The Orchid Shroud Read online

  “Arrh,” a voice grated hoarsely behind them.

  They turned. It was Theo Serafim, standing in the open doorway. He was covered in a fine layer of plaster dust. He carried his mallet as nonchalantly as a tack hammer. Dark runnels of sweat scored his cheeks.

  “Oui?” Mara drew straight, black brows together, the knot in her stomach that she was coming to associate with the Serafims pulling tight.

  “Smokey says you want the stones numbered.” Theo’s accent was even thicker than his brother’s.

  “Exactly.” She let her breath out slowly. “Left to right, top to bottom, while they’re still in place. Monsieur de Bonfond wants to keep the stones, and he wants them ordered. I explained everything to Smokey yesterday. You have a problem?”

  “Arrh. It’s just that it’s a double wall, and we’re working at it on both sides, like.”

  She waited distrustfully.

  He scratched his head, releasing a cloud of particles into the air. “So how do you want them numbered? The side he’s on, or the side I’m on? Left to right his side is right to left my—”

  “Christophe,” said Mara in as even a tone as she could manage, “will you excuse me a moment?”

  2

  SEPTEMBER 1870

  The object that Henriette de Bonfond, née Bertillon, had caused to fly was not a dinner plate but a goodly-sized crystal ball. She had two strong arms, and the orb she had flung from the terrace had crashed into the nose of a fishlike creature that rose out of the fountain below her, carrying away with it a large chip of stone before disappearing with a satisfying splash into the murky depths of the basin. She had chosen the crystal ball because it appeared to be a valued family possession, occupying pride of place on a plinth in the main reception room. She had intended simply to hurl it into the pool. That it had damaged the fountain en route was better still.

  Henriette’s fury was occasioned by her impossible situation. She had given up the lively salons of Paris for a promised life of ease and comfort. Not that she had expected Hugo’s family to receive her well. At least, not at first. She brought neither money nor property into the match. Beauty, wit, and intelligence were her entire dowry. However, at Aurillac she had found a penny-pinching austerity beyond imagining and a degree of ill-will that chilled her to the bone. Hugo, now that he had bedded her, did nothing to defend her. Instead, he went hunting every day, returning in the evening smelling of horses and wet leaves and stained with the blood of his kill. She was left to the company of his odious mother, his great lump of a sister, and his gouty father, who leered horribly at her from the fireside armchair to which he was confined.

  A survivor, Henriette had instantly picked out Hugo’s mother as her principal adversary. Odile de Bonfond was a thin, grim woman with a mouth like an iron trap. Henriette astutely sized her up as harder and more grasping than a bordel keeper and more preposterously puffed up about her station in life than the most arrogant Parisian lackey. Odile was also cruel and clever. Henriette found herself the target of daily acts of malice. The fare at Aurillac consisted mainly of game brought down by Hugo, who had a bloodlust for the hunt. When they had a civet of hare, it was Henriette who was somehow and inexplicably served the head. She was kept short of candles, perhaps in the hope that she would trip on the stairs and break her neck. She was sure that the servants had been instructed to ignore her orders. Only one, a new girl named Marie, showed herself kindly toward the newcomer. Between mistress and maid a certain sympathy had sprung up.

  As Henriette watched the ripples in the pond die away, she knew it would be a fight to the finish. She was confident enough of her skills to feel that in time she would more than better her new sister and father-in-law. She was not so sure about Odile.

  3

  WEDNESDAY, 28 APRIL

  Business was a word-of-mouth affair, Julian Wood reckoned happily. Or, as the locals put it, de bouche à oreille, from mouth to ear. He was a tall, lean man, topping fifty, with a long face, a badly trimmed mustache and beard, and unruly, grizzled hair. He stood a moment, looking across the Sigoulane Valley, a broad sunlit depression on the north shore of the Dordogne River. Trellised vines filled the valley floor. Rows of them spilled up the gently sloping western flank to join a pure, blue sky. Julian hooked his thumbs into his jeans pockets and breathed deeply. It was a glorious morning, the kind of weather he had left England for nearly three decades ago. The kind of weather that kept him rooted in the Dordogne.

  It was simple. Julian had introduced Mara to his good friend Christophe de Bonfond, which had led to her securing the renovation of Aurillac Manor. Christophe, in turn, had set Julian up with his cousin Antoine de Bonfond, an uncomplicated man of the soil whose large, upright figure belied his seventy-odd years. With the result that Julian was now coming away from the prestigious Coteaux de Bonfond winery with a fat contract in his pocket. Or as good as, for the deal with Antoine had been concluded with a handshake and the prospect of landscaping the new sales pavilion, destined to receive the delegations of buyers and busloads of tourists who were the foundation of the winery sales. That was how things worked in the Dordogne, and just in time, too, from Julian’s perspective. His bank account had been running desperately lean of late. Whistling an off-key rendition of “Money Makes the World Go Round,” he hopped into his battered Peugeot van, keyed the ignition, and drove off.

  Good old Christophe. He thought again with gratitude of their odd friendship, formed twenty-three years ago, during a back-breaking and often hysterical attempt to restore the Italianate format of Aurillac’s gardens. Julian did the spadework, and there had been a lot of it, for everything had been allowed to run wild; Christophe had the hysterics; and the project was eventually abandoned half finished. Shortly after that, Christophe had published Julian’s book on wildflowers of the Dordogne when no one else would touch it. The work, originally planned in picture-book format, had been converted by a bright junior editor to a bilingual botanical guide. At first Christophe had balked. It was not the thing that small, select Editions Arobas did. But the idea had proven so successful that Arobas was now set to publish Julian’s Wild Orchids of the Dordogne as a companion edition. Julian, who wanted nothing more than to garden and pursue his orchidological passions, was actually in danger of becoming an established author.

  Julian’s relationship with Mara, more dizzying, went back not quite fourteen months. At the thought of her, he left off whistling and rubbed his beard reflectively. Like a man unable to trust a run of luck, he didn’t entirely believe that Mara had come into his life. One disastrous marriage long ago and subsequent unsatisfactory relationships had left him doubting. The two of them were so different. She was high-energy and driven. He was content to go, slowly, with the flow. She was an interior designer, constantly interfering with the natural scatter of things. He was an outdoors kind of person who, for the most part, took life as it came. She did not share his floral enthusiasms.

  Well, opposites attracted, he acknowledged as he downshifted into a turn. Although it could also be the typical story of two expatriates thrown together in a country where you were always to some degree an outsider, and where existence ran according to an often elegantly unfathomable logic. Nothing new there. Lust? Definitely. But there was more to it than that, he felt. Something—he chewed his bottom lip, thinking of fitting similes—like a taut piece of elastic between them that held him fast (but that could also fling him back nastily, if the other end were let go). Nevertheless, there she was, causing him to experience a sense of glad anticipation he had not known for years.

  Julian slowed as he approached the turnoff for Aurillac, which stood high on a ridge on the east side of the valley. Christophe was laying on drinks and lunch that day, “to commemorate the breaking of stone.” Julian glanced at his watch. Just gone half ten. He supposed he could turn up early to see how the demolition was progressing, but he’d only get in the way. Mara at a work site, he knew from experience, could be cranky. On the other hand, he had plenty
of time to run out to Malpech and back, rounding out what was already shaping up to be a perfect day. He gunned the engine and drove straight on.

  His way ran south out of the valley along a road that cut through the immaculately groomed vines of Coteaux de Bonfond, fifty hectares planted in Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon grapes with smaller cultivars of Malbec. The valley held the sun like a bowl. This, combined with its sheltered position and peculiar gravelly soils, resulted in an annual production of twenty-four hundred hectoliters of wine, a portion of which went into the making of one of the finest, if not the finest, Bergerac reds. Julian had done his homework. The winery star was its Domaine de la Source, a splendid, full-bodied wine that took its name from a spring that poured out of a hillside above the winery in the forested north end of the valley. In fact, the landscaping plan he had proposed cleverly centered on a water feature, modeled on that spring. Again, he had done his homework.

  As he neared the valley head, he passed Antoine’s house—Les Chardonnerets, it was called—an imposing structure that rode like a stone ship in a sea of vines. Beyond it, the order of Coteaux de Bonfond gave way to the sketchier plantations and cottages of smaller growers. At the village of Sigoulane, a cluster of steeply roofed buildings fashioned from the warm yellow limestone of the region, he found himself at the river. He rumbled across the old stone bridge and turned east, following a network of minor roads that wound between rumpled hills and past fields of young wheat ablaze with spring poppies. Iris Potter had left a message on his phone the evening before: she needed to talk to him about a sketch she was preparing for a section of his book, and could he drop by at his earliest?

  The new book was Julian’s magnum opus. It contained lovingly annotated photographs of every species of wild, terrestrial orchid native to the Dordogne. There were dozens of them: Lady Orchids in their spotted purple skirts; Military Orchids standing to attention like diminutive soldiers; pale, fleshy Bird’s-nests; braided Lady’s-tresses; Man, Pyramidal, Lizard, Butterfly, and Monkey Orchids. There were also the many kinds of Dactylorhiza, and the cunning genus of Ophrys that mimicked the insect pollinators they sought to attract. He had spent years charting and photographing these flowers and knew them like old friends. Each spring he returned to woodlands, meadows, and bogs to visit his favorite colonies, or searched anxiously for individual plants whose fate he feared for. And each year he found that the orchids were fewer in number as their habitat was gradually encroached on or destroyed.

  One flower, in particular, haunted his waking hours. An unknown Lady’s Slipper which he had never seen in real life and of which he had only one very bad photograph and no information. He had given a copy of the photo to Iris to draw, hoping that her artist’s eye could render whole something that for him was frustratingly incomplete. He was itching to see what progress she had made on it. He was less enthusiastic about running into Iris’s temperamental paramour, Géraud Laval. Géraud was also a keen orchidologist and Julian’s nemesis in all things botanical, especially where this Mystery Orchid was concerned.

  Ah. C’est vous,” Géraud barked as he opened the door to Julian. “What do you want?” A retired pharmacist, he was a short, bald, goblinesque man with wiry tufts of hair sprouting from both ears. Julian, who could only guess at Géraud’s age, believed grimly that he would never die.

  “Don’t be rude, Joujou.” Iris, a dumpy little figure in a paint-stained smock, pushed forward to pull Julian inside. “He’s here to see me.” She raised a weathered face to exchange pecks with Julian, one per cheek—the number varied, depending on where in France you were. A Brit expatriate and longtime Dordogne resident, Iris dabbled in sentimental watercolors for a living but could turn out surprisingly accurate botanical drawings when called on. “And, no, he doesn’t want to see your latest hybrid.” She steered Julian away from the glassed-in plant room attached to the rear of the house. The space there was crammed with tropical orchids, an exotic display of showy colors and bizarre forms, unlike the more modest terrestrial varieties that Julian preferred.

  Undeterred, Géraud shouted, “Kingianum cross. Got it for an obscene price from a whore of a breeder who literally stole it from someone else.” Géraud’s passion was possessing and breeding tree-dwelling epiphytes, although he also maintained a vast collection of terrestrials that he had pirated from elsewhere and planted in his back garden. Géraud was notoriously unfussy about how he acquired things.

  Iris said earnestly, “Listen, Julian, I need to talk to you. That photo you gave me—”

  “I know,” he apologized. “It’s dreadful. The film, as I told you, was damaged. Unfortunately, it’s all I have to go on.”

  “Ha!” roared Géraud, trailing after them. “You’re mad. Putting that thing in your book, pretending it’s an unknown species of Cypripedium.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Julian fought to keep his cool. “I’m treating it as an uncertain sighting.”

  “Based on a dog’s breakfast of a photograph. You know as well as I do there’s only one native species of Lady’s Slipper in Western Europe, Cypripedium calceolus, which doesn’t grow in these parts and never looked like that.”

  “Oh, you’re just jealous. Admit it. You’re hoping as much as I am that this flower really exists. You’re afraid I’ll claim it first. You can’t stand the thought that someone else might get credit for discovering a rare—”

  “Discover?” Géraud almost shrieked. “Discover? What have you discovered? Where’s your proof?”

  “Don’t worry,” Julian yelled back. “I’ll find it. And you don’t fool me. You’re beating the bushes for it, too. I’ve seen you skulking around Les Colombes.”

  “Stop it.” Iris intervened physically between the two men. “Géraud, go away. I mean it. Go away. Julian and I need to talk.”

  “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.”