CHAPTER 73
Léonie ran along the rue de l’Hermite, dragging her gloves up over her wrists and struggling with the buttons. She turned sharply right and along to the post office.
The double wooden door was closed and barred. Léonie hammered on it with her fist and called out.
‘S’îl vous plaît?’ It was only three minutes past midday. Surely, there must still be someone inside? ‘Il y a quelqu’un? C’est vraiment important!’
There was no sign of life. She knocked and called out again, but nobody came. An ill-tempered woman with two thin grey plaits leant out of the window opposite and shouted at her to stop her banging.
Léonie apologised, realising how stupid she was being by drawing attention to herself in such a manner. If there was a letter waiting for her from Monsieur Constant, it was now destined to remain there for the time being. She could hardly remain in Rennes-les-Bains until such time as the poste restante reopened later that afternoon. She would simply have to return on another occasion.
Her emotions were muddled. She was vexed at herself for having failed to achieve the one thing she had set out to do. At the same time, she felt she had been granted a reprieve.
At least I do not know that Monsieur Constant has not written.
Her muddled reasoning, in some strange way, cheered her.
Léonie descended to the river. Away to the left, she saw the patients of the thermal spa sitting in the steaming, iron-rich water of the bains forts. Behind them, a row of nurses in white uniforms, their wide sweeping hats perched upon their heads like giant seabirds, stood waiting patiently for their charges to emerge.
She crossed to the far bank and found the path along which Marieta had taken them easily enough. The character of the wood had changed a great deal. Some of the trees had lost their leaves, through either the natural approach of autumn or the ferocity of the storms that had battered the hillside. The ground beneath Léonie’s feet was carpeted in wine-coloured foliage, golden and claret and copper. She stopped for a moment, thinking of the watercolour sketches she was working on. The image of Le Mat came into her mind and she thought perhaps she would amend the background colours to suit the autumn hues of the forest.
She walked on, wrapped in the green mantle of the evergreen wood higher up. Twigs, fallen branches, stones shaken loose from the banks on either side, rattled and snapped under her feet. The ground was covered by fallen pine cones and shiny brown fruit from the horse chestnut trees. For a moment, she had a pang of homesickness. She thought of her mother and how, each October, she had taken Anatole and Léonie to the Parc Monceau to gather horse chestnuts. She rubbed her fingers together, remembering the feel and texture of childhood autumns.
Rennes-les-Bains had vanished from sight. Léonie walked a little faster, knowing that the town was still within hailing distance, but at the same time feeling she was suddenly a very long way indeed from civilisation. A bird flew up, its wings beating heavily on the air, making her jump. She laughed nervously when she realised it was only a tiny wood pigeon. In the distance she heard the shots from hunting guns and wondered if Charles Denarnaud’s hand was behind one of them.
Léonie pressed on and soon reached the estate. When the rear gates of the Domaine de la Cade came into view, she felt a rush of relief. She hurried forward, expecting at any moment to see the maid step out with the key.
‘Marieta?’
Only the sound of her own voice echoed back. By the quality of the silence, Léonie knew there was no one there. She frowned. It was unlike Pascal not to do what he said he would. And although Marieta was easily flustered, she was reliable as a rule.
Or perhaps she came and has given up waiting?
Léonie rattled the gates and found them locked. She felt a burst of ill temper and then frustration as she stood a moment, hands on her hips, considering her situation.
She did not wish to have to walk the entire perimeter to enter by the front gates. She was fatigued from her morning’s experiences and the demands of the walk up the hill.
There must be some other way into the grounds.
Léonie could not believe the small outside staff Isolde kept could possibly maintain the boundaries of so large a property in perfect condition. She was slightly built. She was certain if she looked hard enough, she would find an opening wide enough for her to slip through. From there, it would be a simple matter to find her way back to familiar paths.
She looked to left and right, trying to decide which way was likely to best serve her purpose. In the end, she reasoned that the sections in the greatest state of disrepair were likely to be furthest from the house. She turned to the east. If the worst came to the worst, she would simply follow the line of the boundary all the way around.
She walked briskly, peering through the hedge growth, pulling at briars and avoiding the vicious tangle of blackberry bushes, looking for any sort of break in the wrought-iron railings. The section immediately surrounding the gate was secure, but as she remembered from their first arrival at the Domaine de la Cade, the sense of dereliction and abandonment intensified the further she walked.
She had not been searching for more than five minutes when she did come across an interruption in the fencing. She removed her hat, crouched down and, breathing in deeply, slipped through the narrow opening with a sense of relief. Once through, she picked the thorns and foliage from her jacket, brushed the mud from the hem of her skirts, then stepped forward with renewed energy, pleased to be not far from home.
The land here was steeper, the canopy overhead darker and more oppressive. It was not long before Léonie realised that she was on the far side of the beech woods, and that if she were not careful, her route would take her past the site of the sepulchre. She frowned. Was there another way?
There was a crisscross of small tracks, rather than one clear path to follow. All the clearings and copses looked the same. Léonie had no way of plotting her course other than to rely on the sun shining high above the canopy of leaves, but that was an unreliable guide deep in the shadows. But, she told herself, provided she kept walking forward then she would come upon the lawns and the house soon enough. She just had to hope that she would bypass the sepulchre.
She set off across the slope, on a vague track that led to a small clearing. Suddenly, through a break in the trees, she saw the parcel of woodland on the opposite bank of the River Aude within which stood the group of stone megaliths Pascal had previously pointed out to her. Then she realised with a jolt that all the diabolic place-names around about were visible from the Domaine de la Cade: the Devil’s Armchair, the étang du Diable, the Horned Mountain. She scanned the horizon. And so, too, was the point at which the rivers La Blanque and La Salz met, a spot known locally, Pascal had told her, as le bénitier.
Léonie forced herself to suppress the image of the twisted body of the demon and his malevolent blue eyes interposing itself into her mind. She hurried on, striding out across the uneven ground, telling herself how absurd it was to be disturbed by a statue, by a picture in a book.
The hillside rose sharply. The quality of the surface beneath her boots changed and soon she found herself walking over bare earth rather than bracken or pine cones, bordered by bushes or trees but empty of them. It was like a strip of brown paper torn at right angles out of the green landscape.
Léonie stopped and looked ahead. Above her was a steep wall of hillside, like a barrier set across her path. Directly over her head was a natural platform, almost like a bridge arching over the patch of ground on which she stood. She suddenly realised she was standing in a dry riverbed. Once, a torrent of water, thundering down from one of the ancient Celtic springs higher up in the hills, had forged this deep depression through the hillside.
Monsieur Baillard’s words came back to her.
Concealed where the river runs dry, in a place where once the ancient kings were buried.
Léonie cast her eyes about her, searching for anything out of the ordinary, looking at the shape of the land, the trees, the undergrowth. Her attention was drawn by a shallow depression in the ground and, beside it, a flat grey stone, just visible beneath the tangled skirts and roots of a wild juniper bush.
She walked over to it and crouched down. She reached in, pulled at the knotted undergrowth and peered into the damp green space around the roots. Now she could see that there was a ring of stones, eight in all. She thrust her hands into the foliage, staining the tips of her gloves with green slime and mud, trying to see if anything was hidden beneath them.
The largest was quickly dislodged. Léonie sat back on her heels, resting it in her lap. There was something painted upon the surface in black tar or paint, a five-pointed star set within a circle.
In her eagerness to discover if she had stumbled upon the place where the Tarot cards were concealed, Léonie put the stone to one side. Using a piece of wood, she dug around each of the others in turn, piling the earth alongside. She saw a fragment of heavy material concealed in the mud and realised that the stones were holding it in place.
She continued digging, using the piece of fallen timber like a shovel, scraping against stones and shards of tile until she was able to pull the material free from the earth. It was covering a small hole. Excited, she jabbed at it, trying to loosen what was buried beneath, scraping the mud and worms and black beetles away, until she hit something solid.
A little more, and she could see she was looking at a plain wooden casket with metal handles at each end. Fixing her filthy gloves on the clasps, she pulled. The ground was reluctant to yield, but Léonie wrenched and twisted until, finally, it gave up its treasure with a wet, sucking sound.
Breathing hard, Léonie dragged the box out of the depression to an area of dry ground, and placed it on top of the cloth. She sacrificed her gloves to rub the surface clean and slowly opened the wooden lid. Inside the chest was another container, a metal strongbox of the kind in which M’man kept her most valuable possessions.
She removed the strongbox, closed the chest and placed the metal one on top. It was fitted with a tiny padlock, which, to Léonie’s surprise, hung open. She tried to raise the lid, inching it up fraction by fraction. It creaked, but gave easily enough.
The light was dim beneath the trees and whatever was inside the strongbox was dark. As her eyes adjusted, she thought she could make out a package wrapped in some dark fabric. No doubt it was of the right size and proportion to be the deck of cards. She wiped her clammy palms on her clean, dry petticoats, then carefully folded back the corners of the fabric.
She was looking at the reverse side of a playing card, larger than those she was accustomed to. The back was painted a rich forest green, decorated with a swirling pattern of silver and gold filigree lines.
Léonie paused, gathering her courage. She exhaled, then counted to three in her head, and turned over the top card.
A strange image of a dark man, attired in a long red tasselled robe and sitting upon a throne on a stone belvedere, looked up at her. The mountains in the distance seemed familiar. She read the inscription at the bottom: Le Roi des Pentacles.
She looked more closely, realising the figure of the King was familiar. Then it came to her. It was the image of someone the priest called upon to banish the demon from the sepulchre and who had begged her uncle to destroy the deck of cards. Bérenger Saunière.
Surely this was proof, as Monsieur Baillard had told her but half an hour previously, that her uncle had not taken his advice.
‘Madomaisèla. Madomaisèla Léonie?’
Léonie spun round in alarm at the sound of her name being called.
‘Madomaisèla?’
It was Pascal and Marieta. Evidently, Léonie realised, she had been so long absent that they had come out to find her. Quickly she wrapped the cards up once more. She wanted to take them with her, but there was nowhere at all she could conceal them about her person.
With great reluctance, but seeing no alternative since she did not wish anyone to know what she had found, she put the cards back inside the inner box, then the box into the chest, which she slid back into the hole. Then she stood up and started to kick the earth back with the already muddy soles of her boots. When it was nearly done, she dropped her stained and spoiled gloves into the ground too and covered them over.
She had to trust to the fact that no one had discovered the deck previously and were therefore not likely to now. She would return, under cover of dark, and take the cards when it was discreet and safe to do so.
‘Madomaisèla Léonie!’
She could hear the panic in Marieta’s voice.
Léonie retraced her steps, climbed on to the platform and ran back down the woodland path in the direction from which she had come, towards the sound of the servants’ voices. She struck out into the woods themselves, leaving the path so as not to give any hint of her starting point. Finally, when she thought she had put enough distance between herself and the treasure, she stopped, caught her breath, and then called out.
‘I am here,’ she cried. ‘Marieta! Pascal! Over here.’ Within moments, their concerned faces burst through the opening in the trees. Marieta stopped dead, unable to hide her surprise or worry at the condition of Léonie’s garments.
‘I mislaid my gloves.’ The spontaneous lie rising easily to her lips. ‘I was obliged to go back to search for them.’
Marieta looked hard at her. ‘And did you find them, Madomaisèla?’ she said.
‘Sadly, I did not.’
‘Your clothes.’
Léonie looked down at her muddy boots, her stained petticoats and skirts streaked with mud and lichen. ‘I mistook my step and slipped on the damp ground, that is all.’
She could see Marieta doubted the explanation, but the girl wisely held her tongue. They walked back to the house in silence.
CHAPTER 74
Léonie barely had time to wash the dirt from under her fingernails and change her clothes before the bell for luncheon sounded.
Isolde joined them in the dining room. She was delighted with what Léonie had brought for her from the town and managed to eat a little soup. After they had finished, she requested Léonie keep her company. Léonie was pleased to do so, although whilst they were talking and playing cards, her thoughts were elsewhere. She was plotting both how to return to the woods and retrieve the cards. Also, how to engineer another visit to Rennes-les-Bains.
The remainder of the day passed peacefully. The skies clouded over at dusk and there was a flurry of rain down in the valley and over the town, but the Domaine de la Cade was little disturbed.
The following morning, Léonie slept later than usual.
As she emerged on to the landing, she saw Marieta carrying the letter tray across the hall to the dining room. There was no reason whatsoever to presume that Monsieur Constant could somehow have acquired her address and written to her directly. Indeed, her fear was the opposite – that he had forgotten about her altogether. But because Léonie lived in a perpetual fog of longing and romantic possibility, she easily imagined troublesome and awkward circumstances.
So without the least hope of there being a letter from Carcassonne addressed to her, at the same time she found herself flying down the stairs with the sole intention of intercepting Marieta. She feared to see – and yet, in contradiction, hoped to see – the coat of arms familiar from the card Victor Constant had presented to her in the church and which she had committed to memory.
She pressed her eye close to the crack between wood and jamb, at the moment that Marieta opened the door from the inside and emerged with the empty salver.
They both squealed in surprise.
‘Madomaisèla!’
Léonie pulled the door shut to stop their noise drawing Anatole’s attention.
‘I do not suppose you happened to observe if there were any letters from Carcassonne, Marieta?’ she said.
The maid gave her an enquiring look. ‘Not that I noticed, Madomaisèla.’
‘You are certain?’
Marieta now looked mystified. ‘There were the usual circulars, a letter from Paris for Sénher Anatole, and a letter apiece for your brother and for Madama that came up from the town.’
Léonie gave a sigh of relief, tinged with disappointment.
‘Invitations, I dare say,’ Marieta added. ‘Very fine-quality envelopes they were, and addressed in a most elegant hand. A distinguished family crest also. Pascal said they were hand-delivered. Strange fellow in an old cloak.’
Léonie grew still. ‘What colour was the cloak?’
Marieta looked at her with surprise. ‘I’m sure I don’t know, Madomaisèla. Pascal did not say. Now, if you will excuse me …’
‘Of course.’ Léonie stood back. ‘Yes, of course.’
She hesitated on the threshold for a moment, uncertain as to why she should suddenly be so anxious about going into her brother’s company. It was her guilty conscience that made her think the letters might have anything whatsoever to do with her, nothing more. Wise counsel, she knew, but still she felt uneasy.
She turned away and ran lightly back up the stairs.
