Judith Krantz

by Till We Meet Again

  Bruno sat on a tree trunk in a clearing in the forest, in a place of deeply slanted light, aware, in a way that was entirely new to him, that he was at a moment in his life when he could say to himself, “This is the best it can be.” The future held a parade of glorious events that rose before him as clearly as if this woodland were enchanted, but he had no urge to count them, no need to dwell on all the earthly delights that his father’s death now made possible for him. It was enough, just for now, to think about Marie de La Rochefoucauld. Less than three weeks ago, on her birthday night, her admission that she talked about him with her friends had let him know that she loved him. A girl like Marie would never speak her heart more plainly than she had that night.

  In the days following her party he had seen her frequently, and with his new understanding of her emotions, he could tell that in her demure, queenly, old-fashioned way she was waiting anxiously for him to respond to her. She hid her eagerness almost well enough so that if she had not already betrayed herself, he might still be in the condition of anxiety and self-doubt that had existed from the time he met her.

  Marie de La Rochefoucauld was his for the asking, Bruno knew, as he stretched his legs and his arms, exhausted with so much joy. From the instant she had admitted that she could not keep him to herself, he had begun that training in obedience he had promised himself to impose on her. He kept her waiting, dangling, hoping, and uncertain, while he employed all his deliberate and powerful charm to make her fall more deeply in love with him. In the last week her glances had begun to reveal her state of mind. A questioning anguish escaped her clear gray eyes in certain moments during which Marie believed that he wasn’t looking at her. Whenever Bruno spied that anguish, he became remote and superficially polite for a half hour, long enough to confuse and worry her, but not so long that she had reason to ask him what was wrong. Even before the news of Paul’s death, Marie’s universe began to be ruled by Bruno’s moods. He had all the time in the world, he told himself in triumph, to bring her to the point of nervous despair, if he desired, but now that he knew it was possible, it was not yet necessary to test his power.

  He would arrange their engagement, Bruno decided, as soon as he returned to New York, since nothing stood in the way of his return to France. They would fly back to Paris together in a few weeks’ time, so that he could meet Marie’s parents. Her mother would want to begin to plan the great wedding at which all the noble clans to which they belonged would gather to see them united. He imagined that the ceremony would take place in the spring—soon enough, since it was inevitable that in the fullness of time Marie was destined to become the peerless Vicomtesse Bruno de Saint-Fraycourt de Lancel. She would exist to please him; together they would found a dynasty.

  But not here in Champagne. He never wanted to see Valmont again. Only this funeral, so bitterly delayed, so long-awaited, so prayed-for, could have brought him back to this province for even a day. Let whoever chose to live here do so, burdened with all the alarms and worries of a peasant. Let anyone maintain Valmont, so long as he himself received his fair share of the profits of the House of Lancel.

  Perhaps it was time to go back to the château, Bruno thought, lazy distaste tainting his perfect happiness. He hated to get up and abandon his thoughts when everything he had ever wanted was finally within his grasp, but there was a damp chill in the forest air. “This is the best it can be,” he repeated to himself, knowing that this moment would return again and again throughout his lifetime. A breeze sprung up as the leaves in the clearing started rustling behind him.

  A hand, huge, rough, clapped over his mouth, forcing his head back. An arm, heavily muscled, tightened brutally around his neck. Other hands grabbed his arms, jerked them ferociously behind his back and fastened them tightly together. Hoisted to his feet, forced relentlessly forward, Bruno had to walk or fall. His captors marched behind him, so close that he felt their breath on his nape.

  “You should never have come back,” muttered a male voice that Bruno didn’t recognize. “Never return to the scene of the crime. Don’t you know that?”

  “Remember the three Martins? Remember the men you denounced to the Gestapo? We are their younger brothers,” a second voice whispered, barely audible over the crumbling of autumn leaves under their feet.

  Now a third man spoke, almost as softly. “We were coming to find you the day your father arrived home from the war, but you disappeared.”

  “We intend to teach you a lesson,” grunted the man who had spoken first. “Move!”

  In his plunge into terror, Bruno was able to understand only that they were skirting the path toward the cellars. Not one human soul was visible anywhere in the landscape, as the late autumn light grew dimmer. The giant hand over his mouth kept him silent, grinding his lips painfully into his teeth.

  “You thought you’d gotten away with it, didn’t you? You thought that you had destroyed the only men who knew about Le Trésor.”

  Frantically, Bruno tried to shake his head.

  “Don’t deny it. We know it was you,” the third voice muttered in his ear, its merciless edge only sharpened by its reined-in softness.

  “There was another key,” the second voice said in a hideous whisper. “The key belonged to my brother, Jacques, the oldest of the Martins. Your grandfather trusted him as he trusted the others. Except for your father, you had the only other key. There have never been more than three keys to Le Trésor in the history of Valmont.

  “Jacques saw a German convoy one night, near the cellars. He followed, hid, and watched the soldiers carrying champagne into their trucks. The next day he went to Le Trésor and discovered that it was empty. He was afraid that someone might blame him or our brothers, until he understood that it could only be you who had sold the Germans the secret of Valmont. He told us everything, and gave us the key for safekeeping.

  “When the Gestapo came for our brothers,” the wolfish whisper continued, “we realized that you had had them murdered. We could not act because your Nazi friends protected you. After the war, your father never spoke to anyone of Le Trésor. He knew who the real thief was. We respected his shame. We respected his grief. We knew you’d return one day. He must have known it too.”

  Now they entered the huge, well-filled cellars, deserted by any workers, and hurried toward the far wall where the entrance to Le Trésor was hidden. Bruno struggled with insane strength, but he was as helpless as a piece of meat in the butcherly efficiency of their grip. One of them pressed on a chalk surface, and the wall swung open, the lock of the hidden door shining as brightly as it had when Bruno’s grandfather first entrusted him with the secret of Valmont. A key was put in the lock, and the door of Le Trésor swung wide.

  One of the Martins turned on the lights and closed the thick, hinged blocks of chalk behind them, muffling all noise.

  The three men dragged Bruno through the vast, empty cellar. His feet scraped the ground. He had gone limp with knowledge, yet his eyes were still open, still aware, as they propped him up against the back wall. They moved quickly away from him under the battery of lights. The cousins un-slung the rifles that hung from their shoulders, lifted them and took aim.

  Three shots rang out. The Martins walked slowly toward the body on the cement floor. One of them turned Bruno over with his shoe, looking at the sightless eyes, the mouth that had been opened to scream. He had been dead before he hit the floor. Another of them took out a piece of paper on which he quickly scribbled the words, Réglement de comptes.

  “Account paid in full,” he said slowly, and laid the paper on Bruno’s chest. They turned to leave, slipping their hunting rifles back over their shoulders.

  As the door to Le Trésor swung shut behind them, one of the Martins said to the others, “Tomorrow we must send the key and arrange to let the police know where he is. There will be no further investigation … not when they read the note on his body. It would not be fair to Madame de Lancel, otherwise. There would be an endless search and he would never be
found.”

  “His bones should not lie at Valmont. They desecrate it,” said another of the cousins.

  “I agree,” the third Martin said. “Nor is it good for people to believe that there is no final accounting. That man lived too long.”

  Delphine and Armand persuaded Eve to rest before dinner, and went upstairs with her, while Freddy remained downstairs in a small salon with Jane, who had finished her nap. They were trying to catch up on the threads of their lives that were cut when Freddy and Tony had left for Los Angeles, five years earlier.

  “I hated it bitterly when you two left,” Jane complained. “What was the good of having snared you as a sister-in-law if you were going to live so far away?”

  “Well, now you’ve got Tony back,” Freddy said, “and, believe me, he looked a lot more fit today than the last time I saw him. Being a squire again has made a great difference. And that nice girl he says he’s marrying … and giving up liquor. I’m happy for him.”

  “If I’d had a choice, I’d rather have kept you—I have plenty of other brothers. Oh dear, you did make a proper mess of it, the two of you. What a bloody balls-up! Wartime marriages—I wonder if they ever work? I’m so glad I had to wait.” Jane gave Freddy the self-congratulatory smile of a woman who has made a total success of her life.

  “Just imagine, Freddy, I would never have met darling Humphrey, I would never have had my darling children, I would never have been a marchioness, which is simply the most glorious game going, although you may never find anyone honest enough to admit it. The trick is not to worry about death duties. After all, they can’t take it all away. Yes, it was a good thing that I wasn’t a war bride too. It all worked out for the best.”

  “You never got remotely near being a war bride, Jane, as I remember perfectly well,” Freddy protested, “so how can you sit there being sickeningly pleased with yourself for having escaped a fate that never threatened you?”

  “If Jock had asked me, I’d have married him like a shot, and been dragged off to the desert sands of wildest California, just like poor old Tony.”

  “Come off it, Jane! You never had a romance with Jock!”

  “Don’t rub it in,” Jane said with a touch of caustic asperity. A hint of future stateliness moderated the naughtiness of her brown eyes, but otherwise she was unchanged by her noble marriage.

  “What are you talking about?” Freddy said, puzzled. It wasn’t like Jane to have fantasy flings when she’d had so many real ones.

  “You never guessed? No, I can see you didn’t. But then I didn’t want you to, or anybody else. It was horrible enough being ridiculously in love with someone who didn’t know I was alive, without being an object of general pity.”

  “You were in love with Jock Hampton?”

  “For years. And you don’t have to sound so incredulous … that’s a reflection on my taste, and my taste is excellent, if you please, Mrs. Longbridge! I was in love with that lovely man longer than I care to think about. I couldn’t get over Jock, not properly, until I met Humphrey. I guess I’ll always be a little in love with that beautiful blond Tarzan.”

  “That big thug? That over-the-hill cowboy? That derelict fullback, that only marginally intelligent lunkhead?” Freddy asked, bewildered and somehow angry. “No, Jane, say it wasn’t so.”

  “Ah, but it was. And how it was! I doubt you’ve ever taken a good look at Jock. Never mind—it’s a question of taste. But Freddy, don’t you agree that once you’ve been truly in love, even when you fall in love with someone else, the first love will always remain alive inside you?” Jane inquired.

  “I won’t quarrel with that,” Freddy said, her voice touched by a complicated nostalgia, the bittersweet memories of hours that could never return. “But why didn’t you make a play for Jock … you never even flirted with him … you, the most shameless, infamous flirt in the British Empire? What was stopping you?”

  “You,” Jane said.

  “Me?” Freddy objected, outraged. “That’s the most unfair thing I’ve ever heard! How could I have stopped you?… Why would I have stopped you, for God’s sake?”

  “Not you yourself, silly—I meant that Jock was so entirely, head over heels, hopelessly in love with you that there was no way to even get his attention, much less flirt with him. He used to drag himself around looking at you—or worse, trying not to look at you—in a way that told me everything I needed to know. God, it was painful to watch him! Obviously I had to hang on to my pride, since it was all I had left. I found myself in the utterly mortifying position of watching him pining away for you while I pined away for him—and all the while Freddy and Tony, our two happy, self-absorbed young lovers, never even noticed a thing. Ah, love! But, as I said, it all worked out for the best—at least for me. And you know how truly sorry I was—I still am—that it didn’t work out for you and Tony. As for Jock—how is he, anyway?”

  “Jock?… Oh, you know Jock, he’s … fine … going strong …”

  “Poor Jock, still carrying that huge torch for you … a bit like the Statue of Liberty, isn’t he? Tony told me he’d suspected it for years. But … when someone isn’t one’s type, one can’t force it, can one?”

  “Huh?”

  “I said … no, never mind. Of course you’re thinking about other things. Shall I make you a drink, poppet?”

  “Who?”

  “A drink? Do you want one? Freddy? Freddy? How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “What?”

  “I’ll see to the drinks. You just sit there, it’s been a long day. I’m glad I stayed over … you need someone to take care of you.”

  On the afternoon of the day following Paul de Lancel’s funeral, four officers from the headquarters of the Epernay police arrived at Valmont. They asked the housekeeper to tell Madame de Lancel that they were unwilling to disturb her grief, yet they were obliged to investigate an anonymous letter they had received concerning one of her cellars.

  “Go on, do your duty,” Lucie had said with authority. “Madame de Lancel will tell you the same thing, but I don’t intend to bother her with nonsense now.”

  The policemen left for the cellars, armed with the key and the map showing how to find the secret door to Le Trésor, which had been left at their headquarters by an unknown hand earlier in the day. Fifteen minutes later they stood in awe and astonishment as the door to Le Trésor swung open on a vast darkness. One of them groped about and found the light switch. The huge space was revealed to them under the brilliant lights, empty except for a body visible on the floor at the far side of the room. They approached it quickly. Even as they walked toward it, three of the four men, who had been in Epernay all through the war, recognized Bruno. Two of them swore softly, but without surprise. As they all stood over the corpse in a moment of hesitation, one of them, the senior officer, bent down to pick up the paper that had been left on Bruno’s chest. He read it silently and passed it to the man standing next to him. Each of the policemen read the note in the same silence, and the three who had known Bruno gazed at each other in immediate understanding.

  “What do we do now, Captain?” asked the youngest of the men.

  “We bring the body to the château and we report the accident at headquarters, my boy.”

  “The accident, Captain?”

  “You were not here during the war, Henri. Many people had reason to want this man dead. Who could possibly find out now who they were? Or how many of them there were? Who would go to that unnecessary trouble? It could not be done, Henri. It should not be done. Take my word for it, Henri, if you wish to learn something useful. This was an accident that was meant to happen.”

  “If you say so, Captain.”

  “I do, Henri. We all do.”

  “I cannot possibly understand why the police reported Bruno’s death as a hunting accident,” Freddy said. “I’m still in shock. Didn’t they have to know that it was murder—finding him after they got an anonymous tip—what else could it have been? Yet they’re not even going t
o investigate. I don’t hold any particular grief for Bruno, but what’s going on here? Doesn’t anyone else but me think that it’s simply unbelievable?”

  Freddy, Eve, Delphine and Armand had just returned from the hurried formalities of Bruno’s funeral, and were sitting outside on the terrace of Valmont, where the old stones still held the warmth of summer.

  “It was neither an accident nor murder,” Eve said, putting her arm around Freddy’s shoulder. “It was an execution.”

  “What! An execution? What does that mean? And since when are private executions legal in France? Why aren’t any of you more … I don’t know exactly … more surprised? Yes, that’s it! When they brought Bruno’s body to the house, I think I was the only person in the family who was truly stunned. The rest of you seemed to almost accept it—in a way as if you had all … expected something like that to happen. But you couldn’t have! What reason would anybody possibly have to imagine that Bruno was going to end up stone cold dead, a day after he left for a walk in the woods?”

  “Darling, you’ve seen the monument in the center of Epernay, haven’t you?” Eve asked.

  “Yes, but what does that have to do with it?”

  “It’s not a tribute to dead soldiers, Freddy, it’s engraved with the names of two hundred and eight men and women of this small region who died in the Resistance, some at the hands of the Gestapo, many in concentration camps. A number of them worked here at Valmont. The police understood that Bruno’s death was connected to those deaths. He was a collaborator.”

  “You knew?” Delphine turned in astonishment, her hands flying to cover her mouth.

  “Your father told me, but only me. He never wanted anyone else to know—the disgrace of the family name by his own son—it was to be hidden, even from you. However, we both realized that we knew only a part of the story. Who can tell what evil Bruno did here during the Occupation? He was alone at Valmont, after your grandfather died, for three dark years. Many people must have had good reason to bring him to justice.”