Sacred Ends

by Lisa Appignanesi

‘And Monsieur Marchand? Is he available?’ Marguerite intervened.

  ‘Monsieur has gone home.’

  ‘And where is that exactly?’

  A hefty young beribboned woman with a craven look in her eye peered out from the depths of the hall.

  ‘Ah, Mlle Tellier,’ Marguerite guessed. ‘How kind of you to come down. I’d been hoping to meet you for some time.’

  The ungainly girl stepped forwards with a mixture of curiosity and fear.

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m the Comtesse de Landois. I wanted to see a member of your family. Perhaps your grandfather, since your parents are away. May we come in?’

  She pushed past the footman, Durand just behind her. The girl was standing not too far from the pictures Marguerite wanted Durand to inspect, but no sooner had the Tellier daughter stepped inside than she noticed that they had been moved. Two dusty rectangles lined the wall in their place. Madame Molineuf must have talked to her mistress straight after seeing Dr Labrousse.

  Marguerite hid her disappointment. ‘Where might I find your grandfather, Mademoiselle? I have never visited him.’

  ‘His house is just past the orchard, on the next hill. But I don’t know if you’ll find him there,’ the girl said in the small, plaintive voice of someone whom life regularly disappointed. ‘You can’t miss it, though. There’s a new porch been built. With columns. Maman designed it for him. As a birthday present.’

  ‘What a nice idea,’ Durand murmured. ‘Madame la Comtesse told me you also possessed some fine family portraits.’

  The girl flushed and picked nervously at a curl that was twisted in exactly the same fashion as her mother’s. But her white blouse was modest, indeed severe. It was ruched over her capacious bosom and high at the neck like some cleric’s collar. The girl looked behind her to where the portraits had hung.

  ‘Maman decided to have them cleaned. All of them. She said they had grown dark with the years. Too dark.’

  ‘How sad that I shall miss them then! Perhaps another time. Do you know who painted them? Or perhaps there were various artists?’

  ‘I think they were done while grand-père lived on the islands. But you can ask him when you see him.’

  ‘And I hope we shall see you. At La Rochambert. On the twenty-eighth. For the party. You shall meet Yvette Branquart’s sister there. She’s my secretary.’

  Flecked brown eyes grew round in consternation.

  ‘You don’t perhaps know where Yvette herself might be found, Mademoiselle?’ the inspector asked.

  ‘Maman says she should be two metres under,’ the girl blurted out. ‘She was a terrible maid. Disobedient, disrespectful. Disreputable!’

  The voice that emerged was an uncanny echo of Madame Tellier’s. Marguerite found herself veering round to look for the absent ventriloquist, even though she knew the words had come from the girl in front of her.

  ‘It must be difficult getting good staff around here,’ the inspector offered like a pacifying sweet.

  ‘Very difficult, Monsieur,’ the girl said, still in her mother’s voice. She glanced in fear towards the footman who was standing by the door. ‘But sometimes we’re lucky.’

  ‘Is Madame Molineuf away with your mother, then?’ Marguerite asked.

  ‘Non, Madame, she’s not well. She’s resting. She had something of an accident. On the stairs.’ All this was still spoken in the parroting voice that made Marguerite’s spine crawl.

  The inspector lit his pipe as soon as they were out of the door and puffed at it excitedly.

  ‘The fact that the pictures were moved is an indication that someone in the family definitely knows something. I’ll wager it’s the old reprobate you described to me.’

  ‘I hope it’s that easy, Inspector,’ Marguerite murmured, remembering old Napoléon Marchand’s mad, crafty eyes. ‘I wish we had a better case tying the dead man to him than just the resemblance in a painting we no longer have to hand. I imagine Madame is shrewd enough to have the whole thing repainted rather than simply cleaned. Then, too, Madame Molineuf swore to the doctor that the man had never been to the house.’

  ‘There are other houses.’

  A fat round moon sat lazily above what they determined must be the home of Napoléon Grandcourt Marchand. It was at base an old stone farmer’s house, typical of the region. A rounded bread chimney arched out at one of its sides. But the house had grown wings and accretions and floors, as well as a large U of a drive edged by beech trees, their dry reddened leaves still clinging to branches. Smoke drifted out of a chimney, indicating a presence. Marguerite found herself shivering in anticipation of a meeting with the old drunken devil.

  ‘You wait here, Madame. I’ll go and present myself, sniff around and insist that Marchand come into Montoire tomorrow to look at photographs of the body. I’ll just say that someone in the area recognised the man as a relative of his.’

  ‘But I’d also like a better sense from him of Yvette, Inspector. He might be holding the girl somewhere. I swear he’s capable of it. Say she overheard something she shouldn’t have. Something incriminating. Perhaps the scheme which would result in the body now lying in the cold outside Dr Labrousse’s consulting room.’

  The inspector’s features took on a sharper focus. The air of benign self-satisfaction, which served falsely to assuage the fears of those he interrogated, was replaced by a fox’s cunning. ‘That’s very good, Madame. Very good. It gives us motive. Motive for Yvette Branquart’s silence as well as her disappearance. Yes, she overheard something.’

  Marguerite smiled at him. ‘Our servants always know far more about us than we know ourselves, Inspector. It can be a dangerous life.’

  He nodded at her. ‘Let’s hope, in Yvette’s case, it hasn’t proved fatally so.’

  He trotted up the flank of semicircular stairs and made his way to the columned porch Madame Tellier’s daughter had alerted them to. They gave the house an air of classical grandiosity. Madame Tellier evidently wanted her father’s stature in the world improved. Marguerite couldn’t imagine him caring. He was not in her brief experience a man who gave a sous for social niceties. Quite the contrary. He seemed to take a pleasure in confounding all expectations.

  The door yielded to the inspector’s insistent knocking. In the lamplight, a thin, twisted figure of a man raised his head to stare at Durand.

  With a start, Marguerite recognised him. It was the ancient emaciated manservant who had opened the gate to yell at the stone-throwing children when she had first tried to find the Tellier house with Martine. Hercule. That was his name. Hercule who had ordered her rudely away. If he was here now, then the witch Amandine was probably here too. And both of them had something to do with Napoléon Marchand, even though his daughter had claimed she knew nothing of Amandine.

  Marguerite found herself examining all the upper-storey windows of the house, but there was no light or movement visible.

  She opened the door of the carriage and was about to alight, when she heard the ancient servant growl, ‘I told you. Police or no police, there’s no one at home. No one. Now skedaddle. Scoot.’ He slammed the door in the inspector’s face.

  Marguerite watched Durand all but trip on an ornate box that stood to the side of the door. She gazed at its peculiar shape, like a coffin but too small. It was a finely carved wood with exotic whorls and shapes.

  ‘Not very polite in the countryside, are we?’ Durand muttered as he took up his place beside her.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Whatever he said, he was lying.’ He closed the carriage door with a clatter, before Georges could get to it. ‘There was certainly somebody else in there. Unless that desiccated old man has taken up smoking fine cigars, not to mention something more potent.’

  ‘And that desiccated old man, I’ll wager, Inspector, is also guarding a woman called Amandine, a woman who for some reason they want none of us to see or have access to.’

  With a sudden wave of despair, Marguerite sat back in her seat and looked out at the
bulbous outcropping of the house against the hill. ‘Let’s hope we get to her and to Yvette in time. If it’s not already too late.’

  PART THREE

  SUBTERRANEAN

  SIXTEEN

  Carriages gleamed in the moonlight and lined the drive as far as the eye could see. The guests had started to arrive from mid-afternoon and had come from far and wide – Blois and Vendôme and Château du Loir and La Châtre and even a small contingent from Tours. With a deep bow, Olivier greeted the arrivals as they entered the hall. Heels clicked over marble and shining parquet, grew muted on Aubusson rugs. Furs were carried away by a flurry of maids, fluted glasses proffered.

  Men’s chests sprouted decorations pinned on the dark ground of fine suits and uniforms. Women dazzled with an array of jewels on perfumed skin and hair or waxed secret behind a modesty of lace. Slim-fitting skirts rustled with ample trains of printed meteor silks, pliable satins, and glistening taffetas. Bare shoulders gleamed above the forward thrust of this season’s bosoms or the plateaux of a provincial yesteryear. Voices rose and fell and tinkled into laughter.

  If the mirrors and chandeliers sparkled rather more than the wit, Marguerite was happy enough to see her childhood home brimming in this unaccustomed way. Old family friends had honoured them with a visit: the Marquis de Conflans, whose monocle kept falling from his eye as it had always done when he took her hand between his two gnarled ones; the Countess de Cambremer, whose red sequined turban grew out of her highly rouged cheekbones and who still loved to inject English phrases into her speech, so that Marguerite was greeted as ‘darling’, her dress proclaimed ‘divine’, the champagne ‘excellent’, the canapés ‘just super’.

  General Narbon of the great hooked nose had come, accompanied by his wife, who had so shrunk with the years that she appeared to be a diminutive child, until she raised a haggard powdered face at you. There was also Monsieur Mirtout, a number of priests, two resplendent bishops, at least two mayors, not to mention landowners, lawyers, several judges, captains of local industry, a handful of merchants, doctors, an assortment of wives of varying degrees of beauty and capability, and even the editor of Le Journal de Blois – in short, as Olivier had emphasised to her, a broad and democratic selection of the neighbouring community, all of whose votes he would need in the next election and would win with his good wife’s help.

  Madame Tellier had accepted the invitation. Marguerite was pleased. She wanted to observe the woman, who looked rather grand tonight in a myrtle-green satin dress and an encrustation of rings that would have done an old Spanish dowager empress proud. Madame had brought her husband, a thin reed of an aged man who looked shrunken beside his wife and as if he would rather be staring at his sales ledgers than bowing to the dignitaries of the region. Her choice of a man so ordinary when compared to the likes of her father had the air of a bid for normality. Or perhaps the choice had been wholly old Napoléon’s. The Telliers had a reputation as successful businessmen.

  The daughters were here, too. There was Laure, who turned out to be a great pudding of a girl with feet the size of paddles and an expression of disdain that did nothing for her beauty. There was also the younger Hortense, whom Marguerite and the inspector had already met. Madame was intent on showing the girls off to any available men and Marguerite promised herself she would line some up.

  Dr Labrousse, his black beard freshly trimmed, was standing in a corner and observing the guests. He had come with the local investigative magistrate she had insisted they invite. Both had survived Olivier’s inevitably frosty reception, though he had forced the semblance of a campaigner’s smile onto his face. She in turn had been particularly kind to both.

  From her welcoming position near the doors of the large drawing room, Marguerite now looked out for Durand. Many of the men had gathered to play billiards before dinner, but the inspector was here, dutifully engaging Dr Labrousse and Madame Tellier.

  ‘I’m told you have relations in the Caribbean islands, Madame,’ Durand was saying. ‘I confess I have long wanted to go there.’

  ‘Really, Inspector? For myself I have never had the least interest in that direction. It is the men in my family who are the voyagers.’

  ‘As is only appropriate, Madame. We travel so we can come back and regale our wives with tales. Like Odysseus.’

  Madame Tellier looked at him with a blank expression. ‘Spices. That’s what my grandfather came back with. From Martinique. And then chocolate. My father when he was young apprenticed with the Grocers’ Guild.’

  ‘You never told me,’ the plump Laure reprimanded.

  ‘The Guild controlled a highly lucrative colonial traffic, Mademoiselle.’

  ‘So you know about them, Monsieur?’

  ‘In Paris, they know everything,’ Dr Labrousse said, a note of longing in his voice.

  The inspector’s chest took on even more barrel-like proportions. ‘I should very much like to hear your husband’s and your father’s stories, Madame.’

  ‘I would welcome you to our house, Monsieur. But unfortunately we all travel to Tours again tomorrow.’

  ‘Perhaps, then, when I make my visit to the city. I may do so while I am in the region.’

  ‘Come and meet my husband now.’ Madame Tellier dragged the inspector along while Marguerite turned her attention to a new group of arrivals. She smiled to herself as much as to her guests. With that economy of movement and gesture which never ceased to surprise her, Durand would quietly make the rounds of the party, finding out what the guests knew about the suspicious deaths and pregnancies without issue in the region.

  Just as they were all going into dinner, Marguerite glimpsed Martine rushing from the room. There were tears in the girl’s eyes, a nervous quiver in the wrist that held up her dress as she made for the stairs. The dress was a soft velour of palest green, one of her own that had been adjusted for the girl for the evening. With her mass of curling pale gold hair, she looked like a flower rising from a swaying stalk.

  Marguerite excused herself and followed after her. She did so with an unhurried tread and a face that gave away none of her concerns. What could have happened to upset the girl? Had she seen P’tit Ours peering through a window? Had someone insulted her? Not Olivier, she hoped. Martine had been filled with youthful delight at the prospect of the party. She had also been excited by the notion that amidst all the gathered guests, she might find someone who had information about her sister. And now, this rushing away in the midst of things. It made no sense.

  Martine had been so much calmer these last days, so much more measured in her responses. Marguerite could swear she had even filled out a little. Best of all, she was beginning to learn to trust her. It was Marguerite’s own weakened and slightly tremulous state after her fall in the woods that had brought them closer.

  Marguerite caught up with the girl in the corridor. The tears were streaming down her face. It was clear she could no longer see where she was heading.

  ‘What is it, Martine? What’s happened?’

  The girl wrung the handkerchief in her hands, sobbed convulsively, shook her head.

  Marguerite murmured, calmed, asked again. She couldn’t stay away too long or Olivier would notice.

  ‘Please, Martine. Tell me. And I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘There’s nothing to be done, Madame. Nothing. It’s the priest. He told me I was damned. Damned for all eternity. Ungrateful.’ She sobbed again.

  ‘How dare he! Which priest? Père Benoit?’

  ‘No, no. The small one. With the squinty eyes.’

  That surprised her. ‘Do you know him?’

  She shook her head, tried to catch her breath. ‘He said I was a wretch. After all he had done. The treachery. I was damned. Doomed. I would burn in hell.’ The tears were pouring down her face again.

  ‘But Martine, if the man doesn’t know you then he must simply be wrong. Wrong.’

  ‘He probably thinks I’m my sister. So she’s the one. It’s so dreadful. She must have do
ne something terrible…’

  Marguerite took her to her room, had her sit down. ‘Now listen, Martine, I can’t stay here with you. You rest. Wash your face. And stop thinking about him. I’m going to have a word with the silly man. Perhaps this is a boon. A key to where your sister is. He may have seen her recently.’

  The girl stared at her with widening eyes.

  ‘Now go on.’

  As she moved back into the hubbub of the party, she reflected that they could do with a new lead. Durand had spent a day in Blois getting lists of registered prostitutes, visiting a few brothels, but it had led nowhere, certainly not to Yvette or to a woman mourning her lost babe. Nor had he been able to locate the vanished maid Villemardi had named as Louise Bertin.

  Olivier had kept her so busy that she hadn’t been able to go with the inspector. It was clear from his constraint and his barely veiled insults that someone had informed him of her activities in Montoire. She hadn’t even been able to accompany Durand on a visit to Napoléon Marchand, though that too had not led very far, since the man still hadn’t been there, or hadn’t permitted entry. A visit from the Montoire constabulary had led no further. After this evening the two of them would have to make a concerted effort, if Paris duties were not to rob her of the inspector before they had made any headway.

  Marguerite noticed Olivier looking down his aristocratic nose at Durand. He had the air of a sultan exchanging words with a negligible emissary from some unknown province where the smell of dung was omnipresent. She wondered whether she should go and protect the inspector from her husband’s arrogance. She approached and saw Durand shuffling his feet, then in the humblest of voices complimenting her husband on his great charity in adopting a stray child. A second later, the inspector was extricating the exact details of the story from Olivier. She smiled to herself and left the men to it. The dinner table needed her attention.

  It was a grand affair. In the mirrored expanse of the great hall, the tables stretched in two ranks. A retinue of servants had been brought in to pour the wines and serve the truffled pâtés and bisque and game, the carrot purées and the diced potatoes, the tarts and fruit elaborately heaped on giant silver platters. Meanwhile, on the frescoed ceiling, nymphs and cupids danced their revels amidst racing clouds.