The Orchid Shroud Read online

  MICHELLE WAN

  The

  ORCHID SHROUD

  Michelle Wan, the author of Deadly Slipper, was born in Kunming, China. She was raised in the United States and has lived in India, England, France, and Brazil. She and her husband, a tropical horticulturist, visit the Dordogne annually to photograph and chart wild orchids. They live in Guelph, Ontario.

  ALSO BY MICHELLE WAN

  Deadly Slipper

  TO ORCHID-LOVERS EVERYWHERE.

  AND TO MARG, JENNY, AND ANNE,

  VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book drew on the help, kindness, and encouragement of many people. I thank them all. Special acknowledgment is owing, however, to certain individuals. In France, un grand merci to: Bob and Mary Woodman, Michel and Marie-Sylvie Renard, Marie-Léontine Carcenac, Ginette and Louis Ducourtioux, Bruno Dalle, Patrick Lemesle, Marie-Pierre Kachintzeff, and Garry Watt for their friendship, wonderful food experiences, and for helping me to get the language right and understand so many things about life in the Dordogne. I am also grateful to Nicole Levy for her assistance with things legal and notarial; Charles Amiguet for information on hunting; and Didier Ribeyrol for input on the French Gendarmerie. I would be remiss if I did not single out, among the above-mentioned, Patrick for his invaluable guidance on police procedures; and Marie-Pierre, Garry, and Michel and for their kindness and generosity in helping me to nail down facts and fine-tune details. My gratitude to all of you.

  Closer to home, I wish to thank Allan Anderson for his botanical expertise and for helping me to find places where Canadian Slipper Orchids grow; Margaret MacKinnon, David Antscherl, and my husband, Tim, for their critical review of the draft; Frances and Bill Hanna not only for their wise input and support, but for naming this book; and my sister, Grace, whose encouragement and wonderful house inspire me.

  I also used a number of botanical, nonfiction, and other resources in researching this novel. In particular, I wish to recognize the scholarship of the following authors: Phillip Cribb (The Genus Cypripedium); Alec M. Pridgeon, Phillip J. Cribb, Mark W. Chase, and Finn N. Rasmussen (Genera Orchidacearum, Volume I); Holger Perner (personal communications); Pierre Delforge (Orchids of Britain and Europe); Mark Kurlansky (Salt, A World History); Mark Girouard (Life in the French Country House); Michel Louis (La bête du Gévaudan); and Claude Seignolle (Contes du Périgord). Any distortions or errors that may have occurred in making the leap from fact to fiction are mine.

  As always I end with deepest thanks to Tim, the love of my life and friend of the path, who goes with me every step of the way.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This work of fiction takes place in the Dordogne (dor-DOHN-yuh), a département in southwestern France where the wooded countryside in spring rings with the cuckoo’s call and where wild orchids still bloom. The characters in this book are entirely fictitious, and invented places jostle with real ones. The Sigoulane Valley and the places in and around it are imaginary. The orchids, with the exception of one, exist and are endangered. Please respect them and their habitat. Above all, rejoice in their beauty.

  PROLOGUE

  APRIL 2004

  The man in the greasy beret dropped his burden to the ground. He glanced over his shoulder. As usual, he, André Piquet, was up to no good. Nothing serious, mind. Just the kind of routine skulduggery that the Piquets, a noted clan of tricheurs, generally practiced.

  With a quick slash of his hunting knife, André severed the cord that secured the mouth of the sack. It sagged, spewing some of its contents over the damp litter of pine needles and last year’s fallen leaves. Sheathing the knife, he upended the sack. Smelly kitchen peelings mixed with dried maize tumbled to the ground.

  Baiting sangliers, the tough wild pigs that hunters in the Dordogne prized above all game, was frowned on as unsportsmanlike, not to say damned sneaky. The idea was that the sangliers, which roamed freely through the deep valleys and dense forests of this region of southwestern France, became accustomed to feeding at the baiting stations, with the result that, when the hunting season opened, voilà, you had a ready population of pigs in place for the kill. If you were quick off the mark, you could bring down an animal or two before anyone got wind of what you’d been up to. It was the Piquets’ guiding principle. Do it the easy way, secretly and fast, and your neighbor would never be the wiser. Also, it meant not having to share out your kill, taken on the quiet like that, with other hunters and local residents.

  As he rolled up the sack and stuffed it under his jacket, André heard a sound. He looked about him. The woods in early evening were chill and gloomy. It occurred to him that everything was uncommonly still. Normally starlings and crows made a racket around this time. Suddenly he felt a little nervous. Was someone spying on him? Or maybe it was the speed with which the darkness was moving in.

  Again, his ears caught the noise, a kind of scraping that was not the drilling of a woodpecker, or the creaking of branches in the wind. It seemed to be coming from somewhere to his right. Now curiosity vied with caution. Treading softly, he pushed through the thick undergrowth in the direction of the noise. He parted a curtain of pine branches and stepped into a small clearing. What he saw outraged him: a juvenile boar, freshly killed by the look of it. It lay head-on to him, one of its underdeveloped tusks driven into the dark, rough earth.

  “Putain!” André, thrust suddenly onto the unaccustomed moral high ground, gave vent to his disgust. Baiting pigs was one thing, but hunting out of season, especially if someone beat you to it, really went against the grain. Funny, though, he hadn’t heard a shot. And there did seem to be an awful lot of blood about. The ground all around was churned up and soaked with it.

  Then he realized that the wild pig had not been shot. Drawing closer, he saw that it had been brought down by something that had slashed its haunches, severing the hindquarter tendons to disable it before going in for the kill. Feeding had already begun, for the belly had been partly torn open, the slippery guts spilling out. André whistled through a gap in his stained front teeth. Whatever it was had to be big. A boar, even young, was a tough adversary for most dogs. Maybe a pack of dogs? he wondered. He hunkered down for a closer look, balancing on the balls of his feet.

  It was then that the long gray form came on him, hitting him from behind with tremendous force. He sprawled forward, driven face-down into the blood-wet earth. He felt a visceral shock as something ripped deep into the flesh of his shoulder.

  “Nom de dieu!” André shrieked. A hunter, he knew the ferocity of the wounded boar, the dangerous valor of the stag at bay. Never had he encountered anything like the savagery of this attack. Desperately he rolled over, shielding his face and throat with one hand while attempting to free his knife from its sheath with the other. He stood no chance against it. With a snarl conceived in hell, the creature came in for the kill.

  1

  WEDNESDAY, 28 APRIL 2004

  The first shattering blow echoed down the line of empty rooms. The big man stepped back, raised the iron mallet again. It struck home with another sickening thud.

  Christophe de Bonfond recoiled at the first hit, turned away at the second. His normally cheerful face was pale.

  “Je ne peux pas …” he murmured to his companion. “I can’t. It really is too much.”

  “Then don’t,” Mara Dunn responded in French, drawing him away by the arm. She was a small, slim woman, forty-something, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that read in English: Outside of a dog a man’s best friend is a book. Inside of a dog it is very dark. This was attributed to Groucho Marx. Her head was topped with short-cropped hair. She had dark eyes, straight brows, and a decisive chin. Her expression, normally vivid, was at the moment tightly composed. Why had he
insisted on being there? She said in an even tone that belied her exasperation, “We’ll leave them to it, shall we?”

  The little man nodded, shuddering as the steady, awful cadence of blows continued. In his haste to be gone, he pulled free of her and scuttled through a doorway leading into a small antechamber that gave access to the stairs.

  “Smokey,” Mara called over her shoulder, “I’ll be down on the terrace with Monsieur de Bonfond if you and Theo need anything.”

  Aristophanes Serafim, otherwise known as Smokey the Greek because he was from Thessalonika and a chain smoker, paused in the middle of his swing. A limp Gitane clung like a tubular growth to his lower lip. His sweat-stained T-shirt was stretched over a barrel chest and a large belly.

  “What would we need?” He spoke French with an accent as thick as feta cheese. The blunt head of the mallet completed its arc. A large sheet of plaster crashed down around him in a cloud of dust, exposing roughly dressed stone that had not seen the light of day for more than a hundred years. Smokey’s younger brother, Theo, equally big, sledgehammer in hand, stepped up to inspect the damage.

  “Well, just in case.” Mara’s eyes lingered anxiously on the pair. She had not worked with the brothers before and was not reassured by what she had seen so far. Their setup had been casual at best; the necessary precision of the task they were undertaking seemed beyond their comprehension. “Please try to take things down as carefully as possible.” She glanced up. “You’re sure of the bracing?” Her greatest fear was the roof collapsing.

  Both men regarded her with indifference. The Serafims were good at demolishing walls but didn’t seem to care much what else came down with them.

  The terrace ran across the back of the main part of the house, overlooking an expanse of geometrically clipped yews and boxwood: an eighteenth-century garden done in the Italian manner, for all that this was twenty-first-century southwestern France. In fact, everything about Aurillac Manor placed it more in the past than in the present. It was a large U-shaped structure, consisting of an original central block with wings, added on at later times, extending backward to enclose part of the garden. Built of local stone and along traditional lines, with Early Renaissance and Baroque touches, the overall effect was charming if slightly quirky.

  She stood beside Christophe at the terrace’s edge. Below them played an eighteenth-century stone fountain in the shape of a leaping dolphin. Its nose, chipped off at the tip by some past violence, pointed like a crooked finger at a door giving access to the south wing. Water dribbled from the dolphin’s mouth into a handsome but rather scummy pool. Aurillac’s grounds staff was down to one old man and a girl. If asked, Christophe would have complained of the difficulty of getting good help.

  “Silly of me, I know.” His brown eyes were unhappy. He was a small, round person in his early sixties, immaculately dressed in fawn-colored trousers and a summer jacket of slightly darker hue. His sparse, graying hair was neatly slicked back; his features were soft and rosy. He resembled, Mara thought, one of those nice pink marzipan pigs displayed in the windows of the better confectionary shops. Except for his expression. Confectionary pigs smiled.

  “It—it’s too much like living flesh …” Christophe managed to sound both apologetic and petulant at the same time. The flesh of the de Bonfonds was what he meant, overlying the brittle bones of old money, the stiffened sinews of class and privilege dating back centuries, embodied in a house.

  “You wanted a gallery,” Mara reasoned with him. “You can’t have it without knocking out walls.” A naturally quick, impatient person, she had learned the necessity of coaxing clients along. The demolition stage was never easy. People had a hard time seeing past the rubble.

  It had been Christophe’s idea to convert the entire upper floor of the north wing into an elevated gallery. The galerie was a popular feature of grand French country residences in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Initially a broad corridor linking parts of a house, it had evolved its own specialized function as an elegant walkway, a place for meditation and indoor exercise, a showcase for displaying family treasures and works of art. According to Christophe, the fact that Aurillac Manor lacked a galerie was not because it wasn’t grand enough but simply owing to pure bad planning.

  “You see,” he had explained when Julian had brought Mara out three months earlier, “Aurillac, or at least the central block, will be five hundred years old next year. The galerie is my birthday present to the house, you might say, and the perfect architectural complement to a little book I’m writing on the history of my family.” One had to take his use of “little” as an intended understatement, for the draft was said to run to over four hundred pages. “The de Bonfonds were ennobled, you know, by King Louis XV in recognition of invaluable services rendered to the crown. In fact, our family motto, ‘Blood And My Right,’ was suggested by the King himself, who intended it to refer to the rights and privileges conferred by our ancient bloodline. Rather like the British Royal Family’s ‘God And My Right,’ except that the Brits”—here he had giggled—“recognize a higher power.”

  The book, in turn, was intended to mark the quarter-century anniversary of Christophe’s small, elite publishing house, Editions Arobas. It was great fun, he said, everything coming together all at once like that. Christophe, who seemed to have pots of money, had glowed with excitement.

  “Can you do it?” he had asked Mara earnestly as they strolled through the series of gloomy rooms making up the north wing. “Julian told me how good you are. I did talk to an architect, you know, but I didn’t like him. A dreadful man with dirty fingernails, pas sympathique du tout.”

  “I expect he mentioned these are all load-bearing walls?” Mara, a French Canadian interior designer with an eye for old houses, had seen many misguided renovations since setting up shop in the Dordogne eight years ago. “You can’t just knock them out. They hold up your roof.” She had spoken coolly, but excitement had surged through her like a drug. The wing, built before communicating corridors came into fashion, consisted of three large rooms, one giving onto another by way of smaller, interspersing antechambers. That meant breaking down five dividing walls in addition to the portion of the old exterior east wall where the wing had been joined on, thereby extending the gallery all the way to the front of the house. The creative use of space was her métier, and her mind leaped ahead to all the possibilities.

  In the end Mara had worked out a plan (with another architect, who had clean nails and who was more sympathique) for converting the internal walls into a series of weight-bearing arches. The structural integrity would be ensured, and Christophe would have the sense and functionality of continuous space. She also planned to cut away the window embrasures at forty-five-degree angles to increase the illumination. It was Mara’s most important commission ever and a challenging project. Christophe was proving to be a grit-your-teeth client. Changing his mind. Fretting. (What if the structure was damaged? What if the gallery was not, after all, to his liking?) And now not being able to stomach the violence of the hammer’s blow.

  “Look.” Once again she took him by the arm, turning him firmly from the dribbling fountain that was beginning to wear on her nerves. “Stop worrying. This is just the messy part. Think about the finished product. You’ll love it. Family portraits on the walls, statues in the alcoves. The private space of a gentleman, for pleasure and contemplation.” She threw out the line like a sop.

  Christophe brightened. “Of course. You’re right, as ever. I’m so glad Julian introduced me to you. I simply could not have entrusted the work to someone who didn’t understand my feelings.” He allowed himself to be led away. A moment later he glanced slyly at Mara and shook his head. “Although what l’Adorée will say to all of this I really dread to think.”

  “Who”—Mara’s back went rigid as she braced herself for another complication—“is l’Adorée?”

  “The Adored One, my great-grandmother, so named because my great-grandfather loved her passionat
ely. Theirs was the romance of the century.” He gave her an impish grin. “Her spirit still walks, did you know?”

  “Formidable.” Mara laughed gustily. A ghost she could deal with, and Christophe’s sense of humor seemed to have returned. In a good mood, the man was tremendously likable, which made his sulks and moments of unhappiness all the more affecting.

  “Her name was Henriette Bertillon,” he went on. “She was a great beauty and a wonderful soprano. Apparently she was plucked out of a convent school where her pure voice soared over the cloister”—Christophe’s hand spiraled up in a simulation of soaring—“and thrust onto the stage of the Paris Opéra. My great-grandfather Hugo heard her sing and fell madly in love with her. They married, and when she became ill with tuberculosis, he brought her here to the family country estate to recuperate. Come. I’ll show you her room.”

  He steered Mara toward a door at the south end of the terrace. It opened directly into a lovely chamber, the walls of which were covered in cream-colored boiserie inset with lozenges of painted fruit and flowers. True, the paint was chipped and faded, but the effect was charming all the same. In an alcove, Mara spotted a bonheur-du-jour, a delicate lady’s writing desk with a raised back, that she would have given an arm to acquire.

  “As you can see,” said Christophe, “it’s been converted from a bedroom to a sitting room—le petit salon, my parents called it. I’m told l’Adorée loved this room because it opened right onto the terrace and garden. I always thought she died young. However, the fellow I hired to do the background research for my book tells me she lived well into old age.”

  “And her spirit?”

  “Temperamental. Dear me. My housekeeper, whose parents worked in the house in my parents’ and grandparents’ time, claims she once caused dinner plates to fly—”