Belcastel looked and saw Sauvigny striding in the direction of the apple loft. Fat bars of sunshot rain enclosed him! An omen? The monsignor felt a constriction in his chest. Here was a warning that his friend could end up behind bars for some intemperate act! The monsignor did not, of course, believe in omens, but recognized this one as a nudge from his conscience, a reminder that, because he had again failed in his custodial duties, the vicomte could be about to discover his niece and Adam in flagrante delicto. Belcastel felt his brain heat and his forehead sweat. It sweated so profusely that drops slid into his eyes and stung them. Abruptly, to the maidservant’s amazement, he too shot out of the side door and into the rain without either hat or umbrella and, worse still, in his dressing-gown.
By now the vicomte was out of sight.
Slithering in the mud – he was wearing slippers without heels and kept stepping on the sagging hem of his dressing-gown – Belcastel pondered the odds and prayed he was being fanciful. Were Adam and Madame d’Armaillé in the loft? Oh dear, it did seem likely. Making love? Likely too. Remembering her confidences about her uncle, he grew increasingly alarmed. How absurd – and dangerous – human behaviour could be! ‘Please God,’ he begged, while quickening his pace, ‘if You avert this danger, I shall never ask You for another thing. Nor mix Your interests up with the pope’s which are, I admit, lax, secular and full of compromise! So are the cardinal’s. Yes! We have all grown lax. The comte de Chambord was right. The only Catholic king worth having would be an absolute one! His was a noble failure whereas, win or lose, the ralliement is likely to be squalid! He was absurd – but absurdity is what defeats the vainglory of the so-called Enlightenment which was just another of Lucifer’s meretricious mirages. I renounce it! Credo quia absurdum est! Grant me this intention and You can ask me for anything at all! Just make Adam and Danièle not be in the loft!’
Its door when he reached it was open. Inside was Stygian! Black as fur! Blinking into the dark, Belcastel was dazzled by the after-glare of the sunny rain outside, and again felt sweat sting and blind his eyes. He caught a faint smell of fish.
‘Vicomte!’ he called. ‘Sauvigny!’ Then, raising his voice: ‘Hubert!’
***
Sauvigny heard the shouts but paid no heed.
The news that Danièle’s crimson neckband had been seen hanging from a beam in a tricycle or apple shed was the shake to the kaleidoscope which can change everything. His mind had instantly rearranged itself, and its components now spelled out a new message: the demons were not in him! They were in the others. There was an impertinent mockery to the neckband’s being there which could only mean that she, as women did – just think of the whorish wretch with whom he had dallied in Rome! – had forsaken her old loyalties for some new alliance.
As he sighed, his chest swelled and the paper in his waistcoat pocket crackled. The madness in this madhouse had reached his niece! What else could he think when just now he had walked into the outbuilding and seen, exactly as Tassart had said he would, the glimmering neckband – thinner than his little finger – hanging from a peg on a rafter? It was like an obscene symbol! Deeply offended, he had made straight for the iron ladder, which he would need to climb in order to remove what in his mind was a sacred heirloom and in his niece’s, he must now suppose, no more than a love trophy. While looking up at it, he knocked his shin against something – the place was littered with impedimenta – stumbled and, groping for support, caught hold of a dangling rope, jerked it without meaning to, then heard something bang somewhere above his head and found himself in darkness. Guessing that he had accidentally closed the shutter of a skylight, he pulled the rope again, then jiggled it hopefully, only to find it come away in his hand. The thing had broken. A minute or so later he heard Belcastel’s shout.
‘Sauvigny!! Hubert! Don’t go up! It’s dangerous in the dark and, anyway, there’s nobody there!’
A lie, concluded Sauvigny and, as he had now managed to locate a rung of the iron ladder, quickly began to climb. He was getting used to the dark, could guide himself by the light coming from the open doorway behind him and hoped, besides, to be able to reach the skylight shutter and open it once he was on the platform above. So he ignored the mendacious pleading below. Clearly Belcastel had been pimping for his young protégé or anyway closing his eyes to his fornication and now feared that light – literally! – would be thrown on what was going on. Well, one way or another, that was going to happen – though, of course it mustn’t! Sauvigny’s niece’s honour must be protected! Honour? Ha! Pulled up short by the sound of his own sour and unintended laugh, Sauvigny found that he had torn the crumpled letter from his waistcoat pocket behind which he had just felt, or imagined he felt a pain in his heart. Clapping his hand to the stricken place, he dropped the paper. Never mind, he thought, then with a tremor of fear: ‘Am I fit enough to be going to the Congo?’ But maybe the pain was in some unimportant muscle? Hearing a clash of metal below followed by gasps of distress, he guessed that the monsignor had bumped into one of the pieces of domestic machinery that had been visible before the shutter closed. Sauvigny was startled to find himself almost relishing the sounds. Anger, like a rough drink quaffed at one go, left him exhilarated and giddy. It was as if his mind were being shaken again: shaken and shaken so that he could not get his bearings. He felt a thrill of satisfaction at the prospect of catching out the lovers – and at the same time a desolate horror at the pain he knew he would feel once rage had worn off. ‘Honour!’ he found himself repeating silently. ‘Horror!’ What did the words mean? The shock to his mind had drained everything of meaning.
Feeling someone seize his foot, he wondered if he was between two dangers: the monsignor below and, possibly, the Irishman above. Was he up there? Silently waiting? Armed perhaps with some sort of club? Surely he wouldn’t strike Sauvigny in Danièle’s presence? But maybe she wasn’t with him?
The door behind banged shut and the dark became total. He couldn’t move his foot.
‘Let go!’ he shouted at Belcastel, but the fool wouldn’t and kept exhorting him to come down.
‘Please,’ he kept maundering. ‘Let’s talk sensibly! Surely we should be able to do that?’ And other blandishments.
Sauvigny wriggled his foot.
‘There’s nobody up there.’
‘Then let go.’
But the grasping hands were now climbing up Sauvigny’s leg. Next they clutched his coat, pulling him off balance so that his other foot slipped. He regained purchase on the rung, but, instinctively, as he did so, lurched out with the knee the other man had released and felt a crack of yielding bone which must, he guessed, be his opponent’s face. Possibly he had broken his nose? There was a cry followed, as the hands released their grip, by sounds of a fall then a dull collision with something below. Then nothing. The next cry came from the vicomte’s own throat.
‘For God’s sake,’ he called. ‘Is anyone up there? The monsignor may be injured. Can you let in light?’
Nothing.
Groping his way cautiously – he had glimpsed an unstable-looking scythe earlier – past a wobbling tangle of tools, he climbed down then reached the door. Once propped open, it let in enough light to reveal that the monsignor’s head had fallen against the edge of a garden roller and was bleeding. Blood, pouring down his face, hid the gash of his old scar and soaked the quilted silk of his dressing-gown. A large tricycle had rolled almost on top of him. By the time Sauvigny had pulled him clear and found a place to lay him flat, his pulse had stopped. The vicomte, who, in his fighting days, had seen many dead men, was confronting another.
***
It was less than an hour later.
Adam and Sauvigny sat in silence as the hackney cab left the maison de santé. Each was amazed to find himself in the other’s company, but neither had had a say in the matter. Slanting rain streaked the windows as though repeatedly crossing something out. Both their minds were choked by the knowledge that their silence, though an admission of shame,
was impossible to break. Dr Meuriot, limply assisted by a defeated, waxen-faced Blanche, had settled them firmly into the cabriolet, then waved it off.
‘To the railway station,’ Meuriot told the cabman. ‘These gentlemen have trains to catch.’ He spoke with authority and in the mild tones of a man who knows he will be obeyed. Having commandeered the vicomte’s cab, he had asked the coachman to take both men to the Gare du Nord. Clearly, he couldn’t wait to be rid of them and free to start spreading healing lies and Hippocratic balm.
‘It is in both your interests,’ he had explained.
So here, to their exquisite mortification, they sat avoiding each other’s eyes. Neither could think.
‘Here still,’ was all Adam’s frozen mind could manage: ‘Here still!’
He wasn’t sure what he meant by this nor what he ought to do. Surely it could not be his place to speak first? To do so might even be dangerous. Anyway what was there to say? ‘Would you have preferred,’ he would have liked to ask the vicomte, ‘that the accident had happened to me?’ He couldn’t ask that. No. But what could he ask? What possible words – what bridge? – could be found between the awful thing that had happened and their joint flight in a hackney cab? In normal circumstances the proper words would be: ‘Poor Belcastel! He was a good man. May he rest in peace!’ And so forth. Lux perpetua luceat ei! Amen. But if circumstances had been normal, Belcastel would be alive. Poor, affable Belcastel! He had been a good man! And if there was to be an eternal light, it would surely shine for and on him. Adam wished he could scream. Was it my fault, he wondered. How much my fault? Then his mind froze again. Maybe it was as well to let it freeze? He had begged to be let stay for the funeral, but the doctors wouldn’t hear of it, and neither would Danièle. Danièle ... Slowly, like invisible ink yielding up secrets, the confused words which had just now flashed through his head yielded a melancholy meaning. ‘Here still’ meant that he was still near – fairly near – her but might not be again! Dr Meuriot wouldn’t have him back, and even if it did come into being, the newspaper would close its doors to him. Would she? If he came back? Things had moved so fast at the end that the promises they had exchanged earlier this morning might no longer count.
At the last minute, when the vicomte and those taking leave of him had already gone out to the carriage, Meuriot had drawn Adam into a small cloakroom smelling of oilskins and galoshes. ‘The police,’ he warned quietly, ‘may not think that the monsignor’s death was accidental. If they open an inquiry, they will want to talk to you.’
‘Me?’
‘Oh, I know you were with the director when it happened.’ Meuriot’s tone consigned Blanche to the category of the unreliable, too vague or possibly complicit to supply an alibi. ‘But this was found near the body. Read it.’ Adam read and learned that he had been accused of corrupting Danièle and planning to murder Guy. The unsigned letter was addressed to the vicomte. ‘Naturally,’ murmured the doctor, ‘I shall destroy it, but whoever wrote it may write again. And any rumours that get about will make for appalling publicity. Remember the trouble we had with the press over the unfortunate Maupassant? Well, this could be ten times worse.’
Who could have written such a letter? Adam couldn’t remember antagonizing anyone – except perhaps the vicomte. But the vicomte could hardly have written a letter to himself. He must have read it, though, and this made sitting in this carriage with him excruciatingly uncomfortable. Did he believe the accusations? Why did he not say something? Adam’s fists were so tightly clenched that his nails were piercing his palms.
On leaving the rue Berton, the cab clattered along the quai de Passy, and with every hoofbeat, the gagging silence grew more unnatural. Anxiety sharpened Adam’s faculties, and, as worries began to prick and stab, like ice fragments, through the cold mud of his mind, he saw that, even at the cost of disregarding etiquette and possibly his own physical safety, he, the junior man, was going to have to speak first. He must find out what Sauvigny had made of the letter and what advice he was likely to give Danièle.
They were now crossing the river whose pallor glimmered like the track of an enormous snail. Ahead lay the short drive across Paris to the Gare du Nord where they would begin their separate journeys to Ireland and the Congo. There wasn’t much time.
Adam reviewed his recollection of what had been said on Dr Meuriot’s return to the library with Sauvigny in tow. The two had by then been back and forth to the loft from which two gardiens had meanwhile removed Belcastel’s body.
Dr Blanche had left these arrangements to his colleague. He was propped up by cushions, on the library divan, recuperating from the shock of learning that the status quo which he had managed to restore after Adam’s scrape was now threatened by something worse. How much worse, he asked. What exactly had happened? He addressed his questions to the vicomte, but it was Dr Meuriot who replied.
‘An accident,’ he interjected curtly, when Sauvigny tried to describe the new mishap. When he tried again, Meuriot cut him short. ‘Vicomte, with respect, I beg you to hear me out before you speak. We are, after all, discussing my patient.’
As if poor Monseigneur de Belcastel – by then lying under a sheet in the morning room – were alive and suffering from some faintly disreputable malaise!
Sauvigny, perhaps from military instinct, let Meuriot pull rank, and Dr Blanche did not protest. He had spent his last energies on Adam, with whom, not long before, he had been en tête à tête, when Meuriot walked in, accused them of sweeping something under the carpet, and demanded to know what it was. There had been nothing for it then but to give him a sanitized account of the fracas with Guy in which the opium was not an overdose but an appropriate quantity which had been prescribed by Blanche. Meuriot accepted these mitigating points, but Adam saw that the real significance of the exchange was that Blanche felt obliged to provide them. Meuriot had taken over.
It was no surprise then, that, when news came of the monsignor’s accident, Blanche could not cope. He closed his eyes, and his face crumpled. Quite suddenly he had to lie down.
By contrast Meuriot, when he returned, looked forceful. He presented a persuasive version of events. Belcastel had been responsible for accidentally closing the shutter; he had stepped on his own dressing-gown as he climbed the ladder – there was a tear to prove it – had lost his footing and had fallen against the garden roller. He had been alone. Two questions remained to be settled: why had he gone there at all and how had the vicomte come to find him?
Meuriot’s jowls shook impressively as his large, authoritative head, amplified by a vigorous growth of grey side-whiskers, slewed about. ‘You,’ he eyed the vicomte, ‘were no doubt looking for him? The maidservant, who says he followed you outside, must have got things wrong. She is a young featherhead and quite undependable. You followed him, n’est-ce pas?’
‘I ...’
‘And found him dead. In the dark? You had come here, I am told, “between two trains”, precisely to see him? So you were in a hurry and when you saw him making for the loft, you followed him. It is perfectly logical. Nobody is to blame. It was, as I said, an unhappy accident – especially so as the poor, dear man was cured and due to leave us in a day or so.’
Blanche, Adam and Sauvigny were silent. Each may have been waiting to see if one of the others would speak. Then the moment for speaking passed.
Meuriot nodded. ‘The other question remains. Why did the monsignor go to the loft in the first place? Mmm? Someone must have an idea.’ Waiting, he sighed irritably. This time silence wouldn’t do.
To his own surprise, Adam heard himself say, ‘He sometimes went there to read his breviary. He liked to lie in the hammock. It was a place to be alone.’ This was almost true. The monsignor had, after all, gone there once.
‘In the rain? In his dressing-gown?’
‘Perhaps he had left the breviary there and was anxious about it? It was a gift from the comte de Chambord and very precious to him.’ This was an outright improvisation.
&nbs
p; Again Meuriot nodded. He looked relieved.
Adam had spoken from habit. Fixing things was what he had done as Dr Blanche’s factotum and right-hand man. The question remained though: what had really happened? Better perhaps not to know. Monseigneur de Belcastel would not have liked a scandal.
A milk dray was holding up the hackney cab. Looking out, Adam saw that they were nearing the station. They could be there in five minutes. The silence felt like metal, like stone. He must break through it. ‘Well,’ he managed to say, ‘between us we averted a scandal! It was the least we could do for poor Monseigneur de Belcastel.’
The vicomte sighed.
Dazed, Adam decided. Not angry: dazed. Hoping to rouse him gently, he sighed too. It was the pitch of the voice, he had found with inmates, which mattered most. ‘Don’t worry,’ he cajoled soothingly, then, more soothingly still: ‘I know that it’s hard. I myself sometimes worry that I bring bad luck to people I care for. It’s like a fate.’
This, it struck him, might not be a wise thing to say if he wanted the vicomte to consent to his friendship with his niece. Not that the vicomte was listening. His hand moved. It had pulled something from an inner pocket. It was Danièle’s crimson neckband. Sauvigny dangled it on his forefinger.
‘Oh dear,’ thought Adam. ‘Zut!’
‘I took it,’ the vicomte told him, ‘when I went back in. From the nail on the rafter. I couldn’t leave it there.’
‘You know how it got there,’ Adam was inspired to lie. ‘Madame d’Armaillé gave it to the monsignor after he persuaded her to trust His Holiness. As a token of her trust.’
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