CHAPTER 57
Anatole and Isolde stood before the altar.
An hour past, all the papers had been signed. The conditions of Jules Lascombe’s will, after the delays of the summer, had finally been verified.
Lascombe had left his estate to his widow for her lifetime. In an unexpected twist of fortune, he had willed that in the event of her remarrying, the property should pass to the son of his half-sister, Marguerite Vernier, née Lascombe.
When the lawyer had read the terms out loud in his dry and scratchy voice, it had taken a moment for Anatole to realise that it was to him that the document referred. It was all he could do not to laugh out loud. The Domaine de la Cade, one way or another, would belong to them.
Now, half an hour later, as they stood in the small Jesuit chapel and the priest spoke the closing words of the brief ceremony that joined them together as man and wife, Anatole reached out and took Isolde’s hands.
‘Madame Vernier, enfin,’ he whispered. ‘Mon cœur.’
The witnesses, chosen at random, on the street, smiled at their open signs of affection, although they considered it a pity it was such a modest affair.
Anatole and Isolde stepped out into the street to the peal of bells. They heard the thunder. Wishing to spend the first hour of their married life alone – and reassured that Léonie and Marieta were comfortably in the hotel awaiting their return – they ran down the street and ducked into the first suitable establishment they came to.
Anatole ordered a bottle of Cristal, the most expensive champagne on the menu. They exchanged gifts. Anatole gave Isolde a silver locket with a miniature of her on one side, him on the other. She presented him with a fine gold-plate timepiece with his initials engraved on the top to replace the one stolen in the attack in the Passage des Panoramas.
For the next hour, they drank and talked, happy in one another’s affectionate company, as the first spots of heavy rain struck the wide plate-glass windows.
CHAPTER 58
Léonie felt a moment of disquiet as she descended the bridge. She could no longer pretend that she was not disobeying Anatole’s express instructions. She pushed the thought from her mind, then looked back over her shoulder to observe that black storm clouds were massing over the Bastide.
At this instant, she told herself, it would be wiser to remain on the far side of the river away from the worst of the weather. Indeed, it would be inadvisable to return to the Basse Ville quite yet. Besides, an adventuress, a lady explorer, would not give up the chase simply because her brother told her so.
The quartier Trivalle was more unnerving, far poorer, than she had imagined. All the children were barefoot. At the side of the road, a blind beggar with milky, dead eyes sat swaddled in a cloth the colour of the damp pavement. With hands streaked black with grime and poverty, he held out a filthy cup as she passed by. She dropped a coin into it and picked her way cautiously up the cobblestoned road, which was lined with plain buildings. The shutters all were peeling and in a state of disrepair. Léonie wrinkled her nose. The street smelled of overcrowding and neglect.
It will be better within the Cité.
The road sloped gently upwards. She found herself clear of the buildings and in the open air, the beginning of the green approach to the Cité itself. To her left, at the top of a crumbling set of stone steps, she glimpsed a heavy wooden door set deep within ancient grey walls. The sign, battered and worn, announced that this was the Capuchin convent.
Had once been.
Neither Léonie nor Anatole had been brought up in the repressive shadow of the Church. Her mother was too free a spirit and her father’s Republican sympathies meant that, as Anatole had once explained it to her, Leo Vernier considered clerics as much of an enemy to the establishment of a true Republic as the aristocracy. Nevertheless, Léonie’s romantic imagination caused her to regret the intransigence of politics and progress that demanded all beauty should be sacrificed for principle. The architecture spoke to her, even if the words echoed within the convent did not.
In reflective mood, Léonie continued past a rather fine landmark, the Maison de Montmorency, with exterior wooden beams and mullioned windows, the diamond panes of glass catching the light in prisms of blue and pink and yellow, despite the dullness of the sky.
At the top of the rue Trivalle, she turned to the right. Straight ahead, she could see the high and narrow sand-coloured towers of the Porte Narbonnaise, the primary entrance into the Cité. Her heart lurched with excitement at the double ring of walls, punctuated by towers, some with red-tiled roofs, some with grey slates, all in silhouette against the glowering sky.
Holding her skirts in one hand to make the climbing easier, she fared forward with renewed vigour. As she drew closer, she saw the tops of grey tombstones with soaring angels and monumental crosses behind the high walls of a cemetery.
Beyond, all was pasture and grasslands.
Léonie paused a moment to catch her breath. The approach into the citadel was by means of a cobblestoned bridge over a grassy moat, flat and wide. At the head of the bridge was a small rectangular toll office. A man wearing a battered top hat and old-fashioned whiskers stood, hands in his pockets, looking out and claiming payment from the drivers of goods carts, merchants carrying barrels of ale for the Cité.
Perched on the wide and low stone wall of the bridge was a man, in the company of two soldiers. He was wearing an old blue Napoleonic cape and smoking a long-stemmed pipe as black as his teeth. All three men were laughing. For a moment, Léonie fancied his eyes widened a fraction as he caught sight of her. He held her in his gaze a moment, his stare a little impertinent, then looked away. Unnerved by his attention, she walked quickly past.
As she stepped out on to the bridge, the direct force of the north-westerly wind struck her. She was obliged to put one hand on her hat to hold it in place, and with the other keep her swirling skirts free from tangling around her legs. She fought her way forward, eyes screwed tight against the dust and grit thrown up into her face.
But the instant she passed into the Cité, she was sheltered from the wind. She paused a moment to adjust her clothing, then, taking care not to dampen her boots in the stream of water running down the gutter in the centre of the cobbles, she made her way through into the open space between the inner and outer fortifications. There was a pump, with two boys powering the metal arm up and down, spitting water into a metal pail. To left and right she saw the remains of the humble shanty houses that had recently been demolished. At upper-storey height, hanging in mid-air, was a hearthstone, black with soot, left behind when the lodgings had been torn down.
Wishing she had had the foresight to conceal her guidebook in her pocket before departing the hotel, rather than the map of the Bastide only, Léonie asked for directions and was informed that the castle was straight ahead, set into the western walls of the fortification. As she walked on, she felt a flutter of misgiving. After the distant grandeur of the exterior and the windswept spaces of the hautes lices, the space between the inner and outer walls, the interior was darker and more sombre than she had expected. And it was dirty. Mud covered the slippery cobbles. Debris and detritus of all kinds littered the gutters.
Léonie picked her way up the narrow street, following a hand-painted wooden sign for the Château Comtal, where the garrison was quartered. This, too, disappointed. From previous reading, she knew it had once been the home of the Trencavel dynasty, lords of the Cité many hundreds of years ago. Léonie had imagined a fairytale castle, such as those that stood on the banks of the Rhône or the Loire. She had pictured courtyards and great halls, filled with ladies in sweeping dresses, and chevaliers riding out to battle.
The Château Comtal looked like what it now was, a plain military building, efficient, workaday, drab. The Tour de Vade, in the shadow of the walls, was a powder depot. A single sentinel stood guard, picking his teeth. The place wore a mantle of neglect, a building tolerated but not cherished.
Léonie looked for a while from beneath the wide rim of her hat, attempting to see some romance in the plain bridge and the functional narrow gateway into the château itself, but could find none. As she turned away, the thought came into her mind that attempts to rejuvenate the Cité as a tourist landmark were likely to fail. She could not imagine streets such as these thronged with visitors. It was too dull, not designed to appeal to contemporary tastes and fashions. The newly repaired walls, the machine-cut stone and tiles only emphasised how ruined were the authentic surroundings. She could only assume the hope was that when the works were finished the atmosphere would change. That new restaurants, shops, perhaps even a hotel, would bring life again to the winding streets. Léonie strolled up and down the passageways. A few fellow travellers, ladies with their hands warm in fur muffs, gentlemen with walking sticks and top hats, bade her good afternoon.
The wind was even stronger here, and Léonie was obliged to retrieve her handkerchief from her pocket and hold it across her mouth and nose as protection against the worst of the damp air. She picked her way through a complicated chicane, and found herself standing beside an old stone cross looking out over terraced market gardens, with vegetable plots, vines, chicken coops and rabbit hutches. Below, a cluster of small, cramped houses.
From this vantage point, she could see clearly how very high the river was. A restless, swirling black mass of water, speeding through the mills, setting the blades spinning. Beyond, the Bastide lay spread out before her. She could pick out the spire of the cathedral of Saint-Michel and the tall, thin bell tower of the église Saint-Vincent, hard by their hotel. Léonie felt a spike of anxiety. She glanced up at the threatening sky and realised she could find herself confined on the far side of the river, trapped by the water levels rising. The Basse Ville seemed suddenly some distance off. The story she had concocted in her mind to tell Anatole of how she had become disorientated and lost in the narrow streets of the Bastide would be of no matter if she was caught by flooding
A movement above her head made her glance up. A flock of autumn crows, black against the grey sky, flew up over the turrets and battlements, battling against the wind.
Léonie started to hurry. The first spot of rain landed upon her cheek. Then another and another, faster, heavier, colder. Then a rattle of sleet and a single, abrupt crack of thunder. Suddenly all around was water.
The storm, so long threatened, had arrived.