The Scapegoat (34 page)

‘Who was the last to see her?’ I asked. ‘What time did she go to bed?’

‘She was with Blanche,’ said Françoise. ‘Blanche was reading to her, weren’t you, Blanche? She sent her to bed about half past nine. She was restless and excitable.’

I glanced at Blanche. Her face was set and strained. She did not look at me. ‘It’s always the same,’ she said to Françoise. ‘Her father upsets her, works on her feelings, and she is capable of any foolishness after that.’

‘But Marie-Noel didn’t see Jean all evening!’ interrupted Renée. ‘Jean was asleep in his room. The mistake everyone makes is allowing the child to appear on every occasion and mix with adults. Yesterday she tried to be the centre of the picture throughout the day. I noticed it in particular. Of course she became over-excited.’

‘I had the impression she was quieter than usual,’ said Paul, ‘more subdued, at any rate in the evening. It’s not surprising, when you think what happened during the day. I should imagine we’re the laughing-stock of the country, from Villars to Le Mans. You missed nothing,’ he added to Françoise, ‘you were well out of it.’

Françoise, with swimming eyes turned from him to me. ‘Did you drink so much?’ she said. ‘What in the world will people think?’

Germaine, goggle-eyed, watched us from her corner.

‘Go and tell Gaston to start searching the grounds,’ I said to her. ‘Tell him to get hold of Joseph, too, and anyone else who’s about. Monsieur Paul and I will be down directly.’

‘If you want to know what I think,’ said Paul, ‘it’s this. The child has run away because Jean made an exhibition of himself in public. She was ashamed. So were we all.’

‘Marie-Noel was not ashamed,’ said Renée. ‘I heard her telling everyone that Jean was the most courageous man in the world and nobody but herself knew why. Heaven knows what they thought of her precocity. It made me most uncomfortable.’

‘Courageous? What did she mean by courageous?’ asked Françoise.

‘It did take courage of a sort,’ said Paul, ‘deliberately to wreck the day for those who had taken infinite trouble to try and make it a success. It was a curious thing that, out of about fifty people invited here after the shoot was over, only twenty or so turned up. It’s not the personal slight I mind, but the slight on the family.’

‘It was the weather,’ said Renée. ‘Everyone was wet through.’

The bickering was interrupted by a knock on the door, and we all turned, in hope and expectation, but it was only Charlotte, self-importance upon her thin mean face.

‘Excuse me Monsieur le Comte, and you too, Madame la Comtesse Jean,’ she said. ‘I have just heard about the child. I think I was the last to see her. When I went upstairs last night I happened to look along the corridor and she was kneeling outside the dressing-room door. She wanted to say good night to her Papa. She could not make you hear, Monsieur le Comte.’

‘That’s not surprising,’ said Paul.

‘Why didn’t she try my door, then?’ asked Françoise. ‘I was not asleep. She must have known perfectly well that she had only to knock and I would have answered.’

‘That was my fault, Madame la Comtesse Jean,’ said Charlotte. ‘I told the child on no account to disturb her Papa, who must have so much on his mind at the present time, or to disturb you, Madame, who need sleep so badly with the little son soon to be born. A little playmate, I told her, sent from paradise, whom she must learn to love and cherish.’

The small button eyes flickered towards me and fell, and she looked from one to the other of us with a half-smile, servile, obsequious, upon her pinched mauve lips. I thought of the dressing-room adjoining that other bedroom in the tower, and I knew that because of the re-arranging of the boxes in the cupboard above the wash-basin she must be aware of my visit there last night. She would not betray me, any more than she would betray herself. I was an accomplice, and I hated the fact, but there was nothing I could do to alter it.

‘Well,’ I asked, ‘what happened next?’

‘She seemed a little upset, Monsieur le Comte. I was quite shocked. She said, “My Papa needs me, and nobody else. He only wants a boy to bring money into the family.” Those were her words. I told her it was not the way to speak, and that Monsieur le curé would not approve, or anyone in St Gilles.
When the baby comes we shall all love him I said, from her Papa down to César, we had all waited for him so long. Then she came with me as far as the service door, and on to her own staircase, and I went above to Madame la Comtesse, who was sleeping peacefully, like an angel.’

Who was, in fact, lying unconscious, because of what I had done to her. Perhaps it was the same thing. It did not greatly matter now. The only thing that mattered was that Marie-Noel was missing, and she was missing because I had gone to Villars instead of staying at the château.

‘Is it possible, Mademoiselle,’ suggested Charlotte, turning to Blanche, ‘that the little one has run down to the church? After all’ – she hesitated, watching me an instant, the expression of servility on her face deepening – ‘if she has anything on her mind of which she is ashamed, she would surely go to Monsieur le curé and ask to make her confession?’

‘No,’ said Blanche, ‘she would come first to me.’

Paul shrugged his shoulders. ‘It would be more to the point if we all got dressed, wouldn’t it?’ he asked. ‘Blanche can go down to the curé, while Jean and I search the grounds with Gaston. That is,’ he added, throwing me a glance, ‘if you’re sufficiently recovered from yesterday.’

Without answering, I turned and went back into the dressing-room, and crossing to the window looked down into the moat. There was nothing in it but the tangled grass, the ivy, and the weeds. It was only in imagination that I saw the small body in the blue dress lying in the ditch, broken and useless.

It was Gaston who came to tell me that the dog was missing. Joseph had gone to feed him, and had found the kennel empty. This news brought an odd sense of relief. If Marie-Noel had taken César with her he would act as protector, at least from this world’s dangers. Nor would a child bent on self-destruction take a dog with her.

Once outside the château, Paul and the men and I divided between us the ground to be searched, and my territory took
me towards the scene of yesterday’s shoot. The woods were soggy with the rain of the day and the night, the fallen leaves like paper under my feet, the brushwood soft and rotten. But the bright day, penetrating the cover, gave sharpness to the outline of the trees, which yesterday had been blurred and obscure. This morning there was no mist, no patter in listless branches sweeping dull and humid to the ground, only a clear intensity of sunlight turning the undergrowth silver where the raindrops, glistening like pools, shimmered a moment in the hollow of a leaf before the leaf melted and became one with the soil.

I knew, tramping the long rides, climbing the ditches in the black woods, that she would not be there, in front of me, a small Artemis with her hound at the end of the ride, or a babe in the woods asleep at the foot of a tree. It was only an exercise I set myself because there was nowhere else to search, and the shouts and the halloos of the rest of them, closer to the château grounds, could not reach me here, with their irritating, useless frequency. It was as idle to call as to prod a haystack with a fork, which I had seen Joseph do in all seriousness. If the child wanted to be found she would be found, not there, not here, but waiting, hidden, before her own symbolic shrine.

When I broke finally from the forest and emerged into fields once more, I saw that my walk had brought me in a half-circle, this morning’s brightness showing what yesterday’s mist had hidden; and there, a couple of fields away, were the foundry sheds, half obscured by a fence enclosing their plot of ground, and the chimney itself, a pencil against the sky. I climbed under the wire surrounding the wood, crossed the fields past the white horse browsing beside the hedge, and, opening a small gate embedded in briar and nettles, came once more to the apple orchard behind the master’s house. The windows, facing west, were blank and dim, but the tangled garden glistened like the raindrops in the wood, a cobweb veil of dew encompassing the crops, a cover for tumbled, crimson apples, while the earth was steamy with the warmth drawn from it by the sun. The house
slept, yet was not desolate. The creeping vine protected the windows and the walls, and the teeming garden and orchard, spilling vegetables and fruit that were never gathered, seemed an echo and a promise from a past still unfulfilled – a past that became suddenly blended with the present because of a half-open window beside the blistered door, a window that on my visit only three days before had been fast shut and crusted with the years.

As I watched, I saw someone come to the window and stand there, looking out at me, and I walked over the wet earth and the fallen apples. When I stood beside the window I saw the figure was Julie, and she had her finger to her lips for silence.

‘You came quickly,’ she whispered. ‘I only sent word to the château ten minutes ago. I could get no reply by telephone.’

Her words had no meaning for me. Yet I was afraid. The brown eyes, usually so warm and full of life, were troubled. The intuition that I had learnt never to mistrust turned to apprehension.

‘I had no message,’ I said. ‘I came by chance.’

I climbed through the window into the room. It was the same that I had entered before, where the furniture was stored, the one-time salon of the master’s house. The windows faced two ways: the one where Julie stood looked out upon the orchard and the garden, the other to the well. A shaft of sunlight fell upon the child, white and still under a heap of blankets, and upon the dog, his muzzle between his paws, stretched at her feet. It was what my fancy had conjured, yet, strangely, more poignant still. Not dripping from a pool, not torn or mangled, merely alone, a speck in isolation.

‘One of the workmen found her because of César,’ said Julie. ‘The dog was standing guard beside the well. She must have climbed down the ladder to the bottom and lain there, amongst the glass and rubble, all the night. She was asleep when he brought her up, and she was sleeping still when he carried her into the house and called to me.’

Asleep. I had thought her dead. I turned to Julie, but the wrinkled face was puzzled and awed, not stricken. Still whispering, taking me by the arm, she said, ‘It was Madame la Comtesse who walked in her sleep in the old days. It is perhaps part of the little one’s inheritance, Monsieur Jean. No doubt she had something on her mind.’

I felt in my pocket for the scrap of paper. It belonged to Jean de Gué, yet it was also mine. Mine too the image of the drugged woman on her pillow. Jean de Gué’s mother had smiled when I took away her pain, but I had not carried it far: I had left it with his child instead.

The small face against the dark blanket looked like something carved from stone, an angel’s head, remote, intangible, lost in a cold cloister.

‘Poor little one,’ said Julie, ‘it is always at this age they take fancies into their heads. For myself, it was a boy in the village. I followed him everywhere. My sister had a passion for her teacher. This one is religious, like Mademoiselle Blanche. It will pass.’

She patted the blanket, her hand brown and strong and wrinkled like her face, her thumb-nail black with soil. The letter in my pocket, which had seemed precious, a key to unlock a door, became suddenly a scrap without meaning. I had a vision of it found in a forgotten drawer, years later, by a woman looking like Blanche, who, before throwing it into the waste-paper basket, with a frown, wondered when she had written it, and why, remembering nothing of the suffering and pain she had taken with her to the well.

‘You know what it is,’ said Julie. ‘In a house full of women, like yours, it is time someone prepared her for what is to come. She is growing fast. They are like young plants at this stage, they shoot quickly. Ernest, who lives next door to me and who found her and carried her up, is father of three daughters. The first thing he asked me was her age. Not eleven yet, I told him. That’s nothing, he said. His youngest was ten when she matured.
It can be frightening, you understand, Monsieur Jean, when a child becomes a young girl and still knows nothing. It would not surprise me if it happened soon.’

I wished I possessed Julie’s common sense, her tenderness, her perception. I wished I had the knowledge of Ernest, who lived next door and had three daughters. Lecturing on Joan of Arc was no preparation for a
père de famille
, and I was not even a
père de famille
, I was someone acting a part in a masquerade.

‘I don’t know what to tell her,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

Julie stared at me in pity. ‘These things are never difficult for us,’ she said, ‘but for you people at the château life is full of complications. Sometimes I wonder how you live at all. Nothing is natural.’

The child stirred in her sleep but did not wake. The blankets, rough and hairy, brushed her chin. It would be simpler after all if she could stay there, poised in time, without the turmoil of the years to come. To Julie she was a seedling requiring sun; to me, something of my own self lost. In the dark the two combined together in a single point of pain.

‘It’s odd,’ I said to Julie. ‘When they told me at the château she had disappeared, I kept thinking of her drowned.’

‘Drowned?’ she said, puzzled. ‘There is nowhere here to drown.’ She paused and looked over my shoulder to the window. ‘You know there has been no water in the well for fifteen years.’

She turned and met my eyes, and I said, feeling suddenly that I could keep the truth to myself no longer, ‘I didn’t know. I don’t know anything. I’m a stranger here.’

Surely she must understand? Her honesty would not be fooled: she must recognize me for what I was, an intruder and a fraud.

‘Monsieur le Comte was always a stranger at the
verrerie
,’ she said. ‘That was the trouble, wasn’t it? You neglected your inheritance and your family, and allowed another man to take your place and bear your responsibilities.’

She patted my shoulder, and I knew that she was speaking of the past and I the present. We were two people in two different worlds.