by SUZAN STILL
Maria-Elena disembarked and stood bedazzled for a moment, orienting herself in this strange setting. In the center of the courtyard, surrounded by a wheel of geometrically laid-out herbs, was an elaborate wrought iron wellhead surmounting an old stone well.
Beyond and encircling were the sheer stone cliffs of the chateau itself. It was part invincible fortification and part aesthetic fantasy. She had expected a fairytale castle with round, conical-roofed towers but discovered instead an austere rectangle of immense weight and proportion, teased by latter-day Baroque whimsy and elegance.
Her wondering gaze was drawn to a door beneath the square north tower where, to her surprise and embarrassment, she now spied the Count. “Oh! Monsieur le Comte! Please forgive my rudeness!” She blushed deeply. How many times in her life had she been admonished never—never!—to stare!
The Count came forward to take her elbow and guide her into his home. “Think nothing of it. As I recall, Amalia, too, stopped to ogle when she first arrived. I’ve grown up here, so it seems not in the least remarkable to me. I’m sure if I were ever to visit Mexico, I, too, should stare. They say there are parrots in the trees, quite wild—is that true?”
With utter grace, he ushered her into the loveliest of rooms. She could not help exclaiming over its wonderful proportions, its walls of boiserie painted soft gray-green and its bank of tall double doors that looked onto what, in spring, would be a flower garden, now a tangle of frost-bent stalks.
“So beautiful!” Maria-Elena murmured.
“Ah, yes. This part was one of the most recently added, you see. It was designed by Louis Le Vau, modeled on his work at Vaux le Vicomte, which was, as I’m sure you know, the model for Versailles. Rooms of this sort—the long windows, the boiserie, the high ceilings with heavy crown molding—have become rather the standard and cliché of French interiors, I suppose.”
He handed her into a brocade fauteuil. “And they do have a pleasing balance of height to width to length that seems to soothe the soul. Based on the Golden Mean or some such thing, I’m told. I don’t know—I never studied it. Too busy with the halberds, you know,” he said with a wink.
This companionable downplaying of the grandeur of his home relaxed Maria-Elena, and as they chatted before a fire that burned cheerfully beneath the marble mantle, she allowed her eyes to sweep the room again and again, taking in the Aubusson carpet, rich furniture in various antique styles, and family portraits of terribly important- and staunch-looking men and soberly elegant women. Late afternoon winter light laid a flood-tide of gold across parquet floors, the fruitwood fire popped serenely, and beeswax and lavender oil, rubbed for generations into the frames of the furniture, exhaled a sweet and faintly feral scent in the warmth.
Beside the Count’s chair, its long slender head lying on its equally elegantly attenuated feet, lay a dog whose gray muzzle bespoke its advanced age. The Count saw her eye fall upon the creature.
“This is Saladin, ma chèrie.” The Count let his own long, slender hand drift down to the dog’s head. “He, like myself, is the last of a long, long line of his family. His grandparents-past-memory were two of six salukis, three breeding pairs brought back from Arabia by one of my ancestors returning from the Crusades.
“One of my ancestors. From one of the Crusades. There were so many over the centuries, and a member of the MontMaran family or two seems to have attended each of them. We were ever punctilious about important social occasions, I fear,” he said with a small, apologetic smile.
Soon, the Count rang the bell for his housekeeper to take Maria-Elena to her upstairs room. “Madeleine will show you the way. There was a time, believe me, when I would not have relinquished the sacred honor of seeing a beautiful young woman to her room,” he said with a glimmer in his eyes. “But now, my knees can’t take the stairs, let alone kneel to draw a lady her bath!”
Maria-Elena blushed again, recognizing this not as idle gallantry but a challenge which, twenty years earlier, he would surely have undertaken. It occurred to her to wonder how many generations of Mansart women might have been deflowered in this castle by the gallant and charming Count. This, too, made her blush and she exited the room behind the housekeeper, with her head down in embarrassment.
“Well, you may wonder!” le Comte called gaily after her, deducing her thoughts. “Supper at eight sharp. Don’t be late! Take a good rest and we’ll talk all night.”
§
When she came downstairs, promptly at eight, the Count was waiting for her in the drawing room. “My lovely Maria-Elena!” he exclaimed, coming to her side and taking her elbow. “The dining room seems so…excessive for just two people, so I’ve had Madeleine set us a small table here by the fire.”
He shepherded her to the fireplace and pulled out a delicately carved chair for her. She slipped in at a table simply but elegantly set with white linen cloth, monogrammed napkins, and crystal wine glasses. Two tapers burned in gilt bronze candlesticks in the center.
Shortly, Madeleine came silently in, bearing the first course. “Leek and sorrel soup,” said the Count, removing the lid to the tureen with a flourish. He ladled the creamy green liquid into her bowl, as her eyes caressed the exquisite painting of birds and flowers in rich polychrome and gold on the old Sèvres tureen.
“We’re getting along nicely, aren’t we,” the Count suddenly remarked.
Maria-Elena was embarrassed and had no idea how to answer, so she fell back on the gracious habits instilled in her by the elder Mansart women. “But Monsieur le Comte, how could one not have a lovely time with one so gracious as yourself?”
Henri de MontMaran threw back his head and laughed, a sound still hearty despite his ninety-plus years. “Oh, non-non-non-non-non, ma chèrie, do not be alarmed. It’s just that you sounded exactly like your grandmother, when she spoke those very words over seventy years ago! I knew then that the Mansart women were gently reared and not easily dismayed, and I see nothing has changed!”
The meal proceeded in a light-hearted vein. At its conclusion, Maria-Elena, feeling by now relaxed and a little giddy from the wine, was again guided by the Count into a smaller room walled with books. Here, too, a bright fire awaited them and the Count seated her near it.
Saladin, the ancient saluki, came in just as the Count was about to close the door. Head down, his long toenails clicking on the glowing parquet, the dog came to the fire and with a groan, lowered himself to the rug beside his master’s chair.
“Now, ma chèrie”—the Count began, settling himself with only slightly less stiffness—“we have passed our first evening quite pleasantly, and I should let you trundle off to bed. But you must know that the true vice of the very old is talk and also that we cannot sleep well at night. These two factors make a lethal combination for one’s poor, captive guest, I fear.” He smiled sweetly at her and then leaned forward, capturing and holding her eyes with a mesmerizing stare.
Maria-Elena was suddenly aware of him in a very unexpected and uncomfortable way. A mysterious power exuded from him that had been masked completely by his former charm. His eyes glimmered in the caverns of their sockets and his voice was commanding.
“Rather than sending you off to sweet dreams, I must hold you prisoner here awhile. We have a great deal to discuss, you and I.”
Maria-Elena gazed at him in fascination, studying the long, thin nose, its bridge bent aristocratically, the high cheekbones and fine, round brow that made him, even in great age, a handsome and imposing man. To what could he be referring, she wondered? Was he somehow aware of her difficulties with Grand-Mère? Had he read between the lines of her few comments about the situation?
A cold wind rattled the panes of the long windows. A draft laid itself across her lap in an icy blanket and made the fire leap and dance. She was suddenly aware that it was winter—true winter such as was never experienced in Mexico—and that she was in a faraway land, in the home of a man she knew and trusted only from tradition. She felt the small hairs along her arm prickle
and rise, perhaps not from the chill air.
Madeleine entered silently through the high paneled door, bearing a silver tray with demitasses of black coffee, a decanter of Cointreau, and two tiny, gold-rimmed glasses. She set it on a small tea table beside the Count and went wordlessly to pull the drapes.
Maria-Elena was aware of ambient sounds as if they were words spoken with deepest sincerity—the thin trickle of liqueur into crystal, the rough slide of wooden curtain rings across the iron rod, the soft flapping of velvet as Madeleine flounced drapes together to seal out the draft, the snapping of sparks, the soft, irregular breathing of Saladin, and the muted click as Madeleine departed. And behind it all, the thin, high wail of wind, blowing up for a storm.
“I’m afraid I don’t know to what you are referring, Monsieur le Comte,” she said at last, in a small voice. “What matter in particular must we discuss?”
His elbows on the arms of his chair, he held his small glass in both hands, observing her through it as a child might look through a crystal prism, delighting in distortion. He remained silent for quite a long time, during which Maria-Elena was acutely aware that they sat in a small cave of firelight, while the rest of the room was curtained in deep shadow. An eerie sensation again covered her with a chill.
“You did not know, of course,” he began suddenly, “that you are sleeping tonight in my wife’s room? No, to be sure, you would have no way of knowing that. But I want you to know that you are the first of the Mansart women to be accorded that honor.” He continued to stare at her in a way that made her distinctly uncomfortable.
“And you would know little of my wife, of course. Her brief transit through my life fell between your grandmother’s sojourn here and your Aunt Isobella’s, which came a decade or so later. Dearly, as I have loved the Mansart women, I have not spoken of my wife to any one of them—or to anyone else for that matter—these many years. One does not complain of the strokes of ill-fate. But now I feel the necessity to speak of this matter.” He hunched his shoulders as if he, too, felt a chill, and settled deeper into his chair.
“Did you know that I had, as well, a son? Perhaps your grandmother has told you? And that he was killed in the War? One of those brave and foolhardy young Resistance fighters, betrayed by his own countryman—a baker, I believe—into the hands of the Gestapo. Shot at dawn at la Conciergerie, I’m told.” He looked down to his lap, his lips twisted in an agonized grimace.
“You are wondering why I am telling you these things, I know,” he continued, his voice hoarse with emotion. “Is he senile, you are wondering? Is he besotted with the curse of the aged, to endlessly dredge up the past? But no…” his voice fell almost to a whisper, “there is still reason to my story, chère Maria-Elena, so please hear me out, because I am about to lay a tremendous burden on you. And at the same time, to gift you with the rarest of gifts.”
He pushed himself from his chair, threw a log on the fire, and went to fuss with the draperies at windows now rattling incessantly in the rising wind. Assured that no gap in the rich blue velvet was allowing a draft, the Count returned to his chair and filled their glasses again.
“It would be usual, you see, for me to tell these things to my own child…” His voice broke and he waited, head down, to regain his composure. “But as we have seen, I have none.”
He sipped his Cointreau. “Or perhaps to some relative. But all mine are dead. Except for a small lot of them that took off for America during the Revolution, fearing for their heads. They landed in Indianapolis—a place one can scarcely imagine, let alone inhabit. They sent home once, I think it was in the eighteen-fifties, for vines of wine grapes. They had a wastrel son who intended to begin a vineyard in California, where he had gone to the Gold Rush.
“My grandfather sent them, of course, all wrapped and crated. They went around Cape Horn in a sailing ship and actually reached San Francisco alive. For all I know, they may be growing there yet.”
He paused to poke at the fire with an ornately wrought poker. “After that, we lost track of them. Oh, we’ve received various announcements of marriages, births, commencements, and deaths over the decades. Announcements, I might add, which are no longer handwritten but purchased from stationery companies, with lines to be filled in with pertinent information. I fear this branch of the family, therefore, has succumbed to the American way, as it is called, and cannot be entrusted with what we are about to reveal.”
Maria-Elena listened, bemused. How interesting to speak of the generations of one’s family in the multiple we, as if each generation were party to and answerable for the decisions and deeds of all preceding and succeeding generations. She wondered if she unconsciously yielded such total identification to her own family.
The Count continued to lay out his argument: “Non! I distinctly feel that this information is for someone who comes of generations of careful breeding and rearing. Rarefied genetic stock. Call me a snob. Tell me I am unbearably ultraconservative. This has nothing to do with politics nor the rights of the poor.”
He leaned forward from the shadows of his wing chair and peered at her. “I understand from your Grand-mère that you are psychic? Is that true?” His eyes glowed within their pools of shadow as he stared at her.
“Oh, oui, monsieur!” she stammered. “It is true. Since childhood, I have had dreams. In them, a beautiful lady comes to me and tells me things. The information is always, it proves, correct. I can’t take credit for knowing what I know. It is she who tells me. But I suppose you would call me mildly psychic as a consequence.”
The Count nodded his head slightly in approval, so that Maria-Elena hastened to add, “But I must tell you that these dreams are extremely rare. And as I become older, they are increasingly so.”
The Count regarded her now with a fixity that was almost trancelike. The atmosphere between them, within the little circle of firelight, was charged with potent expectation and a mysterious immanence. Saladin groaned at his master’s feet and shifted restlessly.
“As you may know,” the Count began again, “my family is extremely ancient. We have been present for every major turn of French history at least since Charlemagne’s grandfather was walking this Gallic soil. What you do not know, because no one outside the family has ever been allowed to know, is that we have a family secret even more ancient than our lineage. And because there is now no one left in this family to receive this secret, I am passing it along to the Mansart clan with my blessings,” he said with a momentary surge of his former charm. “So bear with me, while I tell you a story that will amaze you…Do you need coffee?”
“Coffee? Oh, heavens, non! How could I possibly drowse through this?” Her heart felt swollen with anticipation and curiosity. Only vaguely in the back of her mind, where unpleasantries so often are deposited, did she wonder if this gift the Count was about to bestow were something she might actually want and not, at some future date, regret possessing.
§
The Story of Le Comte Henri Charlemagne de MontMaran
“As you may know,” the Count began, sinking so deeply into his chair that Maria-Elena could no longer see his face and so perceived his voice to be issuing from a shadowy void within its wings, “there was once a region in the south of France referred to as the Languedoc, because the tongue—langue—of its people pronounced the word ‘yes’—oui—as oc. The area was ruled over by the Count of Provence, and the speech of one of his vassals, upon his arrival in Paris, would be almost unintelligible in that more northerly city.
“I am telling you this because it is difficult for us in this modern age of relative stability to imagine the divisiveness of the thirteenth century, which is where my tale begins. It seems that every petty chieftain who could raise a scruffy army could set himself up as a count or a duke.
“Consequently, the waging of war was endless. City fought against city and duchy against duchy. If they were lucky enough to have a strong leader who could unite a few of these warring areas, then there would be war of nat
ion against nation.
“It was a terrible time. The clergy alone, and a few of the nobility, could read and write. The vast majority of the populace existed in the starkest ignorance and superstition and were really little elevated above the beasts they tended.
“It was against this flood tide of desperate ignorance and violence that a strange phenomenon arose in the Languedoc region. A group of people deliberately separated themselves from the Catholic church. These heretics, as people deemed them, called themselves the Cathari, which simply means ‘Pure Ones’.
“Disgusted by the many degeneracies of the church, these people sought after holiness by attempting to dispense entirely with the material side of life. In the extremes of their belief, many refused to marry, giving rise to terrible rumors of debauch among them, which I believe modern scholars have largely refuted. They were, as well, vegetarians, refusing to eat flesh, eggs, or cheese.”
Maria-Elena, already engrossed in the tale, gazed into the fire, quietly sipping her Cointreau. Like the rising wind outside, the Count’s deep voice, lubricated by eloquence, seemed an element of eternity.
“Now, you would think that such people would be so completely harmless and inoffensive that no one would bother them and that they would be able to live long and peacefully, communing with God. But like most true innocents, they failed to consider the power of politics in the larger world over their very small and local existence.
“Now, the First Crusade occurred in 1094 or thereabouts. It had been very successful in uniting the squabbling clans of Europe and in directing their warlike energies against a common enemy in the Holy Land. So after Urban the Second, succeeding Popes used the same ploy when their political fortunes seemed shaky or when it suited other of their purposes.
“Pope Innocent the Third—and if ever a man were misnamed it was he—was the head of the church at the time of which I speak. And he had not one, but three Crusades at his command at the opening of the thirteenth century. These were directed, however, not against the Infidel in the Levant but against the inhabitants of Europe, for the pope now applied the name ‘crusade’ to all wars in which he was interested.