The Splendour Falls (18 page)

‘He wasn’t a historian, by any chance?’ I asked.

The poet laughed at that. ‘God, no. Didier? He took no interest in such things. He was a clever man, don’t get me wrong – he worked once for a lawyer, so he must have had a brain. But I don’t think I ever saw him read a book. Now me,’ he confessed, ‘I have too many books.’

Paul turned to admire the shelves. ‘There’s no such thing.’

‘I have some books, old books, about the history of
Chinon, that make some mention of the tunnels. I’m afraid I can’t lend them, but if you’d like to look …’

It was a good excuse to stand, to bring our rather pointless visit to a close, and I loitered patiently to one side as Paul leafed through the offered books with polite interest.

It was too bad, I thought, that Harry hadn’t known about Victor Belliveau. My cousin would have coveted this collection of books – old memoirs, bound in leather rubbed bald at the edges; some odd assorted plays and books of poems; an old edition of
Cyrano de Bergerac
, a copy of a British history journal …

I blinked, and peered more closely at the shelf. The journal was a recent one, with a revisionist slant. And there upon the cover, bold as brass, I read my cousin’s proper name:
Henry Yates Braden, PhD
.

‘What’s that?’ asked Paul, behind my shoulder. I tilted the cover to show him.

Victor Belliveau leaned in to look as well. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘that talks about the tunnels, too. I had forgotten …’ He looked a little closer, and his eyebrows lifted. ‘Braden … isn’t that the man you asked me about? The man from your university?’

Paul nodded. ‘Harry Braden, yes.’

‘Then I’m sorry he didn’t come to visit me,’ the poet said, his tone sincere. ‘I enjoyed his article very much. He has an interesting mind, I think.’

I put the journal down again, frowning faintly. ‘I don’t suppose that Didier Muret would have read this article as well?’

The poet shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t think it likely.’

‘Because he didn’t read much, you mean?’

‘Because he knew no English.’ The poet’s smile was gentle. He walked us to the door and shook our hands. ‘You must come back again, if I can be of any help,’ he said. But he didn’t linger for a goodbye wave. He closed the door behind us as we stepped onto the grass, and I heard the bolt slide home. The sound seemed to echo back from the abandoned barn opposite, where a padlocked door creaked in the slight wind as Paul and I trudged thoughtfully across the pitted overgrown yard.

‘He certainly didn’t seem a drunkard,’ I remarked.

‘Yeah, well,’ Paul smiled faintly, ‘that doesn’t mean anything. My Uncle Aaron soaks up liquor like a sponge, but you’d never know it. He only slurs on days he’s stone cold sober.’ We’d reached the leaning gate. Paul pulled it open and stood aside to let me pass through first.

I looked at him, curious. ‘Do you think he was telling us the truth? About not writing Harry the letter, I mean?’

‘Why would he lie?’

Why indeed? I looked back one final time at the dismal yellow farmhouse, at the crumbling walls and sagging roof. The curtains of the kitchen window twitched and then lay still, and the only movement left was that of the lone black chicken, stalking haughtily across the yard through the long and waving grass. I felt a faint cold shiver that I recognised as fear, although I didn’t know its cause.

‘The chapelle, next,’ said Paul, and slammed the gate behind us with a clang that sent the chicken scuttling for cover. 

Paul pulled the jangling ring of keys from the iron lock and swung the great door reverently, as though he hated to disturb the peaceful atmosphere laced with the songs of unseen birds and the whispering of wind in shadowed alcoves. Above the old baptismal font the bay tree rustled gently, while the wild flowers nodded drowsily along the edges of the empty
grass-filled
graves. Soft weathered faces watched us from each corner of the architecture, from every ledge and pediment and every vaulted niche, and in the shadowed aisle behind the tall black iron gates the pensive saints gazed through the bars as one stares at a lion in its cage.

It should have been unnerving, having all those eyes upon me, but it wasn’t. Oddly enough, it was reassuring. I felt again that rush of pure contentment, of childlike wonder, and the sense of beauty stabbed so deeply that I had to blink back tears.

‘Wow,’ said Paul. ‘It doesn’t lose its impact, does it, second time around?’

I shook my head. ‘You’ve been here before?’

‘Yeah. It was one of the first places we discovered after the château. Simon read about it in a book, I think, and when he found out Christian had a key …’ He shrugged, and left it at that, moving past me to the soaring grille of iron.

‘And what’s the word for this place, then? Secluded?’ I guessed. ‘Sacred?’

He grinned. ‘Sanctuary.’

I recalled my own first reaction to the place, and felt an even closer kinship with this quiet young man I’d only met three days ago.

The iron gates swung open, and we stepped into the cloistered aisle with its peeling frescoes and fragile-looking pillars. ‘Sacred,’ Paul informed me, as he shuffled the ring of keys, ‘is just through here.’

‘Just through here’ lay beyond the altar, beyond the second iron gate – the gate that Christian hadn’t had the key to yesterday. The tunnelled passage in behind looked every bit as uninviting as I remembered, and even when Paul had successfully sprung the lock I hung back, hesitating, peering with a coward’s eyes into the darkness. ‘I haven’t brought a torch.’

‘A flashlight, you mean? That’s OK, I’ve got one.’ It was a pocket torch, a small one, hardly any help at all, but he snapped it on and stepped into the passageway ahead of me. ‘I think the main switch is around here somewhere. Yeah, here we go.’ A flood of brilliant yellow light dissolved the lurking shadows.

I blinked, surprised. ‘Electric light?’

‘Sure. This place is kind of a museum, you know. They do take tourists through, during the summer, and I guess they don’t want people stumbling around. Here, watch your step.’ He guided me over the uneven threshold. The passageway was filled on either side with artefacts and curious equipment, neatly laid out on display. Ancient tools for farming and for wine-making shared equal space with emblems of religion and broken statuary, the whole effect being one of wondrous variety. ‘This is where the hermit lived, originally,’ said Paul. A few steps on, the passage turned and widened briefly in an arched and empty room of sorts, where more pale statues stared benignly down on us.

My claustrophobia eased a little and I paused to draw a deep and steady breath. ‘Is this the sacred part?’

‘No. Behind you.’

I turned, and saw what looked like another tunnel running down into the rock, its entrance barred by an ornate black metal barrier, waist-high, anchored in the scarred and worn limestone. Curious, I went as close as the barrier allowed, and peered over it at the flight of crudely chiselled stairs that steeply dropped towards a glowing light. It made me dizzy, looking down. ‘Like Jacob’s ladder in reverse,’ I said to Paul, as he joined me at the railing.

‘It’s a well,’ he said. ‘A holy well.’

‘But where’s the water?’

He smiled. ‘Come on. I’ll show you.’

I had no great desire to go still deeper underground, but neither did I want to seem a coward. And at least I trusted Paul to bring me safely out again.

Climbing the barrier proved simple enough, no different than climbing a stile back home, but the stairs were a different matter. They were irregular in shape, some only several inches high while others fell two feet or more, and my fingers scrabbled in the dust and chips of rock to find a firmer handhold as I made my slow descent. Paul, who had clearly done this before, went down like a mountain goat, his steps sure and even. I was more ungainly, and brought the dust with me, a great whoofing cloud of it that swirled on even after I had stopped to join Paul on the narrow ledge at the bottom of the stairs.

‘This,’ he said, ‘is the sacred part.’ His hushed voice sounded hollow, like the echo round an indoor swimming pool. Intrigued, I braced one hand against the paper-cool stone and leaned forward for a proper look.

The water was there, as he had promised. Clear, holy water, pale turquoise in the glare of an electric light that hung from the stone arch overhead. It was, Paul told me, a Merovingian well, meaning it dated back to the time of the Franks – older, he thought, than Sainte Radegonde herself. The shaft sank deep and straight and true; several metres deep, I would have said, and yet the water was so amazingly clear that I could see the scattering of pebbles at the bottom.

‘You can even see the footholds,’ Paul said, pointing, ‘that the well-diggers used to climb out again, after they’d struck water.’ The footholds ran like a makeshift ladder, straight to the bottom of the well – small, even squares the width of one man’s boot, gouged in the yielding yellow stone.

I sighed, and the surface of the water shivered. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘at least we know that Harry isn’t anywhere down here.’

‘A cheerful thought,’ Paul smiled. ‘But you’re right, it’d be pretty hard to hide something in that water. Even a King John coin.’ He flipped a tiny half-franc piece into the well to demonstrate, and we watched until it came to rest upon the bottom, clearly visible. ‘Here, make a wish,’ Paul told me, handing me another coin.

He sounded just like my father, when he said that. For a moment I was five years old again and standing at the rim of the fountain in the courtyard of our house in Italy. But then I caught my own reflection in the water of the well, and the child vanished. I shook my head. ‘I don’t have anything to wish for.’

‘Everyone has something to wish for. Besides, how often do you get a chance to make a wish in holy water?’

‘No, honestly, you needn’t waste your money …’

‘Has anyone ever told you you’re a terrible cynic?’ He grinned and closed his eyes. ‘OK, never mind. I’ll make a wish for you. There,’ he said, and tossed the second coin into the waiting well. It hit the water with a satisfying plunk. End over end my unknown wish tumbled, glittering, and landed close to Paul’s one on the smooth and level bottom.

‘So what did I wish for?’ I asked, curious.

‘Bad luck to tell,’ he reminded me. Turning, he offered me his hand to help me up the stairs again. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘let’s give this place a proper search, and see what we can find.’

We found a treasure trove of slightly dusty artefacts
displayed in every crevice of the caves. We found a smaller chamber at the tunnel’s end, where someone evidently lived from time to time. ‘There’s a caretaker in the summer,’ Paul informed me, ‘on and off. I think she stays up here.’ But no one had been staying here recently. The bed was stripped, the cupboards empty, and dust lay thickly settled on the floor, marked by no sign of footprints save our own. We found a working wine press tucked in one high corner of the largest cave.

What we didn’t find, of course, was anything that Harry might have left. There wasn’t so much as a
chewing-gum
wrapper or a shred of tissue dropped in that bright, winding underground maze. I was, by turns, relieved and disappointed. Relieved because I hadn’t turned up any evidence that Harry was in trouble, disappointed because I hadn’t turned up any evidence that Harry was here at all. There was only that blasted coin.

Paul poked at the donation saucer as we paused before the simple altar on our way back out. ‘Is this where you found the King John coin?’

My face flamed with embarrassment, but I didn’t bother to deny it. The problem with Paul, I thought, was that he was too damn clever. He had a quiet but persistent way of finding out the truth. ‘Yes. I … I put in a donation of my own,’ I added, as if that made my theft acceptable, but Paul didn’t seem to be listening.

‘There’s got to be an explanation.’ That was the physicist talking. He furrowed his brow and stared hard at the plate of jumbled coins. ‘There’s got to be. We just aren’t looking at this from the right angle.’

He was still standing there, thinking, when the faint sound of the noonday bells came drifting up from the town below and broke the peaceful silence of the chapelle. There was nothing more for us to do here, I decided. I tugged at Paul’s sleeve. ‘Come on, Sherlock, time for lunch.’

‘Yeah, OK.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I guess I ought to check the laundry, anyway, before Simon gets back. Thierry’s probably shrunk everything beyond recognition by now.’

His gloomy fears turned out to be unfounded. From the pristine pile of folded shirts and jeans that met us in the hotel’s entrance lobby, it appeared that Thierry had done quite an expert job.

He flashed his quick disarming smile and ran his thumb along a trouser crease. ‘I cannot take the credit,’ he confessed. ‘I gave the clothes to Gabrielle for washing.’

Paul raised his eyebrows. ‘Gabrielle?’

‘The girl who does reception this week. Me, I am not good at washing things.’

He’d never have to worry about it, I thought, as long as he could aim a smile like that at a member of the opposite sex. It was a difficult smile to resist. I couldn’t help but feel a pang of sympathy for Gabrielle – small wonder she was so confused, sometimes. ‘You don’t play fair,’ I said to Thierry.

‘
Comment?
’

‘She means you take advantage,’ Paul explained. ‘Is Simon back yet?’

‘No, he is still with the Whitakers, I think.’ Again the
grin. ‘It has been quiet here, today.’

Paul turned from the front desk and looked a question at me. ‘You sick of my company, yet?’

‘Of course not. Why?’

‘Feel like having a drink or something? I know I could use one.’ Paul glanced back at Thierry. ‘The bar is open, isn’t it?’

‘Of course. You have had a nice time, sightseeing?’

‘Very nice.’ Paul smiled. ‘But don’t forget, now, it’s a—’

‘—secret,’ Thierry finished. ‘Do not worry, I am good at keeping secrets. If I had a franc for every secret in this hotel,’ he said, grinning, ‘I would not be needing to work.’

But he condescended to serve us anyway, before vanishing once more into the back rooms. Paul sipped his beer and leaned an elbow on the stack of freshly laundered clothes, which he’d set carefully beside him on his customary window seat. Behind his shoulder I could see the concrete planter outside, with its single pink geranium. It made a pitiful splash of colour against the shadowed backdrop of the busy fountain square.

Paul reached for his cigarettes and offered me the packet. ‘Want one?’

‘What? Oh, no thanks.’ Smiling, I shook my head. ‘No, I gave up smoking, years ago. Last night was just a momentary lapse.’

‘A momentary lapse that saved my butt,’ he pointed out. He lit one for himself and settled back. ‘So, what’s our next move?’

I gave a faint, defeatist shrug. ‘I don’t know. I’m rather tired of thinking about Harry, actually.’

‘So take a break,’ was his advice, ‘and drink your drink.’

It was, I decided, sound advice from one so young. I leaned back in my chair and sighed. But I couldn’t let it drop entirely. ‘What did Martine Muret’s ex-husband do for a living, do you know?’

Paul smiled at my obstinacy. ‘He was unemployed, I think. Simon actually met the guy once, he might know. Simon didn’t like Muret – thought he was a real jerk. He was drunk, you know, when he fell over that railing. That’s how he died. And I guess he gave Martine a hell of a rough time when they were married. He didn’t hit her or anything, I don’t think, but he was … well, he was pretty rude. Embarrassing. The kind of guy who likes to play the big shot, you know?’

Like Jim and Garland in reverse, I thought. No wonder Martine hadn’t been upset by her ex-husband’s death. To her, it must have been almost a deliverance.

Close by, a car door slammed and Paul craned his neck to peer out of the window, beyond my line of vision, towards the hotel’s front entrance. ‘So much for our quiet drink,’ he said, stubbing out his half-smoked cigarette.

‘Why? Are they back already?’

‘Do you know,’ he mused, his dark eyes twinkling, ‘I think I’ll just slip round to Christian’s and give him back that key.’

‘Coward,’ I teased him. But he just laughed, and winked, and ducked like lightning through the back door as the returning tour party from Fontevraud descended upon the Hotel de France in a blur of sound and motion.

The transatlantic line hummed thick with static, and it seemed an age before my father picked the phone up at his end. It was suppertime in Uruguay, and I’d obviously caught him in mid-meal. His voice at first was hard to understand.

‘Mmwamph,’ he said, when I apologised for calling at this hour, and ‘Barrrumph-ba’ was his comment after that. He cleared his throat, and coughed. ‘You’re still in France, then, are you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Still on your own?’

‘Yes. Actually, that’s why I called …’ I twined the phone cord round my fingers, then in a rush of explanation told him what I’d found.

‘The King John coin? You’re sure of that?’

I nodded, not caring that he couldn’t see the gesture. ‘I’ve got it right here, in my room. And I don’t think he’d have left it anywhere unless he meant to leave it, only that doesn’t make much sense, does it?’ I sighed, plucking at the coverlet of my bed. ‘Honestly, Daddy, I don’t know what else I can do.’

‘Well, it sounds as though you’ve handled things quite sensibly.’

‘I thought I might just ring Aunt Jane—’