A Provençal Mystery (28 page)

“And I got away with it,” I bragged.

“But perhaps it is of no use in solving Agatha’s murder. It could be Griset,” he said “Or Fitzroy. And what about the diary?”

“Or Jack, who has a story but not really an alibi,” I replied, as I kept Foxy from yanking at the leash to greet his poodle friend. "But all those links between Chateaublanc and the past. A past he doesn't want us anyone to know about."

"Those documents are very old," he said.

"I know that," I replied .

"Perhaps sixteen generations for the diary. How can a story stay alive for sixteen generations?"

"Why not? Look at the genealogists. They are more interested in their great-grandfathers than in their great-grandchildren."

"But to kill? What does this say about nobility? Aren’t nobles supposed to be above such things?”

"Come on, Roger. You know that nobles have always been experts at killing.”

He turned to smile at me. “But for noble reasons.”

“Not always. What about the noble bandits of the Old Regime? And besides, what about selective amnesia? People are really good at forgetting the parts of the past they don’t want to remember. Atrocities in wars. Betrayals. Their ignoble ancestors. Little acts of cruelty. Have you ever met an adult who admitted to being a bully as a kid? Or a soldier who admitted he was a coward?”

“That sounds very academic,” he said, but he put his arm around me.

The river water was sparkling in the early sunlight. The sky was clear, and the air cold. We sat on a bench. Foxy sighed and lay down—I knew he wanted to keep walking.

Finally, almost against my will, because it was on my mind, I said, “I used to think I didn’t believe in the irrational. But not lately. Funny things have been happening to me. I’m no longer so objective about it.”

“Funny things?”

“A sense of an old presence during mass in that little church. Stuff—alien stuff—swimming up into my consciousness.”

“Does it scare you?”

I thought a moment and then I said, “Strangely, no. I think I love it.”

I could see Roger trying to decide how to respond. Finally, he replied, “Be careful, Dory. Consider. Don't act until you know what you are doing. You're impulsive. With this new sensibility, you could start to think you can levitate. Or fly over walls.”

I had a flash of anger at his remark, but I was tired and his shoulder was warm. I felt myself relent toward him. Then I felt him know it, and I was irritated again and angry at my own irritation. I didn’t want to be susceptible to him. But I was. Right at that moment I wanted to be in bed with him. But that would have to come later.

“Maybe it was Madeleine,” he finally said. “She may have soured on religion. Like me. I was brought up Catholic, but when I was twelve or so, I decided it was all mumbo-jumbo.”

“But that didn't make you a killer.”

“
Neither does being an unbearably arrogant seigneur make Chateaublanc one.”

“Nor Fitzroy a philanderer make him one,” I replied. “We should go see Madame de Forêt with Rachel and see what's inside the reliquary. Today. We need real answers, not speculative ones. The reliquary has to tell us something.”

“The police don't want you interfering, “ said Roger.

“It's not interfering. It's doing historical research.“

Madame de Forêt met us at the door as if she had been expecting us, and maybe she had. It wouldn't have surprised me to learn that people from New Chateaublanc had ways of watching out for her, telling her of visitors coming up the mountain..

“You have come for the woman's head,” she said.

“Yes,” said Rachel, and she took the key from around her neck. She held it in her hand and looked at the head with such intensity that I had a brief image of it bursting into flame. This was the object that Rose and Antoinette had searched for, that Rachel's grandmother had packed carefully in an embroidered bag, that Agatha had hidden here, that that unknown ancestors had filled with things of such importance.

When Rachel turned the key in the keyhole, the back of the head fell open, I was half expecting to see a shriveled relic—perhaps a gruesome face with wisps of dead hair. Nothing like that. Instead, documents. Just pieces of old paper, folded, dog-eared. But the words on them could be, we knew, explosive. Perhaps someone had been willing to kill, just for the chance of being able to rip them up.

The first was a birth record of a child, Gustave Vallebois, on July 10, 1658, in St. Jean.

“Vallebois!” I said.

“Isabelle must have been born a Vallebois!” said Rachel. “My mother's maiden name. She must have called the child by her maiden name, not her married one.”

“Agatha's mother was a Vallebois cousin,” said Roger. “So she was related to you. I am not, at least not by blood since it is through her father that I was her nephew. But if we had a family reunion. . . .”

I had been staring at the birth record. “There is another connection. St. Jean's is where the noble sent des Moulins. He had some land there.”

As I spoke in my historian's voice, my mind was imagining the woman I knew only through the diary and other records: Isabelle, small and groaning, squatting to deliver, blood on a floor (was it dirt?), and a baby slipping into the hands of a village midwife. (Was the midwife old and wise? Maybe not. Maybe she was a young woman trained by her mother in a family craft.) Then, Isabelle, staring with hate at the midwife, her social inferior, who had witnessed her humiliation, who had shoved peasant hands into her most intimate parts, who had tried to hide her smile of contempt at the lady's screams of pain. Isabelle, pointing at the infant, saying,“Take it away! Out of my sight!”

A contract for Gustave's apprenticeship in 1668, with no payee listed, and his copy of his master's papers granted in 1678 showed that Gustave had become a printer. What had happened between that unfortunate birth and 1668? Someone had to have intervened. Apprenticeships cost money.

A sale of a painting by Michel Vallebois to Chateaublanc's uncle in 1943 did not mention its subject. Was it one of the paintings I had seen in the shed? Which one? I thought I knew and wondered briefly why the family had not destroyed it. Only briefly. It had to be valuable. And it was a historical artifact.

We drove back to the archives, where Chateaublanc sat at his desk, as usual playing nervously with a paper clip. He wore a light brown tweed jacket and had combed his hair precisely across his bald spot. He seemed to be waiting for something. He said nothing about my arrest and refused to meet my eyes.

I again ordered the records of the Hospital of the Holy Spirit, which served as an orphanage as well as a hospital for the sick, to find Gustave. I had a name, and the child had been born in 1658. Good enough. I leafed through the book until I came to the year 1658, and found listed a male child under the name of Vallebois, born on July 10. A tiny faded yellow badge in the shape of a six-pointed star was attached to the page. Startled, I reached out to touch it. The yellow star, I knew, went back a long way, back to the Middle Ages as a symbol of Judiasm.

The boy named Vallebois was taken from the hospital in 1660 by a woman who refused to be identified. Des Moulins? Then a year later he was returned "by his grandfather, who has asked to be nameless, but has paid a pension for the boy of 400 pounds." The seigneur was important enough to be able to keep his name off the records, and he was rich enough to pay out 400 pounds, a considerable sum of money, for the boy's keep. I imagined that he was the one who paid for Gustave's apprenticeship as well.

In 1663, one Gustave Vallebois left the hospital to go to a Benedictine monastery in Apt, until he should come of age, the cost again to be paid by his grandfather. The Benedictine monastery had some spotty records of their pensioners, and one Vallebois did appear there from time to time as being paid up.

Chateaublanc was watching me, I saw, every time I looked up from a document, but I kept searching.

I went back to the convent records where I found the bishop’s report for 1659. The report spoke only of a disgrace, but I had an idea of what the disgrace was. Our Lady of Mercy had left behind detailed records of the money received for dowries, sales of land, and the products the fallen women made, as well as the outgo for food, wine, services, and other items. It took me only a few hours to find that the books did not balance. A good deal of money was unaccounted for, and I had a suspicion that Fernande had given it to her brother. In the convent election of that year, Agnes of Jesus, who had been brought back from the convent at Tarascon, was made superior. Mother Superior Fernande was taken from the convent on the day after the election “by her family for good and sufficient reasons," her dowry not refunded; no further record of her existed
.

Nowhere could I find the contract for Mother Superior Fernande's entry into the convent. We still had no definite proof that she was a Chateaublanc.

I knew that Griset had to have something on Chateaublanc, and we needed to find out what it was. Roger was ready to agree with me. We decided to surprise Griset in his apartment, where he had lunch when not at Café Minette.

Roger was able to find out from the police where Griset lived, only a few blocks away from the archives on a street near the Place d’Horloge, up four flights of crooked, rickety stairs, each flight badly lit by a timed bulb.

Griset answered our knock, looking surprised when he saw us. “Come in, come in," he said. He was wearing a red robe tied with a purple sash. A marmalade cat walked solemnly over to us and wound its body around Roger’s feet. I wished I had brought Foxy along to watch the action. Cigarette butt pasted to his lip, Griset escorted us into his small apartment, which was cluttered with objects from all over the world.

"From my merchant seaman days," he said, when I commented on the Middle Eastern rugs, the Egyptian pottery, the South Seas figures. "Do sit down."

We sat. I thought how different from his life in the archive his life at home was—living in the midst of memorabilia from his past, a man setting up house in a museum. A serious man. Not a kidder.

The marmalade cat jumped on Roger’s lap. Roger said, "We’re here to ask you about the hold you have on Chateaublanc."

"Hold? What hold?" Griset’s voice rose, close to squeaking. He took a panicked puff of his cigarette. It was not like Griset to lose his aplomb.

“The Gauloises,” I said. “Wasn't Agatha poisoned with nicotine? There is a murderer loose, and we hope that it's not you.”

Griset set the cigarette butt on the edge of a Raffles Hotel ashtray, where it smouldered.

“I did not kill Sister Agatha,” he said.

“We are aware of that. But you know something,” I replied. I could not believe that Griset was involved in anything criminal. His eyes flinched away from mine, and he shrugged as if to throw something off his body. The marmalade cat wound itself around my legs.
“Something keeps Chateaublanc from firing you. What is it? Are you an accessory to Agatha’s murder.”

“No!” cried Griset, sounding so alarmed that the marmalade cat jumped up on a shelf. “Agatha . . . I would never do anything to hurt that marvelous woman!
This
is the truth: Chateaublanc and I—we have an agreement. I have some documents having to do with his family that I keep secret. They are little hostages for me to use. He has to keep me on, no matter what I do. No matter how lazy I am. I That’s the story, Madame Red." He grinned painfully.

We left, leaving Griset standing next to a large African drum covered with an animal skin that had some of the hair—stiff, the color of dead grass—still on it. He held the cat and looked worried.

When we arrived at my place, Foxy greeted us at the door. Roger insisted on entering first to make sure the apartment was safe. I let him. After we took Foxy for a short walk, I sliced some bread and took some cheese out of the refrigerator, and poured some wine. We sat down on the couch, which served as a bed, for a minute or two. I turned my head to look at him next to me, his head against the flat of his hand, deep in thought. He needed a shave. I could see the rough dark stubble on his chin. I leaned against the wool cloth of his shoulder, knowing it was a passive gesture and becoming a habit, but not caring. Tired, I was tired. Foxy jumped up and draped himself over me.

"Griset may be lying," said Roger. He looked severe.

"I doubt that."

He shifted on the bed, moving slightly away from me.

Back in the reading room, I began a tedious search through the convent’s entry records of fallen women and girls, which sometimes included very young converts from Judiasm to Catholicism, who were not “fallen” at all. Finally, for the year 1639, found what I was looking for: Isabelle Vallebois, "a little Jew," mother’s name Bouton, had been converted in 1639 to the Catholic faith at age 11. She had stayed just long enough to learn her catechism and then left. She was a cousin to Jeanne; her mother was the sister of James Bouton, Jeanne’s father. Jeanne was probably killed because she knew Des Moulins, knew the secrets about the money and the child. But by whom? Probably Fernande, I thought. But again, maybe by Des Moulins, who might not have trusted Jeanne to keep her mouth shut. Perhaps she needed to protect the life of her son against other possible heirs until he became old enough to take care of himself. Did she tell Rose a false story to lead her off the track?