by SUZAN STILL
In the hurricane’s eye was the stillness of death.
§
Two factors saved her. The first was the somewhat sly realization that Javier must be suffering just as badly as she was. They had been together far too long for her to ignore either his emotional pain or the intellectual rigor he would be bringing to the issue of their separation.
He would count up the years she had spent by his side in Chiapas, nursing him back to health after his imprisonment and torture, helping him build Rancho Cielo, and acting as a full partner in both the ranch and in their political activities. He would not forget to add in the sale of her Paris flat to Hill, even though she had made that decision on her own.
Against that summation, in the other pan of the scale, he would throw his own devotion to her. And what else? He had resisted every suggestion of hers that they take vacations, travel a little, relax more. In her more rational moments, she knew he would be deeply troubled by the emptiness of that side of the balance. Not that she wanted him to suffer, of course, but some obstinate place in her at least demanded the fair hearing that she had not gotten.
The second factor was the property—and if she was rigorously honest with herself, it was the fascination with the old house that really saved her. To distract herself, she threw herself into negotiations with the owner of the mas. To her surprise, it was just as the rental agent had suggested. The owner was not only willing but eager to make a deal with her for the sale of the entire property.
She would never forget the first time she entered the old house. The heiress to the estate, an attractive, businesslike young woman who drove over in her BMW from Narbonnes to show Calypso around, was an executive in an international chemical conglomerate. She breezed through the shuttered rooms, throwing out dismissive gestures at all the collected treasures of generations of her family.
“All this old stuff!” she exclaimed, pulling a two-hundred-year-old faience plate from the depths of a kitchen cupboard. “I can have a dealer come in and get it out of your way, if you want.”
Calypso’s heart leapt and it was all she could do to reply calmly, “No, I’d like to include the furnishings and all in whatever price we finally arrive at, if that works for you.”
The young woman wrinkled her nose and shrugged. “That’s fine with me. I’m a minimalist myself. I can’t bear all this fusty old stuff.”
Calypso downplayed her interest slightly, saying, “I’m sure there will be a couple of pieces that I’ll want to keep and I can dispose of the rest.”
She cast her eye over the treasures for whose continued existence in the house she was now responsible. She peeked at Provençal armoires and Louis Quinze and Seize fauteuils. The contents of the house ranged from early to late Baroque with lovely Rococo pieces, to second phase of Neoclassical with its elegant ebony and gilt evocations of Egypt of the Napoleonic era known as Empire. All stood patient and forlorn under dust covers. She felt as if she were negotiating the release of prisoners of war, of entire families that would otherwise be separated at best and demolished at worst.
Finally, over cups of coffee, they settled at the orangerie dining table to talk business. Calypso was not unmindful that, for all her disparaging of the contents of the house, the young woman was more than aware of their value. After an afternoon of haggling, the two women settled on a price.
§
Despite the eagerness of the owner to make the sale, the negotiations for the purchase of the property were more convoluted than Calypso had imagined. She was obliged to engage a notary who could deal with the legal complications. Bureaucratic delays were lengthy and frustrating. Nevertheless, she was able to make a contractual agreement with the seller so that she could begin renovations on the house, even before taking legal ownership.
Luck was with her. She heard about a retired builder in the village, Monsieur Signac, and set about to convince him to take the job. He wandered through the rooms of the house, smacking walls with his fist to demonstrate the plaster falling away in dust, bouncing on the upstairs floors to test the integrity of the wood, humming dejectedly over antiquated wiring, and snorting in disgust at the unorthodox web of lead plumbing pipes.
He spent two days in isolation, making calculations, during which time Calypso paced the property and took to biting her nails. Finally, on the morning of the third day, the builder appeared, papers in hand.
They sat at the garden table, their coffee growing cold, and hammered out an agreement and a price. They shook hands and Monsieur Signac announced that work would begin the following day.
He arrived at seven the next morning with two stout-looking assistants, who immediately began erecting two portable metal sheds on the gravel apron in front of the house, one for a tool shed and one for storage of the furniture. By afternoon, the two young men, Luc and Jean-Pierre, were engaged in moving massive armoires, beds and sideboards into the shed. By evening, both sheds sat filled and locked, their silvery sheen looking strangely alien through the garden growth, against the backdrop of golden stone.
§
The work went on for months. Summer passed in heat and clouds of dust, as walls were rid of rot and replastered. Electricians came in their square vans and rooted in the depths of the house, as did plumbers. A sheet metal specialist raised an ungodly din for weeks, installing ductwork for central heating and air conditioning. A roofing contractor began pitching broken roof tiles into the yard, and barely finished securing the house before the coming of the autumn storms.
A blustery autumn turned into a dismal winter of cold wind and torrential rain. Working under portable lights, the men began the finish work. The parquet of the upstairs floors was stripped in preparation for refinishing. Plaster was smoothed in preparation for painting. Original wallpaper was restored. New faucets were installed over old basins.
A seamstress in the village, Madame Simard, labored over yards of hand-blocked Souleiado fabric making draperies and cushions. Calypso made excursions into the neighboring towns and villages, always returning with some treasure to feather her nest. The pile of boxes and bags grew in the second bedroom of the orangerie.
§
Everything, in fact, was going well except her relationship with Javier. He had, of course, headed straight home to Rancho Cielo after their tiff. At first, he refused to speak with her on the phone, to the consternation of their maid, Maria. “I tell him, Señora, but he no come,” she wailed. “When you come home? We miss you!”
As the weeks went by, he deigned to hold brief conversations, during which they discussed the weather and the present state of the cattle herds and not much more. Calypso was grateful even for that. Both carefully avoided the subject of the new house each was tending into existence on separate continents.
She ended each conversation by saying, “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he would say, but it sounded stiff and not very convincing.
§
One day in early spring, just after the signing of the final papers, Monsieur Signac came to the door of the orangerie with an odd look on his face.
“Excuse me for bothering you, Madame Searcy, but I think you should come see this,” he said without preamble. “I don’t know what to make of it.”
Calypso slipped on a sweater and followed him down the gravel path toward the house. The rains had stopped for a few days and the gardens were just beginning to shake off the winter’s hammering.
“I had Luc working on the floor back in the mud room this morning,” Monsieur Signac said as they hurried along. “I saved that for last because it gets so much traffic from the workmen.”
Calypso nodded. “Yes, I remember discussing that.”
“The tiles were uneven in the back corner, as you may remember. It didn’t matter as long as that big armoire was there. But now it’s very obvious. The tiles there aren’t eighteenth century and don’t match the rest. So I had Luc chisel them out so we can replace them with antique tiles.”
“Good,” Cal
ypso said.
She pulled the sweater tighter about her as the wind kicked up and showered them with pendant droplets from the garden’s canopy.
“But something strange happened.”
Monsieur Signac stopped and looked her in the eye. Calypso stopped, too, and gave him a puzzled look.
“Strange?”
“Yes. The floor under the newer tiles was wood, very badly put in place. So I told Luc to tear it out so we could do the job right.”
“Yes?”
“And he broke through into…well, you should come and see for yourself.” He turned without another word and led them around to the north side of the house with its single, austere back entrance near the west corner. Calypso followed, mystified.
The back door gave into a room about fifteen feet square, with one long window on the west wall. Directly across from the entry was the door leading into the kitchen. The corner to the left of the kitchen door that once had been occupied by a large Provençal armoire was now a gaping hole.
“What on earth?” Calypso exclaimed.
Monsieur Signac handed her a large flashlight.
“We haven’t gone down yet,” he said. “It is your right as owner to descend first.”
“Down?”
Calypso’s voice was dubious. She approached the hole, which breathed a cool and faintly musty draft into the room, and angled the flashlight’s beam into its dusky depths. Starting just beneath what would have been floor level were steep stone steps leading down into darkness.
“Oh my!” She glanced at Monsieur Signac with a wry smile. “It’s a dubious honor you’re offering me.”
“If you like, I will go down first,” the builder offered gallantly.
“No, I think I want to do this myself. Just be listening for screams, please.”
He gave a stiff, ironic bow.
“At your service, Madame.”
§
Monsieur Signac held out his arm for support, as Calypso stepped into the hole and planted her foot on the first step. The flashlight’s beam revealed that the stairs were wedge-shaped and wound downward in a tight spiral. They were also very high, so that after descending three steps Calypso was forced to relinquish Monsieur Signac’s arm, as she was already almost a yard below floor level.
“I’ll just lean against the wall as I go down,” she reassured him.
In three more steps, she had curved from his view and was fully under the existing floor. She was in a narrow shaft not more than nine feet wide, entirely filled by the staircase.
In three more steps, she had completed one whole revolution of the spiral and the sense of depth was beginning to close in on her. Light from above had dimmed nearly to blackness at this level, as she discovered when she accidentally hit the flashlight’s switch against the wall. Instantly she was plunged into darkness and she let out a small shriek of surprise.
“Everything going well?” she heard Monsieur Signac’s voice from above, blunted by the thick stone.
“I’m fine,” she called back, aware that there was a slight edge of hysteria in her voice. “Still descending.”
She groped the switch on and lowered herself a few more steps, feeling like she’d shrunk down to ant size and was lost inside a seashell. Two more steps and the light picked out a landing only three more steps below her. She lowered herself cautiously, her feet scraping on the grit of ages. She was grateful that the stairwell was unusually dry, with no slippery mold or moss to make the descent even more treacherous.
Finally, she reached the bottom and a small landing, barely big enough to contain her. Straight in front of her nose was a heavy wooden door, arched at the top, with a handsome, hand-forged iron latch. She reached eagerly for it and then hesitated.
What if there were a chamber of horrors inside? An old prison cell, where people were left manacled to the wall until they went mad from darkness and isolation and then died? She laid her hand against the cold metal and asked herself if she had the courage to face the worst—knowing full well that her curiosity would not let her wait much longer.
At last, she depressed the latch and pushed against the door with her shoulder, realizing that the opening was so low she would have to duck. With surprising ease, the door swung inward and Calypso crouched through into a low room.
She swung the flashlight’s beam. She was in a round space perhaps twenty feet in diameter, with a vaulted stone ceiling that barely cleared her head and then sloped down to half that height near the walls. She recognized the construction as very old—possibly Romanesque, making it roughly a thousand years old, or even Roman, which would mean it was around two thousand years old. She had expected the space to be dank and slimy and was impressed that it was watertight and dry.
The room was empty except for a central mass slightly taller than she was and covered with a linen sheet grown yellow with age and dust. Teepee-shaped, it sagged into the crevices of what lay beneath with finality, as if it had been dipped in plaster, and had ripped in several places from its own weight. Clearly, it had been undisturbed for a very long time.
She tried to lift the sheet from the object it covered, which sat, apparently, on a table or dais. The covering was stiff and resistant, however. It was more the texture of canvas, she realized as she tugged at it. Wrestling with it only covered her in a landslide of cascading dust and grit. Coughing, she backed off, thinking she would have to return with a stout pair of shears to cut the covering away.
Running her light over the mound, her eye caught the corner of a table with an elegant Louis Quinze leg and a glint of metal, where she had dislodged the right-hand edge of the tarp. Her flashlight illuminated a whirling cloud of dust motes as she stepped forward again and slid her hand beneath the edge of the fabric, across what felt cold and smooth like a marble tabletop. It met with a solid rectangle, which she dragged out and lifted, then quickly lowered to the floor as it was very heavy.
She squatted and ran her light over the object. It was a box about a foot long and five or six inches wide, with a metal framework covered in gold work and antique cut gems. The sides and top of the box were of thick, beveled rock crystal. It must be a reliquary, she reasoned, one of those precious containers in which the bones of a saint lay in honor.
She was stunned by its beauty and richness but even more by something else. It took her a moment to realize it. The reliquary was the same size and shape and of a sumptuousness equal to the now-lost locket box.
§
Calypso laid the flashlight on the stone floor and slipped out of her sweater. Wrapping the box in it so that nothing showed, she tucked it under her arm, took up the light again and stood. With one last look around to make sure she hadn’t missed anything, she ducked back out of the vaulted room and closed the door.
Going up the spiral stairs was harder than coming down. Her knees protested against the high steps and she had a hard time keeping her balance with the flashlight in one hand and the box tucked under the other elbow, the way a running back would snug a football. Tottering and scraping, she made her way to the top where Monsieur Signac waited, staring worriedly into the darkness.
“Ah, Madame! I was just about to come down looking for you!”
“Thank you, Monsieur Signac. It’s not so far down, really, but it’s very steep.”
She handed the flashlight to him and took his proffered hand so that he could pull her up the final three steps.
In answer to his questioning look she said, “There’s a door at the bottom, leading into a Roman or Romanesque vault. There’s nothing of interest there except this box.” She waved the sweater-wrapped parcel. “I’ll clean it up and let you see it later.”
“What is your pleasure regarding this stairwell, Madame? Shall we put the new floor over it?”
“No. What I would like you to do is to create a door that is flush with the floor and covered with the same tiles. And I’d like a flush-mounted lock on it.”
“Very well, Madame. I can do that.”
“Oh! And” she turned back as if it were an afterthought, “please don’t go down there or let Luc or Jean-Pierre go down. It’s very steep and I don’t want the insurance liability.”
“As you wish, Madame Searcy,” and he bowed stiffly with a slightly ironic smile.
§
Calypso surprised herself with her protectiveness of the newly found space. As she hurried through the windy garden toward the orangerie, she wondered at her response. Whoever originally had floored-over the stairs must have done so for a reason. Like a detective, she didn’t want the scene contaminated until she could understand more about what had occurred there.
The orangerie was still warm, although the fire had died down. As she stepped into the salon and laid her parcel on the table, she shivered, pulling a shawl from the back of her armchair and throwing it over her shoulders.
Then, like a surgeon unwrapping bandages, she began the careful extrication of the box from its knitted wrappings. Prongs holding the jewels caught in the yarn and the little metal legs with their lion’s paw feet were poking rudely into the knit. It took several minutes before the crystal container stood in the light of day on the marble tabletop.
She went for a damp cloth to wipe the crystal clean. As she did, the beauty of the box became more and more remarkable. Now she could see that the interior was lined with crimson silk, although to her relief, no saint’s bones appeared to be present.
Finally, she put her thumb to the delicate clasp and released it. Raising the lid with great care, fearful of breaking a hinge, she surveyed the interior. The red silk lining was striated with minute tears, all down its length. Only one thing was contained within—a small piece of paper, rolled like a scroll. Gingerly, she picked it up between thumb and finger and then lowered the lid.
Going to her desk, she placed the scroll on the desktop and began with careful fingers to unroll it. Although its edges were dog-eared and it was plainly of some antiquity, the paper was surprisingly supple. Soon writing in an elegant hand, in sepia ink, began to appear. Unrolled, the entirety was about eight inches long. She weighted it with books, top and bottom and along the side edges to keep it from curling up again and went for her magnifying glass.