‘Yes?’ he says, blinking. His eyes are the familiar sharp pale blue but in no other way does he resemble either Louis or Modeste. But they are him and he is them.
I hold out my bottle of wine. ‘I came to say thank you for hauling me out of the drink.’
He frowns. ‘You? You don’t look like . . .’
‘The bedraggled wretch you fished out of the river?’
He nods and smiles a little. I’d forgotten that dimple on his cheek. ‘How did you find me?’ he says.
I tap the painting on the side of the cabin. ‘The Deer House,’ I say. ‘I remember the Deer House.’
‘The Deer House? Climbing the wall in the dark? Those years ago? I remember. I looked for you . . .’ He blinks again. Now he knows. He knows it’s me; he remembers that fateful night so many years ago. ‘Come inside,’ he says. ‘Please.’
I follow him into the narrow space with shining wood walls and crowded shelves with objects lined up in order. It has a kind of tightly packed elegance. He takes two glasses from a shelf and gestures for me to sit down on a side bench and sits on the opposite side to open the bottle. Here we are, face to face. ‘I left your house open. I’m sorry,’ he says calmly.
He tells me that he found the Maison d’Estella and went exploring. We are on our second drink when he asks about Siri. ‘She was your daughter? I saw the news cuttings in your top room. Sorry, I shouldn’t have been so nosy . . .’
‘You more than anyone have a right to know about Siri.’
I will tell him all about Siri. And Louis, and Modeste and Tib. But there will be plenty of time for all that. First . . . ‘Your name! The nurse said you were an Englishman called Charles something . . .’
He grins and moves to sit beside me on the narrow bench so we are sitting tightly, shoulder to shoulder. ‘My ex-wife preferred Charles, but really it’s Ludovic. Do you remember, your friend compared me to a board game? So it’s Ludovic.’ He takes a long sip of his wine and turns to look straight at me with those big blue eyes. Louis. Modeste. ‘My friends now call me Luke. A work thing,’ he says, holding up his glass in a toast to me. Or both of us, perhaps.
‘Hello again, Ludovic,’ I say. ‘Hello Luke.’
THIRTY-SEVEN
And in the Beginning
I found out the truth about Tibery and Modeste the day before Luke and I set off on the Deer House to begin our journey back to England. The days since he dragged me out of the river had been a tumble of catching up, explanation and exploration. Luke was desolate to hear about Siri, knowing her and losing her in an instant, concerned about my grief and faintly disbelieving about my stories of Louis and Madame Patrice, Tibery and Modeste. Odd, that – Luke smiling in disbelief, looking at me with Modeste’s eyes.
On our last day in Agde we went on Luke’s motorbike to a place called St Thibery, a mile or so from the city. There by the river we found a small dusty town whose streets circled in an odd fashion around the remnants of a beautiful medieval abbey. We kept getting lost. We found the one tabac then lost it again. We found the one boulangerie then lost it again. Somehow there was no way of knowing our left from our right. It was a shapeshifting kind of place.
We sat in the one café and I tried to tell Luke about the Cessero I knew. We wandered around again, hand in hand. I tried and failed to see my Cessero. Only its location near the river told me it was the place I wanted it to be: that and the dusty plaque linking the medieval abbey to the martyred boy. Saint Thibery.
We called in the tiny tourist shop and I asked the woman for information about the village and its history. She rooted in a store cupboard and fished out a sheaf of papers. ‘Seulement un document, Madame,’ she said, smiling.
The document is single-spaced, seven pages long, in faded typescript and unsigned. It speaks of Tib and Modeste. So, as Luke and I made our way north through the locks on the Canal du Midi and then up the great rivers on our way to Paris, I used his old doorstep Harrap’s dictionary to translate the pages of the document one by one. I worked very hard to get it right, careful not to add my own remembered truths, the truths of my own experience.
I was sitting with my back to Luke’s bike on the deck of the Deer House when I wrote the last words on my pad and read my translation right through again. Looking up at the night sky over Paris I could see Virgo twinkling above us. And across the sky, steady as ever, the Great Bear sat secure in its proper place.
Afterword
Extract from Starr Warner’s translation of her ‘found’ paper:
The Greeks, the Gauls and the Romans called this place Keppero, then Cessero. Only after the Merovingian age, when the Christian era began, was it called Saint Thibery . . . There was a child called Thibery who in the fourth century AD was found guilty of embracing Christianity and martyred in this place . . . As legend has it, the boy could cure a sick man of his mental demons with a single touch. His noble and inspiring acts made people respect and admire him. And apart from his physical beauty he possessed the highest intelligence and a loving heart. Even at eleven years old he was sensitive to the flaws in the human heart and was particularly skilled at curing those ill in the mind . . . Thibery was born in Agde – then called Good Fortune – in 301 or 293. His father Helée, governor of the city of Agde, was a devoted servant of Rome . . . He appointed, as tutor for his son, a wise and literary man called Modeste, who bestowed on his pupil the sacred fruits of knowledge gathered throughout his life . . . The fact is that in secret, Modeste was following the new religion of Christianity. His pupil witnessed his commitment and – like his tutor – was drawn to Christianity and secretly began to participate in the rites of that religion . . . Although he cured his father of blindness and also cured a relative of the Emperor Diocletian of a degenerative sickness, Thibery and Modeste’s religion made them traitors and, with their companion Florence, they were executed on 10th November 304 AD. The executions took place on the landing stage at Cessero. The three of them were buried at their place of execution . . .
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