The Lavender Garden (51 page)

“Exhibit A. Don’t look at it until I’ve collected all the evidence.” Alex positioned himself behind Sebastian’s computer and switched it on. He typed in a password and the computer gave him access.

“How can you know what his password is?”

“If you live with the fact that someone is intent on making your life as difficult as possible, you make it your job to know these things. Especially if you have as little to occupy you as I do.” He continued to type. “Besides, I can read my brother like a book. It didn’t take a genius to work it out.”

“Is it
Matisse
, by any chance?” guessed Emilie.

“No shit, Sherlock.” Alex grinned at her. “The thing with Seb is that he makes little or no attempt to hide his tracks, believing so totally in his consummate skills as a liar if he has to explain himself. Now”—Alex reached down to pull some pages off the printer and handed them to her—“Exhibit B. Just one more thing.” He pointed to an oil painting of his grandmother that hung on the wall—“Could you remove that for me?”

Emilie did so, revealing a small safe behind it.

“Right, unless he’s changed the combination, which I doubt, it’s my grandmother’s date of birth.” Alex stretched for the dial on the front of the safe and twisted it carefully. “I just hope Seb hasn’t removed what I want to show you since I last looked.” Alex reached inside the safe. He ferreted around its interior and then, with a sigh of relief, produced a padded envelope and a smaller, plain, white one. “Exhibits C and D.” He closed the safe and motioned to Emilie to rehang the picture. “I suggest we return to my quarters, just in case the man himself is racing up the motorway from London as we speak to save his marriage, or rather, to save himself. It’s also a damned sight warmer.”

Alex switched off the computer and the printer, and they left the study. Back in the apartment, Alex asked Emilie to place the four exhibits he’d handed her in a line on the coffee table. “Okay, Em.” He glanced at her sympathetically, searching her face. “This is likely to be upsetting, I’m afraid.”

“I am past being ‘upset,’ Alex. I simply want to know the reasons why.”

“Right then. Take a look at the first file.”

Emilie opened the file and saw her own face and that of her mother staring out from the pages. They were photocopies of all the articles in various French newspapers detailing the death of her mother. And announcing that Emilie was the lone heiress.

“Next, open the envelope we took out of the safe and remove its contents. Be careful, it’s very, very old.”

Emilie slid her hand inside the envelope and retrieved a book. She glanced at the title in awe. “It’s
The History of French Fruit.
I heard from Jacques yesterday that my father gave it to Constance as a keepsake when she left the château to return here. It’s the book you said you couldn’t find from the library here.”

“Yes. Now, very, very carefully open the cover and read what’s on the first page.”

“ ‘Édouard de la Martinières,’ ” she read, “ ‘1943.’ So?”

“Hang on a tick, I need to get something else to show you.” He wheeled himself out of the sitting room and returned shortly, handing her an envelope. “Inside you’ll find a letter written to me by my grandmother. She lodged it with her solicitor just before she died. I doubt she trusted Seb to hand it over to me. What’s new?” He sighed.

Emilie began to read.

Blackmoor Hall, 20th March 1996

Dear Alex,

I am writing this in the hope that one day you will return home to Blackmoor Hall, although I accept now it may not be in my lifetime. My dearest grandson, I want you to know I now understand why you felt you had to go away, and firstly I want to offer my most heartfelt apologies for not seeing or reacting more to what was happening to you. I fear I let you down and didn’t protect you when you needed me to. But it was hard to believe that your brother, whom I also love dearly, could be so methodical in his destruction of you.

I do hope, dear boy, that you can forgive me for ever doubting you. So many times I, too, was duped by your brother, whose intelligence was not in the same stratum as yours, but whose quick wit and capacity for deception and lies equals it in its magnificence. And perhaps I, as your grandmother and then in the role of your mother, felt guilty that from the first moment I set eyes on you, I loved you more than him. You, so adorable, angelic and loving, and your poor brother so much less appealing on every possible level.

There is a poem I read once—by Larkin—which talks of wishing his newborn godchild to be “ordinary”—blessed with enough of each gift, but never too much or too little. I understand now exactly what he meant. For your gifts, Alex, have been your downfall. I digress, forgive me.

Now, Alex, I have obviously been praying that you will return before I die. Because I must decide what to do with my beloved Blackmoor Hall. As you know, it has been in your grandfather’s family for over 150 years. As I’m unaware of your whereabouts, or how much money it will take to restore the house, I am uncertain of what to do. So, my dearest boy, I have decided that I must leave it jointly to the two of you, hoping that the mutual ownership will reunite you. I know it is the faint wish of a dying and optimistic old woman, and perhaps it will prove to have the opposite effect. I can only pray it won’t prove a burden for either of you. If it does, please sell it with my blessing.

I am also leaving you a book—I know how you value old editions—which is of sentimental rather than monetary value to me. I was given this by a friend of mine a long time ago in wartime France. Also in this envelope is a book of poems written by his sister, Sophia, of whom I was extremely fond. If you wish to, the owner’s name in the front of the book is enough to help you find out more about what happened to your grandmother in France during the war. I chose to keep it secret in my lifetime, but it’s an interesting story, and perhaps it will make you think better of the woman who did all she could to care for you, but made some fatal mistakes. The book and the poems are where they’ve always been—on the third shelf to the left in the library. You can retrieve them if you wish.

Other than that, I am leaving you half of what I have left, the grand sum of £50,000. I can only pray that one day, dear Alex, you will return home and can forgive me. However flawed, I had to love Sebastian too. Do you see?

Your loving grandmother, Constance X

Emilie wiped her eyes, the stress of such a long and traumatic day finally getting the better of her. “It’s a beautiful letter.”

“Yes, it is,” said Alex. “You know, Em, I did write at least three or
four letters home when I was abroad, giving Granny my address in Italy. I can only believe that Sebastian got to the postman here first. He recognized my writing and snaffled the letters, which allowed Granny to think I hadn’t bothered to let her know where I was. In other words”—Alex sighed—“that I didn’t care about her.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me at all now. He’s an arch-manipulator. Thank you for letting me read the letter. But what relevance does this have to the other things you’ve shown me?”

“Please pick up the last file.”

Emilie did so, her eyes widening as she read the contents. She looked up at Alex for confirmation.

“You can see that Granny was certainly wrong in one respect: the book she left me was not just of ‘sentimental’ value.”

“Yes.” She nodded.

“Of course, when I eventually got her letter, then went to search for the book in the library when I came home from hospital after the accident, I made the fatal mistake of telling Seb what I was looking for and where to find it. I couldn’t reach it, you see, it was on the third shelf up.” Alex shrugged. “When Seb retrieved it for me, I showed the book to him willingly. At the time, I was eager to try and forge a relationship with him, so when he asked if he could borrow the book for a few days to read it, I agreed. After that, every time I asked him for it, he’d say he would return it, but of course he didn’t. And knowing Seb as I do, I suspected something was up. I looked the book up on the Internet, like he obviously had, and knew that if he hadn’t sold it already, it would be tucked away in his safe. And there it was.” Alex shook his head sadly.

“But why hasn’t he sold it already? And if you knew it was so valuable, why haven’t you reclaimed it?”

“Em, maybe you haven’t glanced fully at the detail on the sheet I printed up. I was convinced that Seb wouldn’t sell it. The one thing I know about my brother is that he’s greedy. He’d never be prepared to settle for what he had already when he knew the main prize was possibly on offer. Read out what it says to me. From the beginning.”

Emilie was beyond exhaustion, but she did her best to concentrate on the words.

The History of French Fruit

By Christophe Pierre Beaumont. 1756. 2 Volumes. Arguably the finest and rarest book on fruit. With illustrations of fifteen different species of fruit trees. The work was inspired by an earlier Duchamel publication,
Anatomie de la Poire
, published in the 1730s. Illustrations by Guillaume Jean Gardinier and François Joseph Fortier. Beaumont’s intention was to promote the virtue and nutritional value of fruit-bearing trees. Fifteen different genera of fruit and a number of their different species are described in the work: almonds, apricots, a barberry, cherries, quinces, figs, strawberries, gooseberries, apples, a mulberry, pears, peaches, plums, grapes, and raspberries. Each colored plate illustrates the plant’s seed, foliage, blossom, fruit, and sometimes cross sections of the species.

Provenance: Both volumes believed to reside in a private collection in Gassin, France.

Value: Approximately £5 million.

Emilie finished reading and looked up at Alex. “I still don’t understand.”

“Right then, I’ll spell it out for you. I contacted a rare-book seller of my acquaintance in London, as I presume Sebastian had already done. He told me that, separately, the two volumes were probably worth around half a million pounds each. But, together, five times that. Do you understand now, Emilie?”

Finally, the penny dropped. “Sebastian was looking for the first volume in my father’s library,” she stated flatly.

“Yes.”

Emilie was silent for a while, processing the information. “Now, at last, it all makes sense. That was why Sebastian was in France a few weeks ago. My friend Jean, who runs the vineyard on the domaine, found him in the library searching through the shelves. No wonder he came back to Yorkshire in such a bad temper that weekend. He obviously hadn’t found the first volume.”

“Well, at least that’s something.”

“I can understand everything except why he went as far as to marry me.”

“Well, maybe having failed to find the first volume up until the moment the château was about to go under renovation and the library was about to be packed away, Seb needed to have ‘access all areas,’ ” mused Alex. “As your husband, no one could deny his presence, and he could continue to investigate. Your marriage allowed him free rein to keep looking.”

“Yes. You’re right. And I trusted him completely with it.”

“Em, are you up to opening the last envelope?” Alex indicated it lying on the table. “I have a feeling this one might be very upsetting for you.”

“Yes, I’m fine,” Emilie replied stoically, grasping it and tearing it open. Inside was the new key to the front door of the château. Sebastian had asked for a copy at some point, and she had handed it over to him without thinking about it. But also in the envelope was the original rusting key that had gone missing.

“Oh, God,” she mouthed eventually, involuntary tears springing to her eyes. “It was
him
who broke into the château that day! And then he had the gall to return almost straight afterward . . . and
comfort
me! How could he, Alex, how could he?!”

“As I said, he needed access all areas. God, Em, I’m sorry, so sorry. And to be completely fair to him, I do know he was very taken with you at the start,” Alex equivocated, seeing her pain and desperately wanting to make her feel better. “He certainly waxed lyrical about you to me when he came back from France after he’d met you. Perhaps his intentions were not all bad. Maybe he thought he could make the marriage work. But then the honeytrap of Bella raised its ugly head and he couldn’t resist. He’s never been able to let her go completely over the past ten years.”

“Do
not
excuse him, Alex, please,” Emilie snapped. “He doesn’t deserve your sympathy on any level. Taking everything else he has done to me aside, in my book, if you love someone, it’s to the exclusion of all others,” she said vehemently, wiping her tears of shock roughly away with the back of her hand. She
would not
waste them on him.

“I can assure you, in my book too. So, there we are. God, Em, I hate that it’s me who’s had to tell you all this. It breaks my heart to
upset you. Please don’t hate me too, will you? I despise my brother for what he’s done to you, I really do.”

“Of course I won’t hate you,” she answered, exhausted now. “I asked you to tell me.”

“Well, I really hope you won’t,” Alex said with feeling. “By the way, I think you should keep the book.” He indicated it lying innocently on the table. “Take it with you to the château and put it back where it belongs.”

“But it was given to your grandmother by my father, and then to you by her. It’s yours.”

“You’re right, under normal circumstances. But perhaps it’s best if it goes with you to France, out of harm’s way,” he suggested. “Just out of interest, do you know where the other volume is? Obviously not in your father’s library.”

“You haven’t seen the library. It’s vast—over twenty thousand books. I think it would have taken Sebastian longer than a couple of days to check it wasn’t there.”

“Sorry, Emilie”—Alex looked pained—“but he’s had far longer than a couple of days, hasn’t he? His recent journey to France was simply a last-ditch attempt to recheck that he hadn’t missed it before the library went into storage. Sebastian had spent plenty of time in the château beforehand with you.”