Daughter of Deceit (39 page)

I promised I would.

When I returned to La Maison Grise, I lost no time in calling on Nounou.

She was very pleased to see me.

“I’ve missed your visits,” she said. “I can see that Paris fascinated you as it did Marianne. It is that sort of city, is it not?”

I agreed that it was.

I was not sure how I could get round to asking her what I wanted to know. When I was in Paris, I had felt it would not be difficult.

We talked about Marianne, as we always did. She found more pictures. She talked of her hosts of admirers. “She could have married the highest in the land.”

“Perhaps she realized that after she had married Monsieur Gerard, and regretted the marriage.”

“Oh, that family has always been highly thought of. She did very well for herself. There’s none that could deny that.”

“Apart from the prestige the marriage brought, was she happy in it?”

“She was happy enough. She was greedy, my girl. As a child she would stretch out her little hands and say ‘Want it’ whenever she saw something that took her fancy. I used to laugh at her. ‘Mademoiselle Want It,’ that’s what I called her. I’m just going to put some flowers on her grave. Would you like to walk over to the cemetery with me?”

I was wondering what I could say to Nounou. I kept forming phrases in my mind. “If she had quarrelled with her husband, and he had told her to go, how would she have felt about that?” She would ask me how I could possibly have got such an idea into my head. I must not betray what Gerard had told me.

I watched her tend the grave. She knelt and prayed for a few moments. And as I stared at the gravestone, with her name and the date of her death, I could picture her beautiful face mocking me.

I am dead. I am buried. I shall haunt him for the rest of his life.

No, I
thought, you shall not. I will find some way of freeing him from you.

Which sounded as though I had made up my mind to marry him. But later on I felt I could never marry anyone now. Roderick had gone out of my life, taking all my hopes of a happy marriage with him.

Robert had gone to Paris. He said, before he left, that the situation was getting somewhat grim. The Emperor was losing patience with Bismarck. He saw in him the enemy of all his plans for the greatness of France.

“It is a good thing,” Robert had said, “that Prussia is only a small state. Bismarck won’t want trouble with France, though he is as arrogant and ambitious for Prussia as the Emperor is for France.”

He thought he would be in Paris for some little time.

“When you feel like coming to the house, you’ll be welcome. Gerard will be delighted, too.”

I would go, I promised myself. But first I wanted more talks with Nounou.

Before I could do so, there was devastating news. It was a hot July day. Marie-Christine and I were in the garden when Robert unexpectedly returned from Paris. He was very excited.

We saw him go into the house and hurried after him. Angele was in the hall.

Robert announced: “France has declared war on Prussia!”

We were all astounded. I had heard the discussions in the studio, but had not taken them very seriously. This, of course, was what they had feared.

“What will it mean?” asked Angele.

“One good thing is that it can’t last long,” said Robert. “A little state like Prussia against the might of France. The Emperor would never have gone into this if he had not been certain of a quick victory.”

Over dinner, Robert said he would have to go back to Paris almost immediately. There would be precautions he would have to
take, just in case the war was not over in a few weeks. He supposed he would be kept in Paris for a while.

“You should stay here in the country until we see what is going to happen,” he went on. “Paris is in a turmoil. The Emperor, as you know, has for some time been losing the sympathy of the people.”

The next day Robert went back to Paris. Angele accompanied him. She wanted to make sure that Gerard was looking after himself.

I was wondering what was happening at the studio. We were avid for news.

Several weeks passed. It was early August when we heard that the Prussians had been driven out of Saarbrucken, and there was great rejoicing. Everyone was saying that this would be a lesson to the Germans. However, within a few days the news was less good. It was only a small detachment which had been driven out of Saarbrucken, and the French had failed to take advantage of their small success. They were, therefore, routed and had retreated in confusion into the Vosges Mountains.

There were grim faces everywhere; there was murmuring against the Emperor. He had plunged France into war on the flimsiest pretext, because he wanted to show the world that he was another such as his uncle. But the French people did not want conquest and vainglorious military success. They wanted peace. And this was certainly not success. It was humiliating failure.

Through those hot August days we waited for news of the war. Not much seeped through to us, and I guessed that was a bad sign.

Robert came back for a brief visit. He advised us to stay in the country, though he must go back. Things were getting very difficult in Paris. The people were very restive. Students were gathering in the streets. The cafes and restaurants were crowded with people who wanted to arouse others to action.

The days of revolution were not far enough in the past to be readily forgotten.

I was seeing Nounou now and then. She had little interest in the progress of the war. I had not up to that time found an opportunity to bring up the matter which was very much in my mind. I
wondered a great deal about Gerard. He was serious-minded and would, I knew, be deeply perturbed by the war.

Opportunity came suddenly. I was with Nounou one day and she was talking about Marianne. She had found a picture of her which she had forgotten existed. She had not seen it for years.

“It was at the back of one of the albums, tucked away under another picture. She must have hidden it. She never liked that one.”

“May I see it?” I asked.

“Come up,” said Nounou.

She took me to that room which I thought of as Marianne’s room. There were pictures of her on the wall, and on the table were those albums which were for Nounou a record of her darling’s life.

She showed me the picture.

“She looks a little bit saucy here, does she not? Up to tricks. Well, that was like her—but it shows more on that one.”

“And she wanted it to be hidden?”

“She said it was too revealing. It would put people on their guard.”

I studied it. Yes, I thought, there was something about it … something almost evil.

“I’m glad I’ve got her pictures,” said Nounou. “In my young days, there wouldn’t have been all these pictures. That Monsieur Daguerre brought them in. I don’t know what I’d do without my pictures.”

“If she didn’t like the picture, I wonder she did not destroy it.”

“Oh no … she’d never destroy any of her pictures. She’d look at them as often as I did.”

“It sounds as though she was in love with herself.”

“Well, why shouldn’t she be? Everyone else was in love with her.”

“She was happily married, wasn’t she?”

There was a slight pause. “Well, he was madly in love with her.”

“Was he?”

“Oh yes. Everybody was. He was jealous.” She laughed. “Well, you could understand that. Every man was after her.”

“Did she quarrel with her husband?”

Nounou was thoughtful and a smile curved her lips.

“She was a clever girl. She liked things to go the way she wanted them to.”

“Most people do, don’t they?”

“They want them, but with her—she thought they ought to, because she was so beautiful. If they didn’t go the way she wanted, she’d make them.”

“That must have been trying for him.”

“Well, she was a handful. Didn’t I know it? There were times when she drove me to distraction. But it didn’t change my feelings for her … one little jot. She was mine … and there was no one like her. She told me everything … or most things. I was always there—old Nounou—to help sort out her troubles.”

“Did she tell you about her quarrels with her husband?”

“There was very little she held back from me.”

I took a chance and said: “I am not sure that he was as besotted about her as you think.”

“Why do you say that?”

I decided that I could be on the verge of discovery, and for Gerard’s sake I was going to do everything I could to find out what I wanted to know, even if it meant distorting the truth a little.

I began: “The day she died …”

“Yes?” said Nounou eagerly.

“One of the servants heard them. There was a quarrel. He told her to go. He had had enough of her. It doesn’t sound as though he were so desperately in love with her.”

She was silent for a second, and a slow smile crossed her face.

“It’s true,” she said. “But that was what she wanted. Here.” She rose and went to a cupboard. “Look at this.”

She opened a door and disclosed a travelling bag.

“That’s her bag,” she said. “Can you guess what’s in it? Her jewellery … some special clothes. I tell you, she was clever. He did tell her to go. But that was what she meant him to. She led him to it.”

“Then why was she so upset?”

“Upset? She wasn’t upset. She had it all worked out. I knew. I
was in on the secret. She played on him. He was meant to say what he did. She provoked him into it. It was all working out as she’d planned. Don’t you think I knew? She told me everything. I knew what was in her mind.”

“Why did she want him to tell her to go?”

“Because
she
was the one who wanted to go. She wanted to be free … but she wanted it to come from him. She’d been bringing things over to me and I was keeping them for her. She wanted him to turn her out. She didn’t want it to be said that she’d left him for another man. But that was what she was going to do. I can see her now, her eyes alight with mischief. She said, ‘Nounou, I’m going to make him turn me out. I can do it. Then I shall go to Lars. Lars wants it that way. He doesn’t want it to seem as though he’d come between us. He wants it to be that I go to him after Gerard has turned me out. Lars doesn’t want trouble. And this is the way.’ I’ve seen this Lars. A fine, upstanding young man. More her sort than Monsieur Gerard. Of course, Monsieur Gerard had the family … the standing … but he was too serious for a girl like her. She’d have been better off with Lars. But let me tell you, it was her arranging. She wanted Monsieur Gerard to turn her out, and she got her way, I reckon. She and Lars worked it out between them. Lars could say, ‘Well, you let her go … and so no hard feelings.’ You see, they were friends … living close to each other. Oh, it would have been a good way … and then that to happen.”

“So the quarrel was arranged by her,” I mused.

“I’m sure of that. She told me, didn’t she? I reckon he cursed himself for saying it after. But she was a siren. She could get anyone to say anything she wanted them to.”

“And she was going off to her lover?”

“All the things she wanted to make sure of keeping were here, waiting for her. In a day or so, he was coming down to fetch her.”

“But … she died. It wasn’t because she was so worried about being turned out that she was reckless.”

“Not her. She wasn’t worried. She was full of joy. I could picture her, laughing and singing to herself … galloping along. At least she died in triumph.”

“So it was excitement at the thought of the future that made her careless. She was thinking of being with her lover … of her lucky escape from her husband …”

“There’s not a doubt of it! I knew her. She’d do reckless things. She’d have been so pleased by the turn things were taking. She could be reckless at times. I know. Who knows better? She thought she had a charmed life. Everything had gone her way … and there she was, on the threshold, you might say, of the life she wanted. She’d always had a fancy for that Lars. And then … right when she was ready to start the life she’d been wanting for a long time … death came.” The tears were on her cheeks. “I’ll never forget her … my bright and beautiful girl.”

I was elated. I thought: I will go to Gerard tomorrow. I will tell him that he was mistaken. She had been planning to go to Lars Petersen. They had been lovers for some time. I would tell him about the sketches and the picture I had seen in Lars’s studio.

Surely now I could wipe out his guilt.

I did not go to Paris, for the next day the news came to us.

The Emperor with his army had surrendered to the enemy at Sedan, and he was a prisoner of the Prussians.

The days now seemed like a hazy dream, for we had only vague ideas of what was happening. Fragments of news did reach us now and then, but we were very much in the dark.

Before the end of the month, Strasbourg, one of the last hopes of the French, had surrendered, and we knew that sooner or later there would be an onslaught on Paris. We were very worried about Gerard and Robert and Angele.