The Orchid Shroud (4 page)

“You’re chasing a phantom,” her volatile consort cried, stalking off. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Iris pushed Julian down the hall into her studio and slammed the door.

“Look. I’ve done your color sketch. But I want you to know I honestly couldn’t make anything of the whatsit, the labellum, from the photo.” She handed him her drawing. It depicted a flower rising from a single stem. Two long, blackish-purple lateral petals spiraled fantastically away from a large middle petal that was only partially sketched in.

“But you’ve left most of it blank,” Julian cried.

Iris shoved wisps of graying hair out of very blue, ingenuous eyes. “What else could I do? I mean, you want this to be accurate, don’t you? Here.” She unpinned a much-handled print copy from a
corkboard and held it beside the drawing. A dark stain ran through the middle of the image. She tapped the spot. “You tell me.”

“I did. The labellum is a shoe-shaped pouch with an opening at the top where insect pollinators enter. You know the legend. Venus lost her slipper, it changed into a flower, hence the name.”

Iris said flatly, “I don’t see it.”

“Trust me. And anyway, you can take a little artistic license, can’t you?”

“But what? Fat and bulbous? Long and thin? It’s like one of those dot-to-dot drawings children do, except the dots are missing. Anything I put in would be pure guesswork.”

Julian stared glumly at Iris’s sketch. She was right, of course. He was asking her to make a drawing of something that had to be at least partly imagined. And yet this orchid had once grown on the grounds of the château of Les Colombes, no more than a few kilometers from where they stood. Twenty years ago, Mara’s twin sister had found and photographed it. The badly stained print she had left behind was Julian’s only evidence of its existence. Unfortunately, Bedie Dunn was in no position to describe it or guide him to it. She was dead.

“What about Jeanne de Sauvignac? Have you tried asking her?” Iris referred to the only other person who might be able to help him.

He shook his head. “No good. I tried, but she’s genuinely round the twist. I doubt she knows what day it is, let alone where Bedie’s orchid might have grown.”

Iris sighed. “Poor thing. Of course, she never was exactly right, was she? She’s back at Les Colombes now, did you know? A nurse goes in daily, but I hear that Rocher woman is more or less looking after things. In fact,” Iris said grimly, “the villagers say she and that ghastly son of hers are practically living at the château.”

“Vrac?” Julian conjured up a hulking form and a frightening face with a vacant, although at times cunning, look. Together, Vrac and his mother, la Binette Rocher, made an intimidating pair.

“Mmm. I ran into la Binette selling her ewe’s cheese at the market in Brames last week and ventured to ask how Jeanne was. The woman told me quite rudely that it was none of my onions. One shudders to think …”

Julian did shudder. Although it was equally possible that the Rochers, in their way, were doing a passable job as caretakers for the elderly woman. The de Sauvignacs of Les Colombes had always stood as
seigneurs
to the Rochers, Jeanne was a de Sauvignac, if only by marriage, and the Dordogne was a region where old loyalties held.

Iris returned to her sketch. “I have another problem. I don’t know what to do with these things that look like petals but aren’t. I mean, orchids have three petals and three other thingummies, don’t they?”

“Sepals,” corrected Julian. “A dorsal sepal on top and two side sepals. They lie behind the petals and wrap around the flower while it’s in bud. And, yes, orchids normally have three of them. But the morphology of
Cypripediaceae
is different. In Slipper Orchids, the two side sepals are mostly or completely fused into a single synsepal. Sorry. I should have explained.”

“Bother,” said Iris. “So how should I do it?”

Julian considered. “If you rotate the drawing to give a three-quarters view, you can show it as one broad synsepal hanging down behind the labellum.”

“Right. Give me a day or two. I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

“Bless you, Iris.”

“Bless yourself. You’ll need it when Géraud gets through with you. He’s determined to expose you as a fraud, you know.”

Julian did know.

J
ulian drove west, retracing his path toward Sigoulane. The church bells were ringing out noon as he rattled through the village, its houses still and sleepy in the midday sun. He was hungry. Fighting with Géraud always gave him an appetite.

Julian reached Aurillac Manor by way of a road that ran up from the valley bottom and along the crest of the escarpment. The road eventually dwindled to a narrow lane bordered by ancient chestnuts before ending, almost without warning, in the graveled forecourt of the house. He parked there, ran up the steps to the massive front door, and rang a brass-plated doorbell.

It was a long time before the housekeeper, Thérèse, appeared. She was a tiny person with a deeply creased face topped by a wispy knot of white hair. She wore a flowered apron over a dark dress that hung to mid-calf. Her feet were clad in stout black leather lace-up shoes. She could have been seventy or a hundred. She belonged to that race of Périgordines who lived long lives and who, from a certain age onward, scarcely seemed to change.

“Ah, Monsieur Wood,” she cried, letting him in. The name came out as “Vood.” “They’re waiting for you out back.”

He pecked her dried-apple cheeks and handed her a bottle of champagne. “Put that on ice, will you? And this”—a bag of almonds coated in raspberry liqueur and chocolate—“is for you.”

“Coucougnettes!”
The old woman beamed with pleasure at the sight of her favorite confection.
“Mais, c’est très gentil.”

He took himself through to the terrace. A table, bearing monogrammed silver and an impressive array of glasses, had been placed in the shade of an orange-and-white-striped awning. Christophe rose to clasp Julian’s hand.

“Eh bien, mon ami. Ça va?
Cousin Antoine came through?”

“He did. But he wants the rock garden done, including a water feature, in time for their marketing launch next month. I’m going to have to work miracles.”

“That’s why I recommended you.” Christophe’s expression was smug.

“Well done.” Mara grinned and half rose from her chair to exchange kisses, her eyes conveying a welcome and something like relief at Julian’s appearance. “Christophe’s been telling me about his great-grandmother.”

“I was just saying”—Christophe waved a hand—“that the poet Aristide Ladurie once described her as ‘walking by day in a cloud of gold’—reference to her hair, of course—‘and charming the night with
Myosotis
eyes.’”

“Forget-me-not,” Julian translated, sitting down.

“She throws plates,” Mara muttered.

Christophe assumed an air of mock self-reproach. “Alas, I have rather monopolized Mara’s attention with tales of ectoplasms. When she should have been seeing to those dreadful vandals upstairs.”

Julian murmured in her left ear, “Wouldn’t mind doing some monopolizing myself.” His nose brushed her hair, catching her intimate smell of sandalwood. Her special throaty laughter filled his ear. She kicked him under the table. “Ow!”

“Don’t scoff, my friend.” Christophe wagged a pudgy finger. “All old houses have their phenomena. Ask Thérèse if you don’t believe me.”

The housekeeper had appeared with a frosty bottle of champagne in an ice bucket. It was not the bottle he had brought, Julian noticed, but one bearing a far superior label that Christophe must have had at the ready.

“Tell them about the Wailing Ghost, Thérèse,” Christophe urged.

“I will not,” the old woman cried indignantly. “It’s not a thing to talk about.”

“Oh, pooh.” The little man took the bottle from the bucket, worked the cork out smoothly, and tipped the frothing champagne
quickly into crystal flutes. “It’s supposed to be an ill omen. Thérèse has heard it many times.”

“I have heard it twice. Each time before a death.”

“She used to frighten me into good behavior with it when I was a boy.
Santé.”
He raised his glass to Mara and Julian, who returned the toast. “Said it lived in the cupboard under the stairs.”

“That was the cat.” The old woman fixed her employer with a stern eye. “And it was you who locked it in there. You shouldn’t laugh at evil. Bad things happen. Look at that scoundrel Piquet. Always up to no good. The devil claims his own in the end.”

“Dreadful incident down in Colline Basse.” Christophe shuddered around a swallow of champagne. He plugged the bottle with a silver stopper to conserve the bubbles. “A few weeks ago. You must have heard about it.”

Everyone had. The media had been full of it. A
sanglier-
baiter had been killed by some kind of wild animal that had fed on him and left the remains for carrion-eaters to finish off. Local villagers, hunters, and gendarmes from the canton, in collaboration with the responsible office of the Ministry of Ecology, had been beating the woods for the thing ever since. But it was cunning, whatever it was, eluding the best-organized
battues
.

“They said it was a feral dog or a rogue wolf protecting its kill,” said Mara. “I hope to god they catch it.”

“Couldn’t have been a wolf,” said Julian. “There aren’t any in the Dordogne.”

“It was no dog or wolf,” Thérèse muttered.

“What was it, then?” Julian asked sardonically. “A
loup-garou
?”

The housekeeper glared at him. “Werewolves exist. They have lived in this valley for centuries. Haven’t you heard of the Sigoulane Beast?”

“Balivernes,”
Christophe declared promptly. “Old wives’ tales.”

“Ah eh?
Then what about the
maquisard sans tête
? Something tore
his
head off.”

Christophe looked annoyed. In response to Julian and Mara’s questioning glance, he said, “It was during the war. My gardener Didier and my cousin Antoine found a body—a Resistance fighter, it was thought—in the woods below the house. They brought it up in a wheelbarrow. I was too young to know anything about it, but it must have been awful for Antoine, who was just a kid himself then. The man had been decapitated. They never found the head. The Germans did it, of course. Although a few superstitious ones”—a resentful glance in Thérèse’s direction—“put it about that the Sigoulane Beast was responsible.”

“It was. If you don’t believe me, ask Didier. He knows a lot more than you think.” Thérèse swept the tray up and marched away.

“Now I’ve upset her,” their host laughed nervously. “She’s been cranky all morning. Finds all this tearing down of walls as disturbing as I, no doubt—”

There was a shuffling noise behind them. It was both Serafims this time, without their hammers. By now they were so thickly coated in plaster dust that it was difficult to tell them apart. They conferred uneasily between them as to who would speak.

“Can we talk to you a minute?” Smokey took the lead, addressing Mara through lips that were startlingly red against the chalky mask of his face. For once he was without a cigarette. His dark eyes, fringed with white eyelashes, were almost alarming.

“What now?” Mara said, feeling her stomach contract again.

“Problem. With the wall. It’s a double wall, like, with a gap in the middle.”

“I know that. It’s the old exterior wall, where the wing was joined to the main building.”

The stonemason considered this for a moment. “Maybe you’d better come.”

“Now? Look, if it’s rubble fill, you’ll just have to dig it out—”

“Not that,” said Smokey ominously.

“Well, what, for heaven’s sake?”

Smokey the Greek gave her a long, complex look. “You’ll see soon enough.”

T
hey followed the brothers at a trot across the terrace, Mara, Julian, and Christophe wheezing breathlessly in the rear. They continued in that order through a door and up the narrow stone staircase servicing the north wing, coming into the antechamber that led into the large room at the front of the house where Smokey had been working.

The scene there was disastrous. Dust roiled in the air. The floor, protected somewhat haphazardly by plastic sheeting, was littered with shards of plaster. Stones, presumably numbered, were piled near a window outside which the brothers had erected a beam and pulley for lowering debris to the ground. Heavy wooden braces shored up the ceiling just above the area of work. The east wall of the room had been partially breached. Smokey and Theo stepped up to the ragged hole they had made.

“In there,” said Smokey, standing aside, like an unhappy showman presenting the climax of an act he did not like.

Mara peered into the dark cavity.

“What is it?” Julian breathed over her shoulder. “Family treasure?”

“There’s something down there.” Christophe’s voice rang with boyish excitement. “Some kind of a package.” He turned to Smokey. “Well, get it out, man! Let’s have a look.”

Smokey did not comply. His expression, as best as could be determined, was sullen. Silently, he handed Mara a flashlight. She trained the beam on the object. They all stared down at it.

“It looks—my god!” Christophe reeled back, hand pressed to his mouth.

Mara gasped and felt Julian stiffen beside her.

The small form lay face up, swaddled in some kind of cloth. The darkened flesh had collapsed and dried about the little skull.
The nose was a shrunken button. The eyes, fallen into their sockets, were covered with withered flaps of skin. The child, for it was a human baby, had been placed with its arms outside the covering and crossed upon its breast. Stiffly the tiny, clawlike hands clutched a rosary, as if in suspended prayer.

The discovery itself was shocking enough. However, one detail hit Mara hard: the child’s lower jaw was jammed sideways, dragging the lips apart. As she stared at it, she felt certain that this infant had struggled, had protested death with all the small strength it had possessed. Rudely illuminated, the black, disturbing crater of the mouth seemed to shatter the stillness of the room with its unuttered cry.