CHAPTER 89
Autumn 1892 tipped into spring 1893, and still Constant did not return to the Domaine de la Cade. Léonie allowed herself to believe he was dead, although she would have been grateful for confirmation of it.
August of 1893 was, like the previous year, as hot and dry as the African deserts. The drought was followed by torrential inundations throughout the Languedoc, washing away sections of land on the plains, revealing long-hidden caves and cachettes beneath the mud.
Achille Debussy remained a regular correspondent. In December he wrote with Christmas greetings and to tell Léonie that the Société Nationale was to present in concert a performance of L’Après-Midi d’un Faune, a new composition intended as the first of a suite of three pieces. As she read his naturalistic descriptions of the faun in his glade, Léonie was put in mind of the clearing within which she had, two years before, discovered the deck of cards. For an instant she was tempted to retrace her steps to the spot and see if the Tarot was still there.
She did not do so.
Rather than the boulevards and avenues of Paris, her world continued to be bounded by the beech woods to the east, the long driveway to the north, the lawns to the south. She was sustained only by the love of one little boy and her affection for the beautiful but damaged woman for whom she had promised to care.
Louis-Anatole became a favourite with the town and the household, who nicknamed him pichon, little one. He was mischievous, but always charming. He was full of questions, more like his aunt than his dead father, but capable of listening also. As he grew taller, he and Léonie walked the pathways and woods of the Domaine de la Cade. Or else he was taken fishing by Pascal, who also taught him to swim in the lake. From time to time, Marieta would permit him to scrape the mixing bowl and lick the wooden spoon when she had been cooking – raspberry soufflé, chocolate puddings. He would balance on the old three-legged stool set hard against the rim of the kitchen table, one of the maid’s crisp white aprons reaching down to his ankles, and Marieta, standing behind him to be sure he didn’t fall, would teach him to knead dough for bread.
When Léonie took him to visit in Rennes-les-Bains, his favourite treat was to sit at the pavement café which Anatole had so loved. With his tumbling curls, white ruffed shirt and nut-brown velvet trousers drawn tight at the knee, he sat with his legs hanging down from the high wooden stool. He drank cherry syrup or freshly pressed apples, and ate chocolate creams.
On his third birthday, Madame Bousquet presented Louis-Anatole with a bamboo fishing rod. The following Christmas, Maître Fromilhague sent a box of tin soldiers to the house and presented the compliments of the season to Léonie.
He was a regular visitor, too, to the house of Audric Baillard, who told him stories of medieval times and the honour of the chevaliers who had defended the independence of the Midi against the northern invaders. Rather than plunge the boy into the pages of sooty history books gathering dust in the library of the Domaine de la Cade, Monsieur Baillard brought the past to life. Louis-Anatole’s favourite story was the siege of Carcassonne in 1209 and the brave men, women, even children little older than he who had fled to the hidden villages of the Haute Vallée.
When he was four years old, Audric Baillard gave him a replica of a medieval battle sword, its hilt engraved and carved with his initials. Léonie purchased for him from Quillan, with the assistance of one of Pascal’s many cousins, a small copper pony, chestnut with a thick white mane and tail and a white flash on its nose. For the duration of that hot summer, Louis-Anatole was a chevalier, fighting the French or victorious at the joust, knocking tin cans from a wooden fence set up by Pascal for the purpose on the rear lawns. From the drawing room window, Léonie would watch, remembering how, as a little girl, she had watched Anatole run and hide and climb trees in the Parc Monceau with much the same sense of awe and envy.
Louis-Anatole also showed a marked talent for music, the money wasted on keyboard lessons for Anatole in his youth paying dividends in his son. Léonie engaged a piano teacher from Limoux. Once a week, the professor would rumble up the long drive in the dog cart, with his white neckerchief and pinned stocks and untrimmed beard, and for two hours would drill Louis-Anatole in five-finger exercises and scales. Each week, as he took his departure, he would press Léonie to make the boy practise with glasses of water balanced upon the backs of his hands to keep the touch. Léonie and Louis-Anatole would nod and, for a day or two following, he would attempt to do so. But then the water would spill, soaking Louis-Anatole’s velvet breeches or staining the wide hems of Léonie’s skirts, and they would laugh and play noisy duets instead.
When he was alone, often the boy would tiptoe to the piano and experiment. Léonie would stand on the landing at the top of the stairs, unobserved, and listen to the gentle, haunting melodies his child’s fingers could create. Wherever he started, most frequently he would find his way to the key of A minor. And then Léonie would think of the music she had stolen so long ago from the sepulchre, concealed still in the piano stool, and wonder if she should take it out for him. But fearing the power of it and its actions upon the place itself, she stayed her hand.
Throughout this time, Isolde lived in a twilight world, drifting through the rooms and the passageways of the Domaine de la Cade like a wraith. She spoke little, she was kind to her son and much loved by the servants. Only when she looked into Léonie’s emerald eyes did something deeper spark inside her. Then, for a fleeting second, grief and memory would blaze in her eyes, before a cloak of darkness came down over them once more. Some days were better than others. On occasion, Isolde would emerge from her shadows, like the sun coming out from behind the cloud. But then the voices would start once more and she would clasp her hands over her ears and weep, and Marieta would gently lead her back to the privacy and half-light of her chamber until better times returned. The periods of peace grew shorter. The darkness around her grew deeper. Anatole was never far from her mind. For his part, Louis-Anatole accepted his mother as she was – he had never known her any different.
All in all, it was not the life Léonie had imagined for herself. She would have wished for love, for a chance to see more of the world, to be herself. But she loved her nephew and pitied Isolde and, determined to keep her word to Anatole, did not waver in her duty.
Copper autumns gave way to chill white winters, when the snow lay thick upon the tomb of Marguerite Vernier in Paris. Green springs gave way to blazing golden skies and scorched pasture, and the briars grew tangled around the more modest grave of Anatole overlooking the lake at the Domaine de la Cade.
Earth, wind, water and fire, the unchanging pattern of the natural world.
Their peaceful existence was not to last for much longer. Between Christmas and the New Year of 1897, there was a succession of signs – omens, warnings even – that things were not right.
In Quillan, a chimneysweep’s boy fell and broke his neck. In Espéraza, fire broke out in the hat factory, killing four of the Spanish female workers. In the atelier of the Bousquet family, an apprentice became trapped in the hot metal printing press and lost all four fingers on his right hand.
For Léonie, the general disquiet became specific when Monsieur Baillard came to give her the unwelcome news that he was obliged to quit Rennes-les-Bains. It was the time of local winter fairs – in Brenac on 19th January, Campagne-sur-Aude on the 20th and Belvianes on the 22nd. He was to pay his visits to those outlying villages, then make his way higher into the mountains. His eyes veiled with concern, he explained that there were obligations, older and more binding than his unofficial guardianship of Louis-Anatole, which he could delay no longer. Léonie regretted his decision, but knew better than to question him. He gave his word that he would return before the feast day of St Martin in November, when the rents were collected.
She was dismayed that his séjour was to be of so many months’ duration, but she had learned long ago that Monsieur Baillard would never be deflected from any purpose once a decision had been made.
His imminent departure – and the unexplained reasons for it – reminded Léonie once more of how little she knew of her friend and protector. She did not even know for certain how old he was, although Louis-Anatole had declared that he must be at least seven hundred years old to have so many stories to tell.
Mere days after Audric Baillard’s departure, scandal erupted in Rennes-le-Château. The Abbé Saunière’s restoration of his church was all but completed. In the early cold months of 1897, the statuary ordered from a specialist supplier in Toulouse was delivered. Among them was a bénitier – a stoup for holy water – resting on the shoulders of a twisted demon. Voices were raised in objection, vociferous, insisting that this and many other of the statues were unsuitable for a house of worship. Letters of protest were sent to the Mairie and to the Bishop, some anonymous, demanding that Saunière be brought to account. Demanding, too, that the priest be no longer permitted to dig in the graveyard.
Léonie had not known about the night-time excavations around the church, nor that Saunière was said to spend the hours between dusk and dawn walking the nearby mountainside, looking for treasure, or so it was rumoured. She did not involve herself in the debate nor in the growing tide of complaint against a priest she had considered devoted to his parish. Her unease came from the fact that certain of the statues were so precisely a match for those within the sepulchre. It was as if someone was guiding Abbé Saunière’s hand and, at the same time, working to cause trouble against him.
Léonie knew that he had seen the statues in her late uncle’s time. Why, some twelve years after the event, he should choose to replicate images that had caused such harm before, she did not understand. With her friend and guide Audric Baillard absent, there was no one with whom she could discuss her fears.
The discontent spread down the mountain to the valley and Rennes-les-Bains. Suddenly there were whisperings that the troubles that had beset the town some years back had returned. There were rumours of secret tunnels running between Rennes-le-Château and Rennes-les-Bains, of Visigoth burial chambers. Allegations that, as before, the Domaine de la Cade was the refuge of a wild beast started to gather force. Dogs, goats, even oxen were attacked, by wolves or mountain cats that appeared to be afraid neither of the traps nor the hunters’ guns. It was an unnatural creature, or so the rumours spread, not one governed by the normal laws of nature.
Although Pascal and Marieta tried hard to keep the gossip from reaching Léonie’s ears, some of the more malicious stories pierced her consciousness all the same. The campaign was subtle, no allegations were made out loud, so it was not possible for Léonie to answer the mounting drizzle of complaint directed against the Domaine de la Cade and the household.
There was no way of identifying the source of the spiteful rumours, only that they were intensifying. As winter went out and a cold and wet spring arrived, the allegations of supernatural occurrences at the Domaine de la Cade grew more frequent. Sightings of ghosts and demons, it was said, even of satanic rituals conducted under cover of night in the sepulchre. It was a return to the dark days of Jules Lascombe’s time as master of the house. The bitter and the jealous pointed to the events of Hallowe’en 1891 and claimed the ground was restless. Seeking retribution for past sins.
Old spells, ancient words in the traditional language, were scratched on rocks at the roadside to ward off the demon that now, as before, stalked the valley. Pentagrams were daubed in black tar on stones at the roadside. Votive offerings of flowers and ribbon were left at unmarked shrines.
One afternoon, when Léonie was sitting with Louis-Anatole in his favourite spot beneath the platanes in the Place du Pérou, a phrase sharply uttered caught her attention.
‘Lou Diable se ris.’
When she returned to the Domaine de la Cade, she asked Marieta what the words meant.
‘The devil is laughing,’ she reluctantly translated.
Had Léonie not known that such a thing was impossible, she would have suspected the hand of Victor Constant in the rumours and gossip. She chastised herself for such thoughts.
Constant was dead. The police thought so. He had to be dead. Otherwise why would he have let them be for nearly five years, only to return now?
