The Orchid Shroud Page 4

  “Don’t worry, lad. I’ll let you do your job. I’m just an old man along for the ride.” To the others he explained proprietarily, “My niece’s boy.” To Christophe he said, “And don’t you worry. Had a little talk with his commanding officer, Adjudant Compagnon. Know him well. Good man. Although he was just a bit touchy at first, my being ex-PJ and all. They’re sensitive about things like that.” Loulou referred to the double structure of the French police system, the Gendarmerie Nationale, which was organized along military lines and reported to the Ministry of Defense and had under its jurisdiction small towns and rural areas; and the Police Judiciare, which policed larger centers and reported to the Ministry of the Interior. Ideally, the two branches, although quite separate, worked together when required, but there was a natural competitiveness between them in matters of turf and the solving of crimes. Loulou, with his Police Judiciaire links, was clearly stepping over the line. In fact, as a retired PJ with no official status, he had no business there at all. Not that this deterred him in the least. He squinted up at the imposing façade of Aurillac Manor with the air of a connoisseur.

  “Scene of the crime, eh?” he chortled.

  Christophe went pale. Just then Thérèse shouted down from the front door that he was wanted on the telephone.

  Christophe said to Mara, “Take them up, will you? I’ll be along shortly. And Mara”—his voice dropped to a murmur—“use the servants’ stairs.” He hurried into the house.

  As Christophe had requested, she took them around the north wing to the back of the house, up the staircase leading to the antechamber, and into the room where Smokey had revealed his find. Everything seemed strangely hushed. The dust had settled. With its rubble-strewn floor and piles of stone blocks, the place had the timeless air of an abandoned archeological site.

  Mara pointed to the partially demolished wall. “It’s in there.”

  Naudet stuck his head into the cavity.

  Loulou pulled him back. “You’ll need this, I think.” He produced a flashlight from a capacious trouser pocket. “A good cop is always prepared.”

  Laurent Naudet made a gesture of despair and went quite red.

  With the aid of the flashlight they looked down on the dead child. It had been placed in a scooped-out cavity under one of a series of bondstones that served to tie the two faces of the wall together. The Serafims, in breaking through the wall, had taken out each course of stones, starting at the top and working down on their respective sides, clearing away the riprap fill as they went. At a point about a meter and a half from the floor, they had lifted out a bondstone and made their startling discovery.

  The body, preserved by the cold, airless environment of the wall, lay covered in dust and surrounded by rubble. Viewing it a second time, Mara noted that the baby’s wrapping was of faded blue silk, fringed with tassels of darker blue. As the beam of light played over dried flesh the color of tea, she saw a quiff of bleached-out hair, shrunken arms dressed in fine cotton sleeves trimmed with lace. A cross of filigreed silver attached to a rosary of ivory and amber beads had slipped down along the baby’s side. Someone had loved this child enough to lay it out with care and commit its soul to God before closing it up in its rough, inhospitable tomb. Inevitably, her eye was drawn to the terrible void of the mouth. The natural result of the collapse of flesh in death, she told herself firmly. But she found she had to turn away, her ears once again assailed by a soundless, deafening cry.

  Perhaps the others heard it, too. Loulou, for once, was silent. Julian looked somber. Young Naudet stared, deeply disturbed. At this point Christophe burst into the room.

  “You won’t believe this.” His small, pale hands fluttered up around his face like panicked moths. “The press have already got wind of the story. That was them on the phone. I’ve put them off for now, but it won’t be long before the dam breaks.”

  “What did you tell them?” asked Julian.

  “I told them …” Christophe gulped. “I told them it was a cat.”

  “Un chat?” marveled Loulou. “How?”

  “It was the only thing I could think of. I said it was a cat that the workmen had mistaken for a … for a …”

  “Never mind,” said Mara. “Sergeant Naudet, how quickly do you think this matter can be taken care of?”

  “Well.” The gendarme pushed his képi back on his head. “For now, my instructions are to secure and guard the site and take down preliminary information. The Procurer’s Office in Périgueux as well as the Criminal Brigade Team will have to be informed. They’ll come out to do their stuff. Then the body will be sent for examination to determine the cause of death. If it turns out a crime has been committed—”

  “All that?” broke in Christophe. “It hardly seems worth it.”

  “Yes, well, it’s not up to me, I’m afraid.” Naudet returned the flashlight to his uncle and took out a notebook and a pencil. “Who exactly was it who found the, um, cadaver?”

  “My workmen,” Mara answered. “Theocritus and Aristophanes Serafim.”

  “And what time was that?”

  “A little past noon,” said Julian. “I remember hearing the church bells.”

  “The time of discovery is hardly relevant,” Loulou pointed out, “since the poor thing’s obviously been in there for a number of years.”

  “Uncle, please. Anyone else present at the time?”

  “Apart from my workmen? The three of us.”

  “Your names, please?”

  He scribbled the information in his notebook.

  “No one else on the premises?”

  This time Christophe responded. “My housekeeper, Thérèse Tardieux. And Didier Pujol, my gardener. He lives in, at the back of the property. Sometimes Didier’s granddaughter Stéphanie comes over to help him. I don’t know if she was here today.”

  “So there were a number of people about?”

  “Yes, but none of us had anything to do with this,” Christophe objected.

  Naudet considered this. “I suppose not.” He tugged one of his oversized ears.

  “You might ask if anything was disturbed,” prompted his uncle.

  “Nothing,” Mara cut in, taking pity on the young man. “The baby is exactly as we found it. Of course, the workmen might have moved something while they were prying out the header. It’s rough work, breaking down a wall, and they wouldn’t have been particularly careful. I can give you their number, and you can check with them, but I think they stopped as soon as they saw what was in there.”

  Naudet wrote this down and closed his notebook. He fiddled with his cell phone but was unable to pick up a signal in an environment with meter-thick walls. He said as sternly as circumstances would allow, “I have to go outside. Please don’t touch anything.”

  He headed for the stairs just as Thérèse reappeared.

  “You’re wanted on the telephone,” she said grimly to Christophe.

  “Oh, mon dieu, not another journalist. Tell them I’m not home. No, wait. Tell them …” The little man hurried after her. His voice, querulous, trailed away.

  Loulou turned a twinkling but slightly malicious eye on Mara and Julian. “Eh bien. Once more you find yourselves in an interesting situation.” He was alluding to the circumstances under which they had originally met, when Mara had come to him for help in tracing her missing sister.

  “It’s not our situation,” Julian protested. “I doubt if it’s anyone’s. Alive, that is.”

  “Well, you’re right on that score at least. That baby’s been there for some time. And murdered, from the look of it.”

  Julian objected, “You don’t know that. You sound just like Thérèse.”

  “Tenez, the face is squashed.”

  “It’s dried out.”

  Loulou shrugged. “The médecin légiste will confirm my suspicions. Lamartine. Good man. I’ve worked with him. Babies’ bones are very fragile. Any pressure would have resulted in telltale fractures.”

  “Thérèse thinks it might have
belonged to one of the housemaids,” said Mara.

  “Ha. Put in the family way by one of the undergardeners. The question is, how did she get the baby in there? It’s not that easy to punch a hole in a stone wall, you know.”

  Mara did know. “It’s actually not that hard. These walls are drystone construction. It would have required a bit of work to pry the first stone loose, but once that was done, the others would have come away relatively easily. Not a large hole would have been needed. And then the stones could have been simply pushed back into place.”

  Julian scratched his beard. “Or else the baby could have been put there at the time of the original construction. Or when the north wing was added. When did Christophe say, 1642?”

  Mara nodded. “Although, when the wing was added, they would have built onto the existing structure. They wouldn’t have had to tear down the old wall.”

  Loulou was still developing his idea. “But if she did break into the wall, she would still have needed help in patching the hole back up. That’s where the undergardener lover came in, I expect. Although it would be better if he were a stonemason.”

  “There’s just one thing,” Mara said thoughtfully. She took the flashlight from Loulou and trained it once again on the small form. “The baby’s dress. Finely woven cotton. The sleeves are edged in lace. The cloth it’s wrapped in looks like silk. And the rosary. Amber, ivory, and wrought silver. A little too good to have belonged to a servant girl, don’t you think?”

  “Hmm. A lady of the house, then?” Loulou peered over her left shoulder. “Yes, you’re right. Definitely someone in the family.”

  Julian said glumly, “Christophe’s not going to like this.” He, too, approached the breach to look again at the diminutive corpse.

  “Naturally,” Loulou confirmed cheerfully. “Who wants a murderer in the family?”

  Julian shook his head. “It’s more than that. This house, the de Bonfond name, mean a lot to him. He was telling me only a few days ago that the family belongs to the old aristocracy, with a title going back to the reign of Louis-the-something, I forget which. This baby comes as a personal affront, not only to him, but to every de Bonfond before him.”

  He was about to turn away when something caught his eye. He stiffened.

  “Mara,” he said, “shine the light over there, will you?”

  “Where?”

  “There.” He directed her hand, then impatiently snatched the flashlight from her. “My god!”

  “But, I don’t—”

  “There.” He pointed with a shaking finger. “Can’t you see it?”

  “See what, mon ami?” Loulou pressed forward as well. “Tenez, you really mustn’t touch—”

  But Julian had already reached into the cavity and was feverishly freeing the end of the blue silk covering which had been tucked around the baby’s feet, revealing the top of an embroidered flower. Julian flicked it sharply to free it of a heavy coating of dust. The colors were faded, but the shape was unmistakable. It was a botanically accurate rendering of an orchid. A dark-purple sepal arched hoodlike over a bulbous slipper finely stitched in pinkish thread. The labellum was flanked by a pair of long, narrow, spiraled petals, also worked in purple. Julian caught his breath in disbelief. It was his orchid, a flower of almost sinister beauty, the one in the photograph, dots joined up, rendered whole.

  “Cypripedium incognitum,” he gasped. It was the name he had given it. His head felt light. “Mara, this is the orchid Bedie found. The one I’ve been searching for.”

  Mara stared at him, then back at the embroidery. “Impossible,” she said.

  Loulou coughed. “A coincidental resemblance.”

  “No.” Julian shook his head emphatically. “No coincidence. It matches in every respect.” Feverishly he pulled the tail of the baby’s wrapping completely free and laid it out flat, exposing a slender stalk rising out of a sheathing of three lanceolate leaves worked in different shades of green. Loulou was too dumbfounded to object.

  “The detail is astounding, down to the veining of the labellum. I now know what this flower looks like in its entirety. This is better than any photograph.” Reverently, he traced the slightly raised stitchery with a trembling forefinger. “It’s probably even to scale—” His hand froze.

  “What is it?” Mara cried.

  “The ventral sepal”—his voice was filled with disbelief—“is separated.”

  “My friend,” interrupted Loulou, “what are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking,” said Julian energetically, “about these.” He indicated two petal-like shapes hanging down on either side of the slipper. “This is bloody astounding.” Seeing their baffled faces, he explained, “There are around a hundred and twenty species of Slipper Orchids in the world. The count varies. As far as I know, in all cases but two the lateral sepals are fused as one into what’s called a synsepal. I was explaining this to Iris just this morning. This flower is another exception. You can see here the lateral sepals are clearly separate.”

  “Is this important?” Mara asked.

  “It could be very important,” Julian assured her. “First, Western Europe has only one Slipper Orchid, the Yellow Lady’s Slipper. Cypripedium incognitum could represent not only a second species but a rare example of an evolutionary departure from normal Slipper Orchid morphology.”

  He stood for a moment, as if in a trance, then stirred. “You know, up to now I’ve gone on searching for my Mystery Lady’s Slipper because, well, everyone has his passion, and this orchid is mine. To be honest, I dreamed of setting the botanical world on its ear one day by presenting my Mystery Orchid as an entirely new species of Cypripedium. But deep down, even though I’ve devoted a section to it in my book, I’ve always been prepared to treat it as a one-off genetic quirk. I mean, all I’ve had to go on was a badly stained photo that left a lot to be imagined.” His eyes were drawn back to the embroidery. “This changes everything. The flower your sister photographed twenty years ago wasn’t just some isolated mutant, Mara. This embroidery proves that it’s an actual, distinct species with a living track record.” He turned to face her, breathing heavily. “You understand what this means to me, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said. She did understand, but at the moment she could not share in his exultation. She left him to walk to the windows, where she stood staring into the brash, relentless sunshine that dressed the remainder of the day. She, who had spent so many years reorganizing living space, had never thought of it as enclosing death. Now she wondered if death had some kind of special affinity to her. She thought she had said goodbye to it when she had buried her sister’s remains. Now she saw that death had simply been biding its time, waiting for her to break down a wall. How long, she wondered, had the child lain there, uttering its endless wail, wrapped in its shroud of blue?

  5

  OCTOBER 1870

  “Blue doesn’t suit you,” Henriette said to her sister-in-law.

  Cécile de Bonfond, a large, ungainly woman, reddened to the roots of her ginger-colored hair, clutched the azure silk shawl more tightly about her thick, sloping shoulders, and looked helplessly around the crowded room.

  The occasion was an afternoon reception. Aurillac’s grand salon, normally kept closed, had been thrown open in honor of Hugo and Henriette. The pair had been wed in Paris in August, and the reception was the least effort that Odile de Bonfond could get away with. Her bitter inclination was to refuse to acknowledge the marriage altogether, but outward appearances had to be satisfied.

  The notaire Maître Caillaud and his wife were early arrivals, followed after an interval by Hugo’s uncle Roland and his bony wife, Anne. Then old Abbé Fortin, who sat in a window embrasure, soaking up what warmth he could from the autumn sunshine and toothlessly gumming biscuits dipped in wine. Eventually, the salon filled up with the area’s most prominent hobereaux, local gentry, all avid with curiosity about the new bride. Henriette, Parisian to her fingertips, viewed them with a critical eye. The men wore
rusty black suits twenty years behind the fashion; indeed, one fat gentleman was stuffed into a moth-eaten velveteen jacket that made him look laughably like an out-of-work actor. The women were even worse, presenting an uninteresting assortment of frumpy crinolines such as shopgirls in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine would not have deigned to wear to an evening’s cheap entertainment.

  Henriette was dressed in an off-the-shoulder gown of robin’s-egg-blue tulle edged with satin ruchings and tied off at the waist by an indigo sash. She stood out like a flower among cabbages. She had been at Aurillac four weeks, and this was her first formal presentation to Sigoulane society, if one could call it that. It had taken that much time for her mother-in-law to invent a vague but respectable bourgeois background for her.

  Nevertheless, the women of the party, with unerring flair, quickly sensed that something was not quite right about the newcomer. They pressed her hand, murmured compliments, commented on the weather, and withdrew to nibble cake and consider this creature whose flashing eyes, bold manners, and cut of dress seemed so unsuitable to the company. The men mainly stared hard at her daring décolletage, the like of which no one this deep in the country had ever seen.

  Hugo, so lately besotted, regarded his wife complacently. For him she was acquired property that had already lost much of its allure. A large, heavy-featured man, he stood for a while at her side, receiving the good wishes of the guests with evident boredom. As soon as he could, he moved to the punch bowl and a group of men who were talking animatedly about the recent kill of a sanglier, a young sow that the dogs had seized by the nose and ears. The men had let the dogs have their sport with it before dispatching it with their knives. Hugo’s cold blue eyes glittered at the account.

  For a moment, Henriette was left alone. Unperturbed, she quickly sized up her situation. The women had gathered in a knot to gaze at her, like cattle, from the other side of the room. She stared back. With a smile and a swish of her gown, she turned her charms on the nonhunting male guests, flirting cleverly with Maître Caillaud and Monsieur Velveteen Jacket, conquering utterly the pompous headmaster of the Lycée Saint-Anselme in Brames, and enraging the wives.