CHAPTER 50
Meredith went straight to the closet and retrieved the Tarot deck, unfolding the four corners of black silk as if the cards inside were made of glass.
The unsettling image of the Tower was on the top, the brooding grey and green of the background and the trees more vivid here in the clouded afternoon than they had seemed in Paris. She paused a moment, suddenly thinking that maybe it had been Justice on the top of the pile when Laura pressed the cards upon her, then shrugged. Obviously not.
She cleared a space on the bureau and put the cards down, then pulled out her notebook from her purse, wishing she’d taken the time last night to transpose her scribbled notes about the reading from page to screen.
Meredith thought for a moment, trying to figure out if she laid out the ten cards that had come up yesterday, in the peace and quiet of her own thoughts, then she might see something more in them. She decided against it. She was less interested in the reading per se than in the historical data she was gathering about the Bousquet Tarot and how the cards fitted in to the story of the Domaine de la Cade, the Verniers and the Lascombe family.
Meredith searched the deck until she had found all twenty-two of the major arcana. Putting the remainder of the cards to one side, she then laid them out in three rows one above the other, placing the Fool at the top on his own, just like Laura had done. The cards felt different to the touch. Yesterday they’d made her nervous. As if she was committing herself to something even by handling them. Today they seemed – and she knew it sounded stupid – kind of well meaning.
She slid the framed photograph from under her jacket and propped it on the bureau in front of her and studied the black and white figures, frozen in time. Then she dropped her eyes to the colourful images on the cards.
For a moment, her attention rested on Le Pagad, with his blue, blue eyes and thick black hair, gathering all the symbols of the Tarot to him. An attractive image, but a man to be trusted?
Then the tingling feeling on her neck started over, licking all the way down her spine as a new idea took hold. Was it possible? She put the Magician to one side. She picked up card I, Le Mat, and held it against the framed photograph. Now she had them side by side, she had no doubt the man was ‘Monsieur Vernier’ brought to life. The same debonair expression, the slim figure, the black moustache.
Next, card II, La Prêtresse. The ethereal, pale, distant features of ‘Madame Lascombe’, although in an evening gown, cut low at the neck, rather than the formal day clothes of the photograph. Meredith glanced back down, seeing the two figures painted together as the Lovers and chained at the feet of the Devil.
Finally, card VIII, La Force: ‘Mademoiselle Léonie Vernier’.
Meredith felt herself smiling. She felt the greatest connection with this card, almost as if she knew the girl. In a way, she guessed, it was because Léonie resembled her mental image of Lilly Debussy. Léonie was younger, but there was that same wide-eyed innocence, the same thick copper hair, although loose on the card and tumbling down over her shoulders, rather than tied up in a formal style. Most of all, that same straightforward way of gazing directly into the lens.
A glint of understanding rippled beneath the surface of her conscious mind, but was gone before Meredith could grasp it.
She turned her attention to the other cards of the major arcana that had come up in the course of the day: the Devil, the Tower, the Hermit, the Emperor. She studied each in turn, but increasingly with the sense that they were taking her further away from where she wanted to be, not closer.
Meredith sat back in her chair. The antique seat creaked. She put her hands behind her head and closed her eyes.
What am I not seeing?
She let her thoughts wander back to the reading. Allowed Laura’s words to flow over her, in no particular order, letting the patterns emerge.
Octaves. All the eights.
Eight was the number of completion, of successful outcomes. There was also an explicit message about interference, obstacles, and conflict. Both Strength and Justice, in older packs, carried the number eight. Both La Justice and La Pagad had the infinity symbol, like a sideways figure of eight.
Music linked everything together. Her family background, the Bousquet Tarot, the Verniers, the reading in Paris, the sheet of piano music. She reached for her notebook, going back through the pages until she found the name she was looking for, the American cartomancer who’d linked the Tarot with music. She switched on her laptop, tapping her fingers impatiently as it sought a connection. Finally, the search box flashed up on the screen. Meredith typed PAUL FOSTER CASE. Moments later, a list of sites appeared.
She went straight to the Wikipedia entry, which was thorough and straightforward. An American, Paul Foster Case became interested in cards in the early 1900s while he was working the steamboats playing piano and organ in vaudeville. Thirty years later in Los Angeles, he set up an organisation to promote his own Tarot system, the Builders of the Adytum, known as BOTA. One of the distinguishing features of BOTA was that Case went public with his philosophy, in sharp contrast to most esoteric systems of the time, which relied on absolute secrecy and the idea of an elite. It was also interactive. Unlike any other decks, the BOTA cards were black and white, the idea being that each individual could colour them in, put their own mark upon them. This, as much as anything, helped bring Tarot into the US mainstream.
Another of Case’s innovations was the association of musical notes with certain of the major arcana. All of them, with the exception of card XX, the Sun, and IX, the Hermit – as if those two images alone stood outside the common run of things – were linked with a specific note.
Meredith looked at the illustration of a keyboard, with arrows showing which card went with which.
The Tower, Judgement and the Emperor were all assigned to the note C; the Devil was linked with A; D connected with the Lovers and Strength; the Magician and the unnumbered Fool were E.
C-A-D-E. Domaine de la Cade.
She stared at the screen, as if it was trying to trick her in some way.
C–A–D–E, all white notes, all associated with particular cards of the major arcana that had come up already.
And more than that, Meredith saw another connection that had been staring her in the face all along. She reached for her inherited sheet of piano music: Sepulchre 1891. She knew the piece backwards – the forty-five bars, the change of tempo in the middle section – in style and character suggesting nineteenth-century gardens and girls in white dresses. Echoes of Debussy and Satie and Dukas.
And built around the notes of A, C, D and E.
For a moment, Meredith forgot what she was doing, picturing her fingers flying over the keyboard. Nothing but the music existed. A, C, D and E. The final split arpeggio, the last chord fading away.
She sat back in her chair. Everything fitted together, sure.
But what the hell, if anything, does it mean?
In a moment, Meredith was back in Milwaukee, Miss Bridge’s advanced music class in senior high, repeating the same mantra over and over. A smile came to her lips. ‘An octave is made up of twelve plus one chromatic tones.’ She could all but hear her teacher’s voice in her head. ‘The semi-tone and the whole tone are the building blocks of the diatonic scale. There are eight tones in the diatonic scale, five in the pentatonic. The first, third and fifth tones in the diatonic scale are the building blocks of root chords, the formula for perfection, for beauty.’
Meredith let her memories come, leading her thoughts. Music and math, seeking the connections not the coincidences. She typed FIBONACCI into the search box. Watched as new words appeared in front of her. In 1202, Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci, developed a mathematical theory where numbers formed a sequence. After two starting values, each number was the sum of the two preceding numbers.
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377.
The relationship between pairs of consecutive numbers was said to approach the golden proportion, the golden mean.
In music, the Fibonacci principle was sometimes used to determine tunings. Fibonacci numbers also appeared in natural settings, such as branching in trees, the curve of waves, the arrangement of a pine cone. In sunflowers, for example, there were always eighty-nine seeds. Meredith smiled.
I remember.
Debussy had flirted with the Fibonacci sequence in his great orchestral tone poem, La Mer. It was one of the wonderful contradictions of Debussy that, although he was seen as a composer primarily concerned with mood and colour, some of his most popular works were in fact constructed around mathematical models. Or, rather, could be divided into sections that reflected the golden ratio, frequently by using the numbers of the standard Fibonacci sequence. So in La Mer the first movement was fifty-five bars long – a Fibonacci number – and it broke down into five sections of 21, 8, 8, 5 and 13 bars, all also Fibonacci numbers.
Meredith forced herself to slow down. To put her thoughts in order.
She went back to the Paul Foster Case site. Three of the four notes linked to the name of the Domaine – C, A and E – were Fibonacci numbers: the Fool was O, the Magician was I, and Strength was VIII.
Only D, card VI, the Lovers, wasn’t a Fibonacci number.
Meredith pushed her fingers through her black hair. Did that mean she’d got it wrong? Or that it was the exception that reinforced the rule?
She drummed her fingers on the desk as she figured it out. The Lovers did fit the sequence if they appeared as individuals rather than as a pair: Le Mat was zero, the Priestess was card II. And zero and two were both Fibonacci numbers, even if six was not.
But even so.
Even if those connections were valid, how could there be a link between the Bousquet Tarot, the Domaine de la Cade and Paul Foster Case? The dates didn’t work.
Case set up BOTA in the 1930s, and in America, not Europe. The Bousquet deck dated back to the 1890s, the minor arcana cards possibly even earlier. There was no way it could have been based on Case’s system.
What if I turn it on its head?
Meredith thought harder. What if Case had heard of the association of Tarot with music and then refined it for his own system? What if he’d heard of the Bousquet Tarot? Or maybe the Domaine de la Cade itself? Could the ideas have passed not from America to France, but the other way round?
She pulled her battered envelope from her purse and extracted the picture of the young man in soldier’s uniform. How had she been so blind? She had seen how the figure of Le Mat was Anatole Vernier, but hadn’t taken seriously the obvious resemblance between Vernier and her soldier? The family resemblance to Léonie too? The long dark lashes, the high forehead, the same trick of looking straight into the lens of the camera.
She glanced back to the portrait. The dates were right. The boy in the soldier’s uniform could be a younger brother, a cousin. Even a son.
And through him, down the generations, to me.
Meredith felt as if a great weight was being lifted from her chest. The burden of not knowing, like Hal had said earlier, crumbling and folding in on itself as she edged closer to the truth. But instantly, the cautious voice in her head kicked in, warning her against seeing what she wanted to see rather than what was there.
Verify it. The facts are out there. Test it.
Her fingers flying over the keys in her eagerness to find out everything, anything, Meredith hammered the word VERNIER into the search box.
She got nothing of use. Meredith stared in disbelief at the screen.
There’s got to be something?
She tried again, adding Bousquet and Rennes-les-Bains. This time, she got a few sites selling Tarot cards, and a couple of paragraphs about the Bousquet deck, but nothing more than she’d already found out.
Meredith sat back in her chair. The obvious way forward was to register with family search websites in this part of France and see if she could pick her way back to the past that way, although it would take a while. But maybe Mary could help out from the other end.
With impatient fingers, Meredith fired off an email to Mary, asking her to check the Milwaukee local history websites and electoral rolls for the name Vernier, aware that if the soldier was Léonie’s son, rather than Anatole’s, she still might not have the right name. As an afterthought, she added the name Lascombe as well, then signed off with a long line of kisses.
The phone beside the bed rang.
For a moment, she just stared at it like she couldn’t figure out what she was hearing. It rang again.
She grabbed the receiver. ‘Hello?’
‘Meredith? It’s Hal.’
She could hear straight off things weren’t so good. ‘Are you OK?’
‘I was just letting you know I was back.’
‘How did it go?
A pause, then, ‘I’ll tell you when I see you. I’ll wait in the bar. I don’t want to drag you away from your work.’
Meredith glanced at the time and was amazed to see it was a quarter after six already. She looked at the chaotic mess of cards, tagged internet sites, photographs lying on the bureau, evidence of her afternoon’s work. Her head felt like it was about to explode. She had found out plenty, but still felt she was in the dark.
She didn’t want to stop, but she recognised her brain had reached meltdown. All those high school nights when Mary would come into her room, kiss the top of her head and tell her it was time to take a break. Tell her that everything would be clearer after a good night’s sleep.
Meredith smiled. Mary was usually – always – right.
She wouldn’t achieve anything much tonight. Besides, Hal sounded like he could do with company. Mary would approve of that too. Putting the living before the dead.
‘Actually, now is a good time to stop.’
‘Really?’
The relief in that one word made Meredith smile.
‘Really,’ she said.
‘You’re sure I’m not interrupting anything?’
‘I’m sure,’ she said. ‘I’ll finish up here and be down in ten.’
Meredith changed into a fresh white shirt and her favourite black skirt, nothing too dressy, and went through to the bathroom. She put a little powder on her cheeks, a couple of strokes of mascara and a little lipstick, then brushed her hair and twisted it up into a knot.
She was putting on her boots, ready to go down when her laptop bleeped at her she’d got mail.
Meredith went into her inbox and clicked on the email from Mary. Only two lines long, the message contained a name, dates, an address, and the promise to email again as soon as she’d got more to tell.
A smile broke out across Meredith’s face.
Nailed it.
She picked up the photograph, no longer an unknown soldier. There was still way more to pin down, but she was nearly there. She tucked the picture into the frame of the photograph, where it belonged. The family reunited. Her family.
Still standing, she leaned over and clicked on reply.
‘You’re totally amazing,’ she typed. ‘All further info gratefully received! Love you.’
Meredith pressed send. Then, still smiling, she went down to find Hal.