CHAPTER 91
The private drawing room on the first floor of a hotel on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees was full of acrid smoke from the Turkish cigarettes the resident guest had smoked since his arrival some weeks before.
It was a warm day in August, yet he was dressed as for midwinter in a thick grey greatcoat and soft calfskin gloves. His frame was emaciated and his head bobbed slightly in perpetual motion, as if disagreeing with a question no one else could hear asked. With a hand that shook, he raised a glass of liquorice beer to his lips. He drank carefully through a mouth scabbed in the corners with pustules. But despite his haggard appearance, his eyes held the power to command, drilling into the souls of those observed like the sharpest jab of a stiletto.
He held up his glass.
His man stepped forward with the bottle of porter and filled his master’s glass. For a moment they made a grotesque tableau, the disfigured invalid and his grizzled servant, his scalp blistered and raw from scratching.
‘What news?’
‘They say she is drowned. By her own hand,’ the servant replied.
‘And the other?’
‘She cares for the child.’
Constant made no answer. The years of exile, the remorseless progress of the disease had left him weak. His body was failing. He could no longer walk easily. But if anything, it seemed to have sharpened his mind. Six years ago, he had been forced to act faster than he had wished. It had deprived him of the pleasure of enjoying his revenge. His interest in ruining the sister had been only for the purpose of torturing Vernier himself with the knowledge, so that mattered little to him. But the quick and clean death meted out to Vernier disappointed him still, and now it seemed he had been cheated of Isolde as well.
His precipitate flight over the border to Spain meant that Constant had not learned for some twelve months after the events of Hallowe’en 1891 that the whore had not only survived his bullet, but had lived to give birth to a son. The fact that she had escaped him again had played obsessively on his mind.
It was the desire to complete his revenge that had kept him patient these past six years. The attempts to seize his assets had almost ruined him. It had taken all the skill and immorality of his lawyers to protect his wealth and his whereabouts.
Constant had been forced to be cautious and circumspect, staying in exile on the far side of the border until all interest in him had died down. Finally, last winter, Inspector Thouron had been promoted and assigned to the investigation into the conduct of the army officer Dreyfus which was so occupying the Parisian police force. More relevant to Constant’s all-consuming desire to be revenged upon Isolde, word had reached him that Inspector Bouchou of the Carcassonne gendarmerie had finally retired four weeks past.
At last, the way was clear for Constant to return quietly to France.
He had sent his man ahead to prepare the ground in the spring. With anonymous letters to the town hall and the Church authorities, it had been easy to fan the flames of a whispering campaign against the Abbé Saunière, a priest associated particularly with the Domaine de la Cade and the events Constant knew had taken place in Jules Lascombe’s day. Constant had heard the rumours of a devil, a demon, released in the past to terrorise the countryside.
It was his paid associates who spread new rumours of a beast stalking the mountain valleys and attacking livestock. His servant travelled from village to village, rousing the crowds and spreading rumours that the sepulchre in the grounds of the Domaine de la Cade was once again the centre of occult activity. He began with the vulnerable and the unprotected, the barefooted beggars who slept out of doors or found shelter beneath the drayman’s cart, the winter shepherds in their isolation on the mountains, those who followed the Assizes from town to town. He dripped Constant’s poison into the ears of drapers and glaziers, boot boys from the big houses, cleaners and pantry maids.
The villagers were superstitious and gullible. Tradition, myth and history confirmed his calumnies. A whisper here and there that the marks were not those of an animal’s claws. That strange wailings were heard in the night. That there was a putrid stench. All evidence that some supernatural demon was come to demand retribution for the unnatural state of affairs at the Domaine de la Cade – an aunt taken in marriage by her husband’s nephew.
All three were now dead.
With invisible threads, he drew his net around the Domaine de la Cade.
And if it was true that there were attacks for which his man did not claim credit, Constant assumed these were no more than the usual litany of the savagery of mountain cats, or wolves, stalking the higher pastures and peaks.
Now, with Bouchou’s retirement, the time was right to act. He had waited too long already, and because he had done so, he had lost his chance to punish Isolde appropriately. Besides, despite the endless remedies and treatments, the mercury, the waters, the laudanum, Constant was dying. He knew he did not have long before his mind too would fail. He recognised the signs, could diagnose himself now as accurately as any quack. The only thing he now feared was the brief, final flare of lucidity, before the shadows des-cended for good.
Constant planned to cross the border at the beginning of September and return to Rennes-les-Bains. Vernier was dead. Isolde was dead. But there was still the boy.
From the pocket of his waistcoat, he pulled the timepiece stolen from Vernier in the Passage des Panoramas nearly six years ago. As the Spanish shadows lengthened, he turned it over in his decaying, syphilitic hands, thinking of his Isolde.
