She was obviously too young to understand grief. That must be it, Ned thought. He swallowed some coffee and found it hot enough to burn his mouth.
The gasp he made after he had swallowed it attracted her attention again, and she smiled. “It makes me feel safe, though, knowing that you will be able to protect us.”
“Protect you?” Ned was still trying to breathe in cool air. “Protect you from what?”
“Why, from the curse, of course.” She took another bite.
Ned closed his mouth, then opened it, then closed it again before he finally spoke. “Delphine, it may be amusing to joke about it, but you know that there is no such thing as a curse.”
“Of course there is. How else do you explain it?”
“Explain what?”
She looked at him as if he were the simpleminded one. “Ever since the family fled the chateau during the Revolution, there has been nothing but tragedy. The vicomte’s two brothers died in the fighting. Then on their way to England, his father died. When the vicomte married, his wife died giving birth to their son. That son died even before his own son was born. And that son died when Antoine was an infant. Brothers and sons all died before they were thirty. And his sister? She had only a daughter. And that daughter has only daughters who have only daughters. What can it be but a curse?”
She returned to her croissant with a shrug, and nothing Ned could say made any impression.
Mme. d’Hivers caught up with Marguerite in the hallway, and put her arm around the girl’s shoulders and held her until her shudders eased.
Taking a deep breath, Marguerite lifted her head and huffed a sigh. “I am such a fool—I should know better than to let her disturb me. I know I promised my mother that I would take care of her, but sometimes… It’s just that every now and then I suddenly cannot bear it.”
“Pftt. Since when can we control our feelings to such an extent? One would have to be a saint to keep from being distressed by that one from time to time.”
“Thank you for that.” Marguerite lifted one side of her mouth in a crooked smile. “I just don’t know what to do. We cannot stay here forever.”
“I know it worries you, but for the time being we are safe enough here. We can stay until we know more. Have you sent the manuscript to Oscar Villoteau?”
“No, not yet.”
Mme. d’Hivers shook her head impatiently. “If you do not write to him, we do not know, and so we cannot make any decision. Give it to me. I will take it down to the village to post. No one will see.”
The girl nodded in acquiescence. “But what should I do about Delphine?”
“Do? Nothing. She is busy with the English aristo. So long as she is practicing her wiles on him, she will not be too difficult.”
She shook her head. “True, but it seems unfair to him. He seems too kind, too gentle. Nothing like those arrogant Parisian aristocrats. Nothing like Louvois.”
“Marguerite,” the older woman said in exasperation, “kindness costs him nothing. If he does not seem like Louvois, it is because he has no need to be so at the moment. Just remember that he is an aristo, accustomed to having whatever he wants and expecting everyone to fawn on him. Delphine will do so, he will be charmed by her, and they will both be happy. He does not deserve your concern.”
“You are doubtless correct.” Marguerite did not look as if she believed her words. “But he seems…I do not know.” She gave herself a shake. “It is of no importance, as you say, and in all probability she can do him no harm. Come. I will write to Oscar and send him the manuscript. And I must ask for his advice as well. Paris is not the only city in the world where music is played. Perhaps he will have some ideas about where we might go. Someplace far from Louvois.”
Chapter Six
The tapestries flapped against the walls as they passed by, making it look as if the warriors brandished their swords and spears at the people moving through the corridor. Ned wasn’t sure if this movement was because Tony was causing a breeze by the pace he set or because the chateau was drafty, but he had no time to investigate. He was too busy keeping up with Tony.
The women—with Horace keeping a silent guard over them—were waiting beside one of the doors that appeared between the tapestries in the corridor. Each of the doors along this corridor was flanked by stone pilasters and surmounted by a pediment carved with leaves and rosettes surrounding a shield with a coat of arms. An impressive—even oppressive—sight. This section of the castle must have been the residence of the lord and his family. Not diffident about proclaiming their importance, thought Ned, but then, what aristocratic family ever was?
Delphine greeted them with a bashful smile—she really had a delightfully sunny disposition, especially in contrast to the grim faces of the other two women. Ned felt a spurt of irritation. Yes, they were about to visit a dying man, but did they have to look as if they were already in mourning? Then he remembered that they actually were in mourning. Now he felt irritated at having to feel guilty. He would have liked to swear to relieve his feelings, but that seemed childish.
How was it that even on such short acquaintance Marguerite always managed to make him feel as if he had put his foot wrong? Even when he hadn’t opened his mouth. It wasn’t anything she said—she barely spoke to him. Now, she wasn’t even looking at him. She was standing there as still and impassive as a carved pillar, her eyes motionless as if her thoughts were far away. She certainly wasn’t thinking about him. Delphine might be a bit silly, but at least she didn’t make him feel like an idiot.
“We’re not late then.” Tony looked relieved. He was massaging his stomach again. Another attack of dyspepsia was the reason he had been delayed.
“No,” said Mme. d’Hivers. “The doctor has not yet deigned to open the door for us.”
“Tante Héloise…” Marguerite softened the reproof with another of her rare little smiles.
The older woman shrugged her indifference. “For all your life, the old man never acknowledged your existence, if he even knew of it. Why should we distress ourselves over him?”
“But think how sad it is,” said Delphine. “He has lived here all alone all these years, without a family to love him, and now when we finally meet him…” Her voice drifted off into a sigh and tears glinted in her eyes.
Marguerite sighed as well, but it sounded more like exasperation than sympathy.
Tony pulled out his watch and glared at it. “It’s one thing if the old man is truly not feeling well, but if Fernac is just playing with us…”
“The vicomte must be very old,” Ned said gently. “A little patience must be necessary.”
Tony glared at him. “Let’s see how patient you feel when you ask him a perfectly simple question and instead of giving you a straight answer, he starts telling you fairy tales.”
“Alas, the poor old man. To have his mind wandering so.” Delphine tilted her head and clasped her hands at her breast. It was a very attractive pose, but Ned had the oddest feeling that he had seen it before. In a magazine illustration, perhaps.
The door had opened without their noticing, and the doctor stood there, frowning impatiently. “His mind is not wandering. He just lacks the strength to explain himself.” He waved them brusquely in.
If the other rooms had been furnished in the latest fashion, this one was in the splendor of a long-vanished age. It was a room fit for a king, but not the sort of king who reigned from Versailles. This was the room of a warrior king.
Over the fireplace hung a sword and shield—the equipment of a medieval knight. Ned was not sure, but he thought they might very well be authentic. On the wall facing the bed was a large iron crucifix—also, Ned thought, genuinely medieval.
The hangings on the stone walls here were of crimson velvet, and the bed had a canopy and curtains of the same fabric, held up by richly carved posts of some dark wood.
It was an enormous bed. Half a dozen men could have slept in it. The sole occupant, however, was a wizened old man, whose hand,
resting on the bed covers, had shriveled into a claw. His dark eyes were sharp, darting over his visitors with something that was not kindness, coming to rest on Ned.
“So you are the young man who fancies himself an historian.” The voice was thin and high, but not weak, and not kind. “Live long enough and you will find yourself turned into history, like me.”
“As will we all,” said Ned, “but not all of us will have lived through such tumultuous times.”
“Tumultuous,” the vicomte repeated, savoring the word. “They were that.” He fell silent, his eyes drifting away, as if looking into the past, until he returned to look at Ned once more. “They were brave, you know. All of them. At least that’s what they tell me. My brave brothers, my brave father. Even the priest was brave. And they all died.” He chuckled. It was not a pleasant sound. “They all died, and I survived.”
Ned cleared his throat. “If you remember…”
“Of course I remember. I cannot forget,” he snapped. The clawlike hand picked at the cover, the eyes unfocused again. “I cannot forget. I hear them crying out. The obligation must be fulfilled.”
The old man fell silent, and the others waited with various degrees of patience. Delphine seemed eager for the vicomte to speak again, while Marguerite watched her cousin with a mixture of worry and anger. That, Ned thought, seemed to be Marguerite’s most common expression, though he could not see any reason for it. Mme. d’Hivers stood back watching them all contemptuously—her most common expression as well.
Ned felt uncomfortably like an intruder.
Tony, never a patient sort, spoke up with an attempt at joviality. “Well, great-grandfather, might you be willing to share those memories with us?”
The dark eyes snapped. “Are you a fool, like all the rest of them? The treasure—the treasure must be found.”
“It might help if you told us a bit more about it.” Tony was not in the least intimidated, only annoyed.
The old man did not seem to hear him. His face went slack, and his eyes lost their focus. “The priest hid it. Just before they came. He hid it, and then they dragged him off and killed him.” He closed his eyes and his voice slowly faded. “I saw them. I saw them and I could not stop them. I did not even try. I ran away.”
Silence filled the room as they all stood around, uncertain. An odd little rumble began. The old man had fallen asleep again and was snoring.
The doctor shooed them into the corridor and shut the door on them.
“Is it jewels, do you think? Perhaps the family jewels, diamonds last worn by a vicomtesse at Versailles.” Delphine’s eyes shone as she waved her hands to drape herself in imaginary necklaces and tiaras. “Or is it gold, saved from the hands of the revolutionary pigs, the canaille?”
“If there ever was such a treasure, it is doubtless long gone,” said Marguerite. “Think, Delphine. This chateau stood empty for forty years. Anything the revolutionary troops missed would have been found by the enterprising thieves who followed them.”
Delphine’s face fell into a mutinous pout. “But he says there is a treasure.”
“He says, he says! What does it matter what he says? He has lived here now for years. If there ever was a treasure worth retrieving, would he not have found it himself? He just uses this talk of a treasure to tease us, to make us wait here in attendance on him—and we are all foolish enough to do so!” Marguerite marched off in a swirl of anger.
“She is probably right, Delphine.” Tony gave the girl a consoling pat on the shoulder.
Delphine shook him off. “No, she is not right. There is a treasure, and it is rightfully mine. She just doesn’t want me to have it.” She flounced off in the opposite direction from Marguerite.
Horace started to follow her, but halted to look questioningly at Mme. d’Hivers. She sighed and nodded permission before turning the other way to follow Marguerite.
Lifting a hand to rub the back of his neck, Tony sighed. “I have absolutely no idea what those women are on about. Everything with them is always a drama. I wish they would just come out and say what it is that is bothering them instead of expecting me to guess.”
Ned nodded sympathetically, but his main emotion was frustration as his thoughts turned to the old vicomte. It was maddening. The old man had been here at the time of the Revolution. If only he could converse lucidly, and not just whisper gnomic hints, he could reveal so much about not just the events but the thoughts of people at the time. All that history, forever out of reach.
Or was it forever?
It might never be possible to unlock the vicomte’s memories, but the chateau might contain other revelations. “Tony, you said there were papers.”
“Lord, yes. Piles and piles of them. Not the legal stuff—deeds and what have you. The lawyers have all that. Just old letters, diaries, that sort of thing. Interested?”
“You know I am!”
Tony laughed. “Your kind of treasure. Buried not underground but up in the old north tower. And maybe you can find something in there that will tell us what this damned ‘treasure’ is.”
Chapter Seven
Ned managed to shake the dust off himself, dress in evening clothes, and slip into his seat at the dining table just as the soup was being served. Mme. d’Hivers frowned at him, leaving him feeling rather like a naughty schoolboy. He felt a bit better when he glimpsed a fleeting expression of sympathy on Marguerite’s face before she retreated again behind her cool, imperturbable mask. But nothing could entirely dampen his enthusiasm about his afternoon in the tower.
Yet when he began to talk of his afternoon’s discoveries, Marguerite shot him a glare and Tony spoke over him to talk of a book he’d been reading. To say he was taken aback by their attitude was putting it mildly. What was going on? Tony had invited him here to look at those papers, hadn’t he?
Well, if they didn’t want to hear about his discoveries, so be it. He retreated into offended silence while they talked about currently popular books.
Something by Jules Verne had caught their fancy—Vingt mille lieues sous les mers. Twenty thousand leagues under the seas? Ned didn’t know the book, and he rather thought Verne was the author of children’s books, but Tony and Marguerite seemed to be taking him quite seriously.
Tony was intrigued by the notion of an underwater ship, which sounded like a fairy tale to Ned, but Tony seemed to think the idea was actually possible. Marguerite contributed some gossip about the author’s problems with his publisher.
While Tony and Marguerite talked—she seemed to actually relax a bit over the gossip—Delphine said to Ned, “That is the kind of people they knew, Marguerite and her father—artists, writers, musicians.” She gave a dismissive sniff. “Never any people of fashion, people of importance. It was so very boring.”
All thought of his own grievances vanished. Really, the girl’s selfishness might be simply childishness, but still it should not be allowed to pass without reprimand. “Have I misunderstood?” he asked, looking at her sternly. “I thought that you and your mother were taken in by Marguerite’s family after your father’s death.”
She shrugged. “Yes, yes. And I must be grateful, no doubt. I was no longer forced to be at that dreadful school. But that did not make it any less boring, to listen to them and their friends talk.”
“Many would find the conversation of artists the most interesting talk to be found, and would be grateful to be admitted to their circle.” He winced at hearing himself sound so pompous.
It didn’t matter. Delphine was impervious. She did not notice the censure in his tone. Instead she looked at him with pity for his foolishness. “Musicians are, really, nothing more than servants. They simply play to entertain the important people, the aristocrats, the fashionable ladies and gentlemen. It makes one embarrassed to have to associate with them. And then one is faced with the reputation of the women!”
She seemed to think that he did not understand what she was talking about. “Consider,” she said, impatiently. “What kind
of woman would get up and perform on a stage, expose herself in front of strangers? Not a lady, not if she were possessed of any sensibility. She makes herself no different from an actress, and it was foolish of Marguerite to pretend to be insulted when the comte offered to make her his mistress. She should have felt honored.”
This was so outrageous that Ned did not know what to say. He was still sitting there with his mouth hanging open when dinner came to an end, and with it the conversation about Verne’s book. When Ned looked away from Delphine he saw that Mme. d’Hivers was regarding him with something that looked almost like sympathy. Still, he was not in a comfortable frame of mind when they all gathered at one end of the great hall for their after dinner coffee.
“All right, Ned,” said Tony, settling himself back in one of the well-padded chairs. “Now you can tell us what you found out today.”
That set Ned’s back up. “There’s no need to humor me. I know you are not interested in my research.”
“What makes you think we’re not interested?” Tony looked honestly surprised.
Marguerite handed Ned his coffee. “Surely you can see that it would not be sensible to talk about a possible treasure in front of the servants. The news that you are searching for it would be all over the village in no time, and the chateau would be overrun with treasure hunters.”
“I am not searching for it. Besides, I thought you said it had probably been found long ago.” Ned tried to sound dismissive but feared that he sounded sulky.
“And that is probably true. But until it is known to have been found, or known to be imaginary, people will keep looking—as we are.” One corner of her mouth lifted in a cynical half-smile. “Many find it difficult to remain sensible when people talk of a treasure.”
She was really the most maddening creature. Did she really think he was such an idiot as to chatter away about some probably imaginary treasure in front of all and sundry? To say nothing of the fact that unless French servants were an entirely different species from English servants, those in the chateau doubtless knew all about it already. She should have realized that herself. “You need not have worried,” he said. “I found nothing that shed any light on the treasure, though a good bit that bears on my own studies, as I began to tell you at dinner.”
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