Perhaps he had confronted the baron. Perhaps he had been caught trying to run away. In any case, she had only glimpsed him after the last beating, his ears a bloody pulp, boxed so often they oozed. She had seen the pauper’s wagon come for him, had watched his poacher-father, a big man with hands like hams, weep as Cook wrapped the wool blanket round him like a shroud.
I tried to summon the courage to seek them out, send a message to Youen’s village, but rumor came that his family had moved away.
A year after the trial, Maria, too, vanished, fleeing in the night with the blacksmith’s son and a rag full of silver spoons. Glassy-eyed Cook read me the note in halting fashion, and after, we never spoke of Maria again:
My dear Perrette:
Do as I do.
M.
The spoons were returned to the cabinet one day not long after, without comment; I know not by whom: one or another of the baron’s heirs. When I found the first of those familiar spoons in the drawer, I held it up and found my own distorted reflection in the shine, dull eyes that could not weep.
Milady and I spoke not of these matters. We spoke almost never, though our sorrows united us. I kept close by her, especially when the moon swelled and paw prints dotted the mud round the moat come morning. But when our wrists brushed as I washed or dressed her, we flinched as if stung. To touch, to know affection, was to suffer, and we would not bring that upon ourselves, upon each other. For what judge, what God, would hear us?
I will labor till my last days in obscurity, scrubbing cobbles in the gray light of morning, and — like paw prints in rainfall, like Milady in her madness — fade and be forgotten.
Only this house, only Kerfol, which I once imagined so neglectful, will remember.
VICTOR WOULD BRAVE THE WALK from the crossroads, he said. He needed air.
In truth, he didn’t want to go on with them to Quimper.
Mother struggled out of the carriage to kiss him with all due (on this day) ceremony. Thanks to him, she would have her old life back. Not all of it, surely, not Father, but there would be ease and security again, some degree of luxury: what degree this staunch new democratic world would allow. Greedy woman, Victor mused, watching her tame her big bustle of skirts. Is it not enough that we live?
He didn’t want to go with them and listen to Michel’s maddening whistling the whole way, but he didn’t want to lose his way through the heather or sink into a bog, either, or catch cold or meet strangers or otherwise face the unknown without Mother. “Won’t you at least call at Kerfol,” he urged, “and take your rest first?”
For a moment she ignored his question, going on at length about the caretaker. “His name’s Grenier. Jean Grenier, and his daughter is Marguerite. See that our rooms are ready and have them plan dinner for sundown. Oh, don’t look so, Victor,” she cooed, tweaking his chin. “My darling.” She kissed her fingers and pressed them to his cheek, leaning close. “I never rest. You know that.”
Michel, their one remaining servant, stopped his infernal whistling long enough to extend a hand to help Mother back up, and she stuck her coiffed head out the coach window, waving strenuously as they started on their way again.
Victor watched the coach grow small on the horizon.
He stood like a statue on the cart road. A signpost at the crossroads promised a dozen paths, and for a moment he imagined losing himself on one of them. But like that of the rest of his accursed class, Victor’s way had been laid centuries before he was born.
He obeyed the arrow reading KERFOL.
Mother would meet with the lawyers today on behalf of his fortune. Not his yet. But it would be, if she had her way — next month, when he came of age. A widowed great-aunt had left all of her still-vast estate to a nephew she scarcely knew because she was childless and because he was a child left fatherless by the revolution. She also knew that Victor aspired to be an artist, meaning that he would be penniless and without prospects. “Thank the Lord for her romantic nature,” Mother had gushed when the letter came, and Victor saw with disgust that she would have kissed every corn on the savior aunt’s feet had the crone still been standing.
Victor came in at an avenue. The trees had the tall curve of elms and the ashy sheen of wet olive trunks and formed a long arch that soft April light couldn’t penetrate. If ever an avenue led unmistakably to something, Victor thought, it was this one. It seemed purposeful, while he was not.
They’d rented Kerfol to be on hand for the legal proceedings. Arriving without the heir in question to huddle with the lawyers and the faction of the family now controlling the estate might present certain challenges, but having Victor there would do more harm than good, Mother had said. His murmured replies and offensive daydreaming would undo her efforts.
Victor wanted no part in any of it.
Snidely — legitimate business will not involve you, but maybe architecture will — or just helpfully, Michel had recommended the tombs in Kerfol’s chapel, which were rumored to be magnificent. The only servant they’d held on to through the Terror, the only one who hadn’t fled, taking a healthy share of silver and brocade with him, Michel held a special status. He might be a capable, badly disadvantaged relation — knowing Victor as he did — and they both resented it.
Michel was right about Kerfol, though. It must have been the most romantic house in the province once. Victor would have been happy to remain on the stone bench at the end of that long avenue, absorbing the influence of the place. He looked up at the sky, an uncomplicated blue, and almost hoped that Jean Grenier wouldn’t turn up. Not yet. He rifled through his leather satchel for pen and ink, found a rumpled sketchbook, and began to compose the entryway and the chiseled hedge garden beyond, coiling mysteriously into shadow.
But soon the distant, silent house with its grim towers — and the many empty avenues converging where he sat — began to unnerve him.
He knew nothing of the estate’s history except what Michel had told him, but it had to be impressive. The accumulated weight of countless lives and deaths always lends majesty to an old house, but Kerfol seemed to harbor more: stern memories, cruel memories stretching away like its gray avenues into a blur of darkness. Tombs in the chapel? he reflected, aware of the sound of his own breathing. This whole place is a tomb.
All of France, it seemed at times to Victor, was a tomb, full of hateful echoes.
Still, he wished the caretaker would not come. Hearing the facts about the house would chip away at its overall impressiveness. I’m told it’s the very place for someone of your sensibility, Mother had said. Meaning what? Excitable? Oversensitive? Inclined to embellish? What would she tell them in Quimper? He was nearly of age, after all. Wasn’t that what these proceedings were all about?
Besides which, it seemed impossible that Kerfol could be “the very place” for any living soul. Sensing that he would learn less by looking than by feeling what the place had to communicate, Victor followed the moat around back. In stark contrast to the methodically shorn hedges out front, the rear of the château was a riot of weeds. Apart from a wide patio checkered with red, white, and black marble tile and edged with urns and the chapel, all the rest — the old courtyard, the dovecote, the orchard — had been more or less reclaimed by the wild. Even the stables and servants’ quarters, still in use, were carpeted round with moss and cloaked in vines.
An arched iron gate hung open in invitation, so Victor ducked through into a dense tunnel of wisteria. Hanging flowers diffused the sunlight and made him feel like he was walking through a storm cloud.
At the other side was the path to the chapel. Victor didn’t take it. The tombs were there, he knew, just over the rise, but instead of a tourist’s curiosity he felt again the heaviness of Kerfol’s unknown history. He began to look for signs of the caretaker.
As he was heading back through the wisteria tunnel, a little dog appeared and barred his way. It was a handsome golden creature with round brown eyes, but Victor didn’t like dogs. They’d lurked round the prison, roo
ting in dung heaps. They’d been there in Paris, he now recalled, before his father got them out during the September Massacres. Mobs armed with sabers, clubs, and knives had hijacked priests from their carriages in those dark days, hacking them to bits in the streets while the National Guard idled. The same rabble had roved from prison to prison, holding court. A “judge” interrogated prisoners, sentencing them to death no matter their testimony, parading their heads on spikes. Exhausted executioners napped among heaped body parts, it was said, and when a woman brought bread, it was soaked in the blood of the dead before it was eaten. Passersby would note red running under the prison walls, out into the gutters, and the dogs of Paris noted it, too.
To quiet his heartbeat, Victor moved forward to try to pet the trespasser, but the dog retreated. Feeling a trespasser himself now, he returned to the patio. The animal had vanished, most likely in the overgrowth pressing in at the edges of the patio.
He circled the estate and rang the front bell, relieved by the expanse of trimmed hedges all round. He’d once heard a courtier claim that the rigid geometry of French royal gardens was a mark of triumph over nature, of civilization over barbarism; to seize and snip unruly twigs, to bend back wanton blades of grass, was to assert dominion. Better see to things out back, then, he mused, smiling at his own jumpiness.
All he wanted now was to find a window with good light and grind some pigment for paint, let the fitful colors crowd the darkness from his mind. Weariness had settled in every inch of him.
A wheezing man saw him in. Jean Grenier was brusque and fat and spoke quickly, without meeting Victor’s eye. “I’ve had the girl dress down the first two rooms in the east wing. Up there.” He pointed to one of two staircases. “I trust your mother . . . Madame will favor the view of the hedge garden. I’ll set your things in the room across the hall.” With a grunt, he took Victor’s bag and vanished, just as the dog behind the château had vanished.
Victor wandered out of the great hall into a narrow passage leading to the rear of the house and the kitchens. As quickly as her father had gone, young Marguerite appeared. His first glimpse of her was in a flour-coated apron, for she was baking, whistling a jaunty tune. She was curvy and capable. Apart from Michel, Mother hadn’t kept servants for years, and their finances kept them out of society. As such, Victor had lately had little contact with any female but his parent. He stood quietly in the doorway, appreciative and suspect.
“I grant you permission to stare, sir.”
He went right on doing so, stunned.
Marguerite shrugged and her dark brows peaked, as if to say, Well, why shouldn’t I speak so to my betters? “I’m not your servant, after all. I’m not employed by this house. You will need my permission.”
“Perhaps you should accept it as my compliment,” he warned, rehearsing for the day when he would again command a houseful of servants. If Mother and the lawyers had their way, it would not be long. They’d lived simply after Father’s murder at the hands of revolutionaries — Marat’s devils and Robespierre’s — but he was his mother’s son, and he’d do well to claim his place. “Your father is in my employ,” he managed. “In a manner of speaking. Is he not?”
That seemed to chasten her, so he smiled to show he thought no less of her for it.
“Yes,” Marguerite complained, “and it’s but for the grace of God I don’t leave him to fend for himself.”
Victor leaned with his elbows on her tall worktable, enrapt by her strong arms kneading, her deft hands smoothing the flour. Mother never let him near the kitchen while she worked. It mortified her to be seen with her sleeves pushed up, even before her own son. Work, housewifery, these were shameful tasks — though what aristocrat hadn’t likewise suffered?
Unlike Mother, Victor was not reclaiming anything. He remembered very little of the Terror. His memories were a wash of color running in a gutter. He remembered a Festival of the Republic, held in a church, and a gaunt man in a red cap booming from atop a tall chair: “Long live the nation! Long live the republic! Down with priests!” while revolutionaries rushed the altar and side chapels, smashing statues, paintings, ornaments, reliquary shrines. He remembered his mother offering the warden chiffon for his wife’s hem and liver-spotted hands unwrapping Father’s linen, slicing up his bread, breaking the pastries they brought him to eat. He remembered mobs gathered outside the prison walls, chanting, “Give us the enemies of the state! Give us the traitors to the nation!” and that his father’s eyes seemed to sink deeper into his skull with every visit. He remembered that one day, Father just wasn’t there. “Removed to Paris for trial,” barked the woman with spotted hands. Mother had covered her own mouth as if she might be sick.
He found himself drawn into Marguerite’s orbit that day. Her easy spirit pleased him as much as her shape, though her confidence was no girl’s. It was a woman’s, and unsettling. Was she that much older? Who knew with peasants, whose hands were rough and who aged before their day? Watching her work, he could only admire the strong, soft flesh of her arms, the creamy skin showing over the stained bodice. She had a smudge of flour on one silky collarbone, and he fought the urge to erase it with his fingers.
“Was that your little dog outside earlier?” he asked to break the silence.
At first she looked confused, and then a veil of intrigue dropped over her face. “There are no dogs at Kerfol.”
Before he could argue otherwise, Marguerite burned her plump arm on a wall of the hearth’s bread oven. She shrieked, fanning the air as smoke flew out from between the bricks, and his question was forgotten.
He was rudely awakened the next morning by the dream of the empty executioner’s basket. Again his father’s head rolled merrily down the scaffold steps, the fishlike mouth forming words he could not hear, the eyes a hollow blackness. Victor hadn’t been present, thank the Lord, when Father was beheaded, but in a way he wished he had been. After, the only way to endure the image of his father’s toppling head was to construct a hero who’d never been. Someone who’d struggled against savagery and injustice. Someone who’d died trying.
Everything around Victor supported this lie.
Mother seized on Jacques Ange Bertin’s characterization of Father in his letter as a man who “died on his honor . . . conducting himself with such dignity and accord that even the executioner winced to see the blade fall.” What left her lips after that became family history, but for Victor, her tale of savage glory only served to make a stranger out of the man he most loved. Father became a faceless hero, a bloodied ghoul that plagued Victor in dreams — especially once he’d read German anatomist S. T. Sömmering’s letter in the Paris Moniteur. Victor vividly remembered the date: November 9, 1795. The guillotine is a terrible torture! We must return to hanging! This was some four years after the national razor had replaced the noose as the official executioner’s tool. Do you know that it is not at all certain when a head is severed from the body by the guillotine that the feelings, personality, and ego are instantaneously abolished . . . ?
It took years to bring back the mild and smiling man Victor remembered, to restore in mind — and to mourn — the whole and loving and largely unimpressive man who’d been his father.
Bad dreams woke him, even still, like the thump of a blade.
It would have been an uneasy sleep anyway, waking in a strange bed, sunlight barred by heavy velvet drapes that had only recently had the dust beaten from them. They reeked of it. Everything in this damp, old château stank of some other time. But he had an eastern room, and the light was good.
Before she left for the day, Mother had sent Michel with breakfast and his easel and gear. There was nothing to do but rise and shine, as she would say in that relentless, cheerful way of hers. Rise and shine, he told the sun bitterly.
The first sketch came with the clarity and suddenness of a dream. A faded portrait in red crayon. Her face was small and oval-shaped. She had a thin mouth and a delicate nose. Her eyebrows were as lightly penciled as the eyebrows in a
Chinese painting, her forehead high and serious. The arrangement of the black hair, fine and thick in appearance, was demure, and the eyes were shy and steady at once. A pair of beautiful long hands was crossed below the lady’s breast. She was a lady, no question. Not a lively wench like Marguerite, but a true — if imagined — lady, and he felt pride and an odd shame at having presumed to create her. Victor had lost his wealth and his father under a single sharp blade and with them, Mother said, his confidence.
“Marguerite,” he called the next afternoon, for she was just outside his chamber dusting in the hall. “Does she look familiar?”
She came and studied the sketch, gnawing a savaged thumbnail. “No.” She shook her head. “Should she?”
He felt disappointed somehow, as if she might have read something in the fine features as an astronomer reads the alignment of planets.
“What do you need with her?” Marguerite demanded, contemplating his work with grudging respect. “Am I not pretty enough to draw?”
A compliment, he guessed, for who cared to be drawn by a lesser artist? Did it matter that he’d impressed a girl like Marguerite with his talents? No, but he was used to being indulged and humiliated by his mother and tutors, who only barely concealed their disdain for his mediocrity. This was something else, something more — even Marguerite saw that — and in a way it scared him.
Victor looked at his hand, at the crayon, and back at the paper. Who was she? Who was he to have created her? Could he trust that it would happen again?
It did, though it was not the same woman. She was altogether different, his second subject. For days Victor worked furiously to prepare a wooden panel. He slathered it with gesso, sanding and layering and sanding again. All that week as Mother schemed with lawyers, he ground pigments, cadmium and cobalt and ochre, mixing them with linseed and walnut oils. He sanded and sketched and in due course began to paint, moving from broad brush and palette knife to the little miniver or squirrel-fur brush for the fine details of the eyes.
The Ghosts of Kerfol Page 5