brought news of the police hunt for Victor Constant, who had disappeared from the Hôtel de la Reine in Rennes-les-Bains under cover of dark on the night of the 31st October and had not been seen since in France.
The police had enquired for him in the various health spas and asylums specialising in treating men of his condition, but met with no luck. Attempts were made by the state to seize his considerable assets. There was a price on his head. Even so, there were no sightings, no rumours.
On the 25th March, by unhappy coincidence the anniversary of the Isolde’s false burial in the Cimitière de Montmartre, Léonie received an official letter from Inspector Thouron. He informed her that since they believed Constant had fled the country, perhaps over the border into Andorra or Spain, they were scaling down the manhunt. He reassured her that the fugitive would be arrested and guillotined should he ever return to France and hoped, therefore, that Madame and Mademoiselle Vernier would feel no alarm that Constant would concern them further.
At the tail-end of March, when inclement conditions had kept them inside for some days, Léonie found herself taking up her pen to write to Anatole’s former friend and neighbour, Achille Debussy. She knew he was now going under the name of Claude Debussy, although she could not bring herself to address him so.
The correspondence both filled an absence in her confined life and, more important for her fractured heart, helped keep a link with Anatole. Achille told her what was happening in the streets and boulevards she and Anatole had once called home, gossip about who was in conflict with whom, all the petty rivalries at the Académie, the authors in favour or disgraced, the artists fighting, the composers snubbed, the scandals and the affairs.
Léonie did not care for a world that was now so distant, so closed to her, but it reminded her of conversations with Anatole. Sometimes, in the old days, when he returned home after a night out with Achille at Le Chat Noir, he would come into her room, throw himself into the old armchair at the foot of her bed, and she, with her covers drawn up to her chin, would listen to his stories. Debussy wrote mostly of himself, covering page after page with his spidery writing. Léonie did not mind. It took her thoughts away from her own predicament. She smiled when he wrote of his Sunday morning visits to the church of Saint-Gervais to listen to the Gregorian chant with his atheistic friends, sitting with their defiant backs to the altar, thereby offending both the congregation and the officiating priest.
Léonie could not leave Isolde and, even had she been free to travel, the thought of returning to Paris was too painful. It was too soon. At her request, Achille and Gaby Dupont made regular visits to the cimitière de Passy in the 16th arrondissement to lay flowers on the grave of Marguerite Vernier. The tomb, paid for by Du Pont as a last act of generosity, was close to that of the painter Edouard Manet, Achille wrote. A peaceful, shaded spot. Léonie thought her mother would be content to lie among such company.
The weather changed as April came in, arriving like a general upon the battlefield. Aggressive, loud, bellicose. Squalls of scudding clouds skated across the peaks of the mountains. The days grew a little longer, the mornings a little lighter. Marieta got out her needles and threads. She put generous pleats into Isolde’s chemises and let out the panels on her skirts to accommodate her changing shape.
Purple, white and pink valley flowers pushed tentative shoots through the crusted rim of the earth, raising their faces to the light. The smatterings of colour, like dabs of paint dripped from a brush, grew stronger, more frequent, vibrating in the green of the borders and the paths.
May tiptoed shyly in, hinting at the promise of longer summer days to come, of dappled sunlight on still water. In the streets of Rennes-les-Bains, Léonie often ventured to visit Monsieur Baillard or met with Madame Bousquet to take afternoon tea in the salon of the Hôtel de la Reine. Outside the modest townhouses, canaries sang in cages now hung out of doors. The lemon and orange trees were in blossom, their sharp scents filling the streets. On every corner, early fresh fruits brought over the mountains from Spain were sold from wooden carts.
The Domaine de la Cade was suddenly glorious beneath an endless blue sky. The bright June sun struck the gleaming white peaks of the Pyrenees. Summer, at last, had come.
From Paris, Achille wrote that Maître Maeterlinck had granted permission to set his new drama, Pelléas et Mélis
ande, to music. He also sent a copy of Zola’s La Débâcle, which was set during the summer of 1870 and the Franco-Prussian War. He enclosed a personal note saying he knew it would have been of interest to Anatole, as it was to him, as sons of convicted Communards. Léonie struggled with the novel, but appreciated the sentiment that had caused Achille to make her so thoughtful a gift.
She did not allow her thoughts to return to the Tarot cards. They were tied up with the grim events of Hallowe’en, and although she could not persuade the Abbé Saunière to talk to her of those things he had seen or done in the service of her uncle, she remembered Monsieur Baillard’s warnings that the demon, Asmodeus, walked the valleys when times were troubled. Although she did not believe such superstitions, or so she told herself, she did not wish to risk provoking a recurrence of such terror.
She packed away her incomplete set of drawings. They were too painful a reminder of her brother and her mother. Le Diable and La Tour were left unfinished. Nor did Léonie return to the glade ringed with the wild juniper. Its proximity to the clearing where the duel had taken place, where Anatole had fallen, made her heart crack. Too much so to contemplate ever walking that way.
Isolde’s pains started early on the morning of Friday 24th June, the feast day of Saint John the Baptist.
Monsieur Baillard, with his hidden networks of friends and comrades, secured the services of a sage-femme from his native village of Los Seres. Both she and the lying-in nurse arrived in good time for the birth.
By lunchtime, Isolde was considerably advanced. Léonie bathed her forehead with cold cloths and opened the windows to let into the chamber the fresh air and the scent of the juniper and honeysuckle from the gardens below. Marieta dabbed her lips with a sponge soaked in sweet white wine and honey.
By teatime, and without complications, Isolde had been delivered of a boy, in good health and with an impressive pair of lungs.
Léonie hoped that the birth would mark the beginning of Isolde’s return to full health. That she would become less listless, less fragile, less separate from the world around her. Léonie - indeed the whole household - expected that a child, Anatole’s child, would bring with it the love and purpose Isolde so needed.
But a black shadow descended over Isolde some three days after the birth. She made enquiries as to her son’s condition and welfare, but was struggling to save herself from falling into the same distant, stricken state that had afflicted her in the immediate aftermath of Anatole’s murder. Her tiny son, so much the mirror of his father, served more to remind her of what she had lost than give reason to continue.
The services of a wet nurse were employed.
As the summer progressed, Isolde showed no signs of improvement. She was kindly, did her duty by her son when called upon to do so, but otherwise lived in the world of her mind, persecuted endlessly by the voices in her head.
Where Isolde was distant, Léonie fell in love with her nephew without reservation or condition. Louis-Anatole was a sunny-natured baby, with Anatole’s black hair and long lashes, rimming startling grey eyes, inherited from his mother. In the delight of the child’s company, Léonie forgot, sometimes for hours at a time, the tragedy that had overtaken them.
As the fearsomely hot July and August days marched on, from time to time Léonie would awake in the morning with a sense of hope, a lightness in her step, before she remembered and the shadows fell over her again. But her love and her determination to keep any harm from coming to Anatole’s son helped her to recover her spirits.
CHAPTER 89
Autumn 1892 tipped into spring 1893, and still Constant did not return to the Domaine de la Cade. Léonie allowed herself to believe he was dead, although she would have been grateful for confirmation of it.
August of 1893 was, like the previous year, as hot and dry as the African deserts. The drought was followed by torrential inundations throughout the Languedoc, washing away sections of land on the plains, revealing long-hidden caves and cachettes beneath the mud.
Achille Debussy remained a regular correspondent. In December he wrote with Christmas greetings and to tell Léonie that the Société Nationale was to present in concert a performance of L’Après-Midi d’un Faune, a new composition intended as the first of a suite of three pieces. As she read his naturalistic descriptions of the faun in his glade, Léonie was put in mind of the clearing within which she had, two years before, discovered the deck of cards. For an instant she was tempted to retrace her steps to the spot and see if the Tarot was still there.
She did not do so.
Rather than the boulevards and avenues of Paris, her world continued to be bounded by the beech woods to the east, the long driveway to the north, the lawns to the south. She was sustained only by the love of one little boy and her affection for the beautiful but damaged woman for whom she had promised to care.
Louis-Anatole became a favourite with the town and the household, who nicknamed him pichon, little one. He was mischievous, but always charming. He was full of questions, more like his aunt than his dead father, but capable of listening also. As he grew taller, he and Léonie walked the pathways and woods of the Domaine de la Cade. Or else he was taken fishing by Pascal, who also taught him to swim in the lake. From time to time, Marieta would permit him to scrape the mixing bowl and lick the wooden spoon when she had been cooking - raspberry soufflé, chocolate puddings. He would balance on the old three-legged stool set hard against the rim of the kitchen table, one of the maid’s crisp white aprons reaching down to his ankles, and Marieta, standing behind him to be sure he didn’t fall, would teach him to knead dough for bread.
When Léonie took him to visit in Rennes-les-Bains, his favourite treat was to sit at the pavement café which Anatole had so loved. With his tumbling curls, white ruffed shirt and nut-brown velvet trousers drawn tight at the knee, he sat with his legs hanging down from the high wooden stool. He drank cherry syrup or freshly pressed apples, and ate chocolate creams.
On his third birthday, Madame Bousquet presented Louis-Anatole with a bamboo fishing rod. The following Christmas, Maître Fromilhague sent a box of tin soldiers to the house and presented the compliments of the season to Léonie.
He was a regular visitor, too, to the house of Audric Baillard, who told him stories of medieval times and the honour of the chevaliers who had defended the independence of the Midi against the northern invaders. Rather than plunge the boy into the pages of sooty history books gathering dust in the library of the Domaine de la Cade, Monsieur Baillard brought the past to life. Louis-Anatole’s favourite story was the siege of Carcassonne in 1209 and the brave men, women, even children little older than he who had fled to the hidden villages of the Haute Vallée.
When he was four years old, Audric Baillard gave him a replica of a medieval battle sword, its hilt engraved and carved with his initials. Léonie purchased for him from Quillan, with the assistance of one of Pascal’s many cousins, a small copper pony, chestnut with a thick white mane and tail and a white flash on its nose. For the duration of that hot summer, Louis-Anatole was a chevalier, fighting the French or victorious at the joust, knocking tin cans from a wooden fence set up by Pascal for the purpose on the rear lawns. From the drawing room window, Léonie would watch, remembering how, as a little girl, she had watched Anatole run and hide and climb trees in the Parc Monceau with much the same sense of awe and envy.
Louis-Anatole also showed a marked talent for music, the money wasted on keyboard lessons for Anatole in his youth paying dividends in his son. Léonie engaged a piano teacher from Limoux. Once a week, the professor would rumble up the long drive in the dog cart, with his white neckerchief and pinned stocks and untrimmed beard, and for two hours would drill Louis-Anatole in five-finger exercises and scales. Each week, as he took his departure, he would press Léonie to make the boy practise with glasses of water balanced upon the backs of his hands to keep the touch. Léonie and Louis-Anatole would nod and, for a day or two following, he would attempt to do so. But then the
water would spill, soaking Louis-Anatole’s velvet breeches or staining the wide hems of Léonie’s skirts, and they would laugh and play noisy duets instead.
When he was alone, often the boy would tiptoe to the piano and experiment. Léonie would stand on the landing at the top of the stairs, unobserved, and listen to the gentle, haunting melodies his child’s fingers could create. Wherever he started, most frequently he would find his way to the key of A minor. And then Léonie would think of the music she had stolen so long ago from the sepulchre, concealed still in the piano stool, and wonder if she should take it out for him. But fearing the power of it and its actions upon the place itself, she stayed her hand.
Throughout this time, Isolde lived in a twilight world, drifting through the rooms and the passageways of the Domaine de la Cade like a wraith. She spoke little, she was kind to her son and much loved by the servants. Only when she looked into Léonie’s emerald eyes did something deeper spark inside her. Then, for a fleeting second, grief and memory would blaze in her eyes, before a cloak of darkness came down over them once more. Some days were better than others. On occasion, Isolde would emerge from her shadows, like the sun coming out from behind the cloud. But then the voices would start once more and she would clasp her hands over her ears and weep, and Marieta would gently lead her back to the privacy and half-light of her chamber until better times returned. The periods of peace grew shorter. The darkness around her grew deeper. Anatole was never far from her mind. For his part, Louis-Anatole accepted his mother as she was - he had never known her any different.