PART X
The Lake October 2007
CHAPTER 84
WEDNESDAY 31ST OCTOBER 2007
When Meredith woke again, Hal was gone.
She put out her hand to the empty space in the bed where he had slept beside her. The sheet was cold, but the soft smell of him on the pillow and the impression where his head had rested remained.
The shutters were closed and it was dark in the room. Meredith looked at the time. Eight o’clock. She guessed Hal didn’t want the maids to see him and had gone back to his own room. Her hand stole to her cheek, as if her skin held the recollection of where his lips had kissed her goodbye, even if she could not remember.
For a while, she lay burrowed deep in the covers, thinking about Hal, thinking about the feel of him beside her, within her, the emotions she had allowed to come flooding out last night. From Hal, her thoughts drifted to Léonie, the girl with the copper hair, her other night-time companion.
I cannot sleep.
The words Meredith remembered from her dream, heard and yet not spoken. The sense of pity, of restlessness, the fact that Léonie wanted something of her.
Meredith slipped out of bed. She pulled on a pair of thick socks to keep her feet warm. Hal had forgotten his sweater, lying in a heap by the chair where he had tossed it last night. She held it to her face, breathing in the scent of him. Then she put it on, way too big and baggy, and found some sweats.
She looked at the portrait. The photograph of the sepia soldier, great-great-grandfather Vernier, was tucked into the corner of the frame where she’d put it last night. Meredith felt the tug of possibility. The mismatched ideas that had been massing in her mind had settled during the course of the night.
The obvious first step was to find out if Anatole Vernier had been married, although it was easier said than done. She also needed to find out how he and Léonie Vernier were connected to Isolde Lascombe. Had they lived in the house in 1891, around the time the photograph had been taken, or were they just visitors that fall? As her online detective work yesterday had reminded her, ordinary people didn’t just appear on the internet. You had to trawl through genealogy sites, you needed names and dates and towns of birth and death to even have a chance of getting the information.
She booted up the computer and logged on. She was disappointed, but not surprised, to find there was nothing more from Mary, but she fired off another email to Chapel Hill, filling her in on the last twenty-four hours and asking if she could check out a couple more things. She said nothing about Hal. She said nothing about Léonie. No sense giving her cause to worry. She signed off, promising to keep in touch, and pressed SEND.
A little cold and realising she was thirsty, Meredith went through to the bathroom to fill the kettle. While she was waiting for the water to boil, she ran her eyes along the spines of the books on the shelf above the bureau. Her attention was caught by one entitled Diables et Esprits Maléfiques et Phantômes de la Montagne. She took it out and opened it. The flyleaf told her it was a new edition of an earlier book by a local author, Audric S. Baillard, who had lived in a village in the Pyrenees, Los Seres, and died in 2005. There was no date of original publication, but it was obviously a local classic. According to the reviews on the back, it was considered the definitive text on Pyrenean mountain folklore.
Meredith glanced down the index and saw the book was divided into stories by region – Couiza, Coustaussa, Durban, Espéraza, Fa, Limoux, Rennes-les-Bains, Rennes-le-Château, Quillan. The illustration gracing the section on Rennes-les-Bains was a black and white photograph of the Place des Deux Rennes taken around 1900, when it was known as the Place du Pérou. Meredith smiled. It seemed so familiar. She could even pick out the exact spot, beneath the spreading branches of the platanes, where her ancestor had stood.
The kettle whistled and clicked off. She poured a sachet of hot chocolate into a cup, stirred in two sugars, then took the drink and the book to the chair at the window and began to read.
The stories in the collection were similar from place to place – myths of demons and devils, generations, even millennia old, a linking of folklore with natural phenomena: the Devil’s Armchair, the Horned Mountain, the Devil’s Lake, all the names she’d come across already on the map. She flicked back to the imprint page again, checking there really was no clue to when the book had first been published. The information wasn’t there. The latest story she noticed was from the early 1900s, although given that the author had only died a couple of years ago, she assumed he had gathered the stories more recently.
Baillard’s style was clear and sparse, giving the factual information with the minimum of embellishment. With excitement, Meredith discovered that there was a whole section on the Domaine de la Cade. The property had come into the hands of the Lascombe family during the Wars of Religion, a series of conflicts fought between Catholics and Huguenots from 1562 to 1568. Ancient families had fallen, replaced by parvenus rewarded for their loyalty to either the Catholic House of Guise or the Calvinist House of Bourbon.
She read quickly. Jules Lascombe had inherited the property on the death of his father, Guy Lascombe, in 1865. He had married an Isolde Labourde in 1885, and died without issue in 1891. She smiled at another piece of the puzzle falling into place, looking over at the ageless Isolde, Jules’ widow, behind the glass of the portrait. Then it occurred to her that she hadn’t noticed Isolde’s name on the Lascombe-Bousquet family tomb in Rennes-les-Bains? Meredith wondered why not?
Something else to check out.
She dropped her eyes back to the page. Baillard moved to the legends associated with the Domaine. There had been, for many years, rumours of a terrifying and vicious wild beast that terrorised the countryside around Rennes-les-Bains, attacking children and land workers on isolated farms. The distinguishing feature of the attacks was claw marks, three wide gashes across the face. Unusual marks.
Meredith stopped again, thinking of the injuries sustained by Hal’s father while his car lay in the river gorge. And the defaced statue of Mary set on the Visigoth pillar in the approach to the church in Rennes-le-Château. Hard on its heels, the memory of a fragment of her nightmare came back to her – the image of a tapestry hanging on a poorly lit stair. The sensation of being chased, claws and black fur touching her skin, sliding over her hands.
Un, deux, trois, loup.
And back to the graveyard in Rennes-les-Bains and the recollection of one of the names on the war memorial to the dead of World War I: Saint-Loup.
Coincidence?
Meredith stretched her arms above her head, trying to get rid of the cold and the early morning stiffness and her memories of the night, then dropped her eyes back to the page. There were many deaths and disappearances between 1870 and 1885. A period of relative calm followed, then there was an intensification of rumours from the autumn of 1891 onwards and a growing belief that the creature – a demon in local folklore – was harboured within a Visigoth sepulchre that lay within the grounds of the Domaine de la Cade. There were deaths – unattributed attacks – intermittently over the next six years, then the attacks came to an abrupt end in 1897. The author didn’t actually say so, but he implied that the end of the terror was connected to the fact that parts of the house were ruined by fire and the sepulchre destroyed.
Meredith closed the book and curled up tight in the chair. She sipped her hot chocolate as she tried to marshal her thoughts, realising what was bugging her. How weird was it that in a work devoted to folklore and legend, there was no reference to the Tarot deck? Audric Baillard must have heard about the cards during his research. The deck was not only inspired by the local landscape and printed by the Bousquet family, but also fell within the exact period of time covered by the book.
A deliberate omission?
Then, suddenly, she felt it again. A chill, a density in the air that had not been there before. The sense of there being someone there, not far away, not in the room, but close by. Fleeting, an imprint only.
Léonie?
Meredith stood up, finding herself drawn to the window. She unfastened the long metal catch, pulled back the two tall panes of glass, and pushed open the shutters, letting them fall back against the wall. The air was cold on her skin and made her eyes water. The tops of the trees were swaying, whistling and sighing as the wind wound itself around the ancient trunks, through the tangle of leaf and bark. The air was restless, carrying the memory of the echo of the music within it. Notes drifting on the breeze. The melody of the place itself.
As Meredith cast her eyes over the grounds spread out before her, she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. She looked down and saw a lithe, graceful figure in a long cloak with the hood pulled up over its head, emerge from the lee of the building.
It seemed to her that the wind was gathering force, racing now through the arched opening cut into the high box hedge that led to the wild meadows and rough grass beyond. Distant as it was, she could just make out the white crests as it sent the water of the lake lapping against the edge and up over on to the grass.
The outline, the impression, the figure kept to the shadows, skimming beneath the rising gaze of the pale sun, which darted in and out of the thin strata of clouds that chased across the pink sky. She seemed to glide over the damp grass, covered with the slightest sheen of dew. Meredith caught the smell of earth, of autumn, of damp soil, of burned stubble, of bonfires. Of bones.
She watched in captivated silence as the figure made its way – her way, Meredith felt sure – to the far side of the ornamental lake. For a moment it stopped and stood on a small promontory overlooking the water. Meredith’s vision seemed to narrow right in, impossibly close, like a camera close up. She imagined the hood falling back from the girl’s face. It was pale and perfectly symmetrical, with green eyes that once had glinted as clear as emeralds. Shade without colour. The skein of tumbling curls fell, like twists of beaten copper, transparent in the morning light, over the slim shoulders of her red dress and down to her narrow waist. Shape without form. She seemed to hold Meredith’s gaze with her own, reflecting back at her her own hopes and fears and imaginings.
Then she slipped away into the woods.
‘Léonie?’ Meredith whispered into the silence.
For a while longer she kept vigil at the window, staring at the place on the far side of the lake where the figure had stood. The distant air was still. Nothing stirred in the shadows.
Finally she pulled back inside and shut the window.
A few days ago – no, hours even – she would have been freaked out. Would have feared the worst. Would have looked at her reflection in the mirror and seen instead Jeanette’s face staring out at her.
Not now.
Meredith couldn’t account for it, but everything had changed. Her mind felt totally clear. She was fine. She wasn’t frightened. She wasn’t going crazy. The sightings, the visitations were a sequence, like a piece of music. Beneath the bridge in Rennes-les-Bains – water. On the Sougraigne road – earth. Here in the hotel – particularly in this specific room, where her presence was strongest – air.
Swords, the suit of air, represented intelligence and intellect. Cups, the suit associated with water, the emotions. Pentacles, the suit of earth, of physical reality, of treasure. Of the four suits, only fire was missing. Wands, the suit of fire, energy and conflict.
The story is in the cards.
Or maybe the quartet was completed in the past and not the present. In the fire that had destroyed much of the Domaine de la Cade more than a hundred years ago?
Meredith went back to the replica deck Laura had given her, turning over each card in turn and staring again at the images, as she had done last night, willing them to give up their secrets. As she laid them out, one by one, she set her thoughts free. She thought of what Hal and her had talked about on the way to Rennes-le-Château, of how the Visigoths buried their kings and noblemen, with their treasure, in hidden graves rather than graveyards. Secret chambers below the river, diverting its course for long enough to excavate the site and prepare the burial chamber.
If the original deck had survived the fire, hidden safe within the grounds of the Domaine de la Cade, then where more secure than an ancient Visigoth burial site? The sepulchre itself, according to Baillard’s book, dated back to that same period. If there were a river in the grounds, it would be the perfect hiding place. In plain view, yet totally inaccessible.
Outside, finally, sunlight split through the clouds.
Meredith yawned. She felt dizzy through lack of sleep, but she was buzzing with adrenalin. She glanced at the clock. Hal had said Dr O’Donnell was coming at ten, but that was still an hour away.
Plenty of time for what she had in mind.
Hal was standing in his bedroom in the staff quarters thinking of Meredith.
After he’d helped her get back to sleep after her nightmare, he’d found himself wide awake. Not wanting to disturb her by turning on the light, in the end he’d decided to slip away and back to his own room to go over his notes before the meeting with Shelagh O’Donnell. He wanted to be prepared.
He glanced at his watch. Nine o’clock. An hour to wait before he saw Meredith again.
His windows, on the top floor, looked out to the south and to the east, giving him an uninterrupted view over the lawns and the lake at the back, and the kitchen and service areas to the side. He watched one of the porters throw a black refuse bag into the bin. Another was standing, his arms crossed to keep out the chill, smoking a cigarette. His breath puffed white clouds into the clear morning air.
Hal sat down on the sill, then got up and walked across the room to get some water, then changed his mind. He was too nervous to settle. He knew he shouldn’t get his hopes up that Dr O’Donnell was going to turn out to have all the answers. But he still couldn’t help himself believing that she would at least be able to give him some information about the night his dad died. She might remember something that would force the police to treat it as a suspicious death rather than a traffic accident.
He ran his fingers through his hair.
His thoughts strayed back to Meredith again. He smiled. Maybe, when it was all over, she wouldn’t mind if he went to visit her in the States. He brought himself up short. It was ridiculous to be thinking along such lines after only a couple of days, but he knew. He hadn’t felt so strongly about a girl for a long time. Ever.
And what was to stop him? No job, an empty flat in London. He might as well be in America as anywhere. He could do whatever the hell he liked. He’d have money. He knew his uncle would buy him out.
If Meredith would like him there.
Hal stood at his high window watching the life of the hotel go on silently below. He flexed his arms above his head and yawned. A car was driving slowly up the long drive. He watched as a tall, thin woman with cropped dark hair got out, then walked tentatively up the front steps.
Moments later, the phone on his bedside table rang. It was Eloise in reception, telling him his guest had arrived.
‘What! She’s nearly an hour early.’
‘Shall I ask her to wait?’ Eloise asked.
Hal hesitated. ‘No, it’s fine. I’ll be right down.’
He dragged his jacket from the back of the chair, then rushed down two flights of narrow service stairs. At the bottom, he paused to slip his arms into his jacket and to make a call from the staff phone.
Meredith put Hal’s pale brown sweater over her blue jeans and long sleeved T-shirt, pushed her feet into her boots, then grabbed her denim jacket, a scarf and a pair of woolly gloves, figuring it would still be cold outside. Her hand was already on the door handle when the phone rang.
She rushed to answer. ‘Hi, you,’ she said, experiencing a kick of pleasure at the sound of Hal’s voice.
But his reply was sharp and to the point. ‘She’s here.’
