A Provençal Mystery (29 page)

Now that I had the key, other documents yielded pieces of the story. Gustave Vallebois died a relatively poor man, though not destitute. He fathered five children, three of whom lived to adulthood.

But one piece was missing—the rest of the old seigneur's will. And I was sure that was the document that Griset was keeping from Chateaublanc.

I caught Griset as he was going out for a smoke. “Now's the time to get that document for us, Griset.”

He knew it was all over. “It's down in the storerooms,” he said. “Under a stone.”

“Take us there.”

He had no choice.

“You should let me go by myself with him,” said Roger.

“No, I am going, too. It's safe enough. It has electric lights, and the chains are long gone."

Griset lit the lights at the head of the steep set of stone stairs that led into the bowels of the former dungeons. Casting moving shadows, artificial light made the ancient place into a stage. The cells carved into the stone were so small that it would have been impossible for prisoners to move much at all. Many cells were closed off with metal doors, some cells still had iron rings to shackle prisoners to the wall. In the ones that were open, I could see stacked boxes of documents, each marked with its archive number in black letters. The former prison was now air-conditioned, cool, with a feeling of dead air. It was a perfect place to keep old books and papers. But the oppressive atmosphere remained — souls would wail there if they could. Humans had screamed under torture, and they had groaned under indeterminate sentences, knowing they could die before ever again seeing the light of day. Here, church interrogators had thumb-screwed and racked the devil out of heretics and blasphemers. Prisoners had scratched desperate words into the rock.

"It’s frightening, is it not?" asked Griset, smiling between his teeth and raising his eyebrows.

"You really scare me, Griset," I said in a calm voice. I was not afraid of him but was not sure why.

He paused at the top of the next step and lit a cigarette, a full-sized Gauloise. "The Palace was once called the ‘Bastille du Midi,’” he said.

"Yes, I know. During the Revolution.” I knew that very drunk and very enraged revolutionaries had killed counter-revolutionaries here.

“On this place, this very place, the platform of the stairs, they cut their enemies’ throats,” said Griset. “They tore bodies apart. Women and men. Young and old. Then they threw the bodies down the Tower of the Latrines." The story was giving me the creeps, even though I had read about it.

"Horrible," added Roger.

"So there has been blood on these stairs," I said. I imagined the scene, imagined slipping on the slick blood and falling down the stairs into a pool of it, where I drowned. . .

"But that was then," said Roger.

We followed a path along the top tier of cells, then walked single-file down stone stairs. The stairs were precipitous, the iron hand rail shaky. It was easy to imagine a prison guard, a big ring of keys at his waist, carrying an oil lamp on those stairs.

"We are now on the ground floor,” Griset said.

The basement room was large and close to empty, stocked with boxes of documents and not much else except a few cells on one wall. I thought it had to be where the forgotten were chained and left forever.
The dank, cold air pressed down on us. It smelled of age and terror.

“The document, Griset?” I said.

“Yes, yes!” He went to a corner, and turned over a stone, shoulders straining, and lifted out a folder. He handed it to me. I handed it to Roger.

Then the lights went out.

I heard the sound of footsteps pounding down the stairs.

"Who’s there?" shouted Roger.

There was no answer.

A sound of rustling; we stood in petrified silence. Then the footsteps again, a body near in the dark, and suddenly, someone slammed into me and I screamed. There was a short silence, more rustling, and the lights went on. Roger, standing by the switch, held Chateaublanc, who stood blinking in the sudden glare. Roger handed me the folder. “You have just incriminated yourself further,” he said to Chateaublanc.

Chateaublanc straightened up, staring at the folder. “That is merely a document.” His eyes blazed defiance.

My heart was pounding and I thought I would faint, though I never had done so in my whole life. I reached out to lean on the cold stone wall.

Under the cellar light, I opened the folder. It contained what I had assumed it would, two documents: Fernande's contract, which gave her lay name, Marie Anne, and identified her as a Chateaublanc, and the rest of the old seigneur's will. It began with a small bequest to a son who was a priest in a church in the city and two bequests to monasteries. No mention was made of the convent, and in one sentence, the seigneur disowned his errant children: “To my daughter, Marie Anne, and my son Philippe, who have disgraced our family name, I leave nothing.” Another sentence leaped off the page: "To my only grandson, Gustave Vallebois, born illegitimately to my son by his mistress Isabelle des Moulins, I leave the rest of my lands and property." Attached was an inventory of properties and possessions that showed the date of death for the old seigneur, 1679, the year after Gustave Vallebois became a master.

"But who did inherit?" asked Rachel.

"It must have been a more distant relative because the Chateaublanc who left the convent a bequest in 1685 was not named Philippe or Gustave, but Henri. And there was no record of a death for Philippe,” I said.

“Maybe Philippe became a remittance man, sent off to the colonies,” said Rachel.

“Could be. He and Fernande seem to have disappeared from the records,” I said. “Agatha knew about this will,” I added, looking at Chateaublanc, though I knew no such thing. “And she threatened you with it. Why? Because she was a Vallebois, from the family your family cheated and gave up to the Nazis?”

“She was a Catholic nun,” he said weakly.

“From the side of the family that converted? Who hid Jewish children in the convent? When did you find out she was a Vallebois?” asked Roger.

“Did you try to rape her?” I asked.

“My God, of course not. How could I do that? Would you think I would strip off her underpants. . . “

”To which you affixed a yellow star,” said Roger.

“I did not try to rape her.”

“But you did kill her. I know why you killed her,” I said. “It was not because of the Chateaublanc fortune. . .”

“There is no fortune any more. Not to speak of.”

“Enough to buy fancy horses and keep a gardener, though. But no, not because of that. Because of family pride. Bloodlines. You couldn’t stand that the Chateaublancs were not rightful heirs to the estate and that someone else knew about it. When Agatha told you about the diary, you were devastated. Agatha brought the Vallebois claim alive. She teased you with it. She had the final proof in her hands. You thought that by killing her, you killed the truth. To make sure, you pierced her tongue with the needle. A nice touch.”

He slumped in his seat. “You have no proof.” But there his voice held no conviction.

“If you like,” said Roger, “we can investigate further. Who knows what else we will turn up about the Chateaublancs? We already know that a Chateaublanc deported a Vallebois family during the War. Were any other Chateaublancs who were Nazi sympathizers? The police can trace your activities before the murder. Your purchase of needles, of yellow paper . . .”

Chateaublanc folded. He had known it was over, I thought, from the moment he saw the will in my hands. “All right,” he said. “I killed her. I killed her. I had read about nicotine poisoning, and it seemed easy. . .”

“The poison also implicated Griset,” I said.

“That weasel!”

“But Agatha. How did you do it?

“I found her in the little reference room, gagged her, injected her. She staggered into the bathroom. I put the needle in after she was dead. It made my point. As did the yellow star. They were my little jokes. She was always making jokes about me. In public.”

“Jokes?” I said.

“The needle made a joke about her big mouth. The yellow star about her origins. I’ll show her, I thought then.”

“She made you angry.”

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes. She tried to humiliate me about the thing I cherished most. To take them away from me—my family, my wife, my children.”

“Why didn’t she tell anyone else?” I asked.

“She was afraid of me, I think,” he said.

Oh, no, I thought, not Agatha. And she probably just didn’t care about things like inheritance.

“And the shooting?” I asked.

“Yes. I tried to warn you off. You were far too curious.”

Epilogue

One last time, I went to the convent. Mother Superior Therese and Madeleine took me into the courtyard garden. Here Rose, honorable and ingenious, had worked not a yard away from us, digging in the ground. Here she had climbed a ladder to prune vines, had worried about Antoinette, had shaken events so that truth would tumble out. She had stooped to pull weeds and had stood, hand on her back, stretching. Her presence lingered in the courtyard. The grapes and herbs she had tended had long since gone brown and brittle, had fallen to the ground, succumbed to the soil. But she remained. Her presence was watchful.

"Well, my dear," Mother Therese said. "Have you changed your mind about the religious life?" She gave a witty little smile and stretched out in her chair.

"No," I replied, "though it certainly has an appeal."

“I’m so relieved that you found the murderer.”

“Did you know? How much did you know?”

“I knew that Agatha was a Vallebois through her mother. How could I know that her secular name was important? I knew about the diary. I had read it. The first part of it.”

“And Agatha put the diary at my place. She must have wanted me to have it to redress old wrongs,” I said. “And you never found the second part hidden between the stones?”

“We never really tried.”

“Do you know when the cells were last plastered?”

“They were plastered just once—in the mid-seventeenth century. They seemed to be holding up. Why spend money on frivolous things? I know that because the subject came up about ten years ago, and Sister Marthe went through the old account books to find out if they had ever been replastered. But we have no idea why the plasterers left the diary in place. My guess is that they were just sloppy..”

“So the diary is authentic, then,” I said, letting out a sigh. “Even if it may not be actually true. And you, Madeleine. Did you read it, too?”

“Yes, I did,” said Madeleine. “Agatha showed it to me. I was the one who put it back at your place. I found it in Agatha’s cell. I knew she would want me to make sure you had it.”

“I didn’t want attention drawn to the convent because of it. It paints such an ugly picture,” said Therese.

“Only of the Mother Superior, who may not have murdered Jeanne at all,” I replied.

“A desperate and prideful woman. A woman who did not put God first. Who did not cast off her earthly relationships,” said Therese.

“But human beings are fallible,” said Madeleine. “Didn't you yourself tell me that?”

“Nuns should not be that fallible!”

“I plan to translate and publish the diary,” I said.

“I won’t try to stop you,” said Therese. “Hiding the truth is worse than any embarrassment the truth can cause.”

“Yes. All involved were hiding something, mortifying themselves psychologically with guilt, a modern guilt. And their secrecy and guilt kept the killer from being found out."

"How so?"

"Fitzroy, who tried to induce a student into an affair and wanted no one to know. Madeleine, who fights ambivalent feelings about Agatha. Jack Leach, who has finally confesssed that he was having an affair with a woman in Aix. Griset, guilty of collusion. Even you, Therese."

“Of course.”

“You hid something about the convent, something that might have thrown light on Agatha’s death. You were between a rock and a hard place.”

“What?”

“An American expression.”

“Perhaps something like Scylla and Charybdis?”

“Yes.”

“It’s true. We were not proud of Fernande's embezzlement. And Agatha sheltered Jewish children, yes, but other nuns fought her. Some were anti-Semites, others were just afraid. I did not want that to be raked up. But I didn’t believe that any of what I knew had a bearing on the case.”

“You thought I was just being nosy,” I said.

“Opening up boxes because that’s what you do.
”

“Like a brash American?”

She smiled. “You said it, not me.”

“I wonder why Gustave did not claim the title,” I said. “Perhaps he thought he could not claim the property without putting his life into jeopardy. The Chateaublanc relatives were powerful and dangerous. So he left it to them.”

“Except the painting of Philippe and des Moulins,” I said. “Somehow Gustave got hold of that.”

The mistral had died down until next year, and as I walked home, I thought that the air smelled of new growth and dampness. It held real promises of warmth. This was the turn of the season, the window of time before Lent. Another three months in Avignon and I should be going home, but maybe I would decide to stay even longer.