Daughters of Babylon (7 page)

What Viv had never intimated in their conversations was:
I cannot wait for you to see it after I am dead.

Temperatures for the
Pyrénées Atlantiques
were being described as unseasonably low, but 42˚ Fahrenheit with a wind chill that made it feel like 38˚ was not why Silvina’s teeth were chattering and her knees knocking like wooden spoons. It was because during the past hour, she’d fully expected to fly off this mortal coil herself half a dozen times.

The train ride from Toulouse had been lovely. She’d intended to get caught up on reading TPA reports but fell asleep with her laptop open and woke up in Foix with a dead battery and drool on the keyboard.

A smiling young man named Jean-Luc was waiting at the station to drive her to
Reine du Ciel
. Curly-haired, married, father of two young kids, he was the kind of chauffeur who loved to talk, and because she was his only passenger, he invited her to sit in the front of the Citröen mini-van.

Silvina had taken almost no days off since coming to Toulouse, but in her limited experience, she’d found the roads of southern France to be excellent. They’d clearly hit some kind of tax boundary: a few kilometers outside of Foix, they were deep into the mountains on single-lane sheep trails that were badly paved or rutted gravel, or greasy mud or fine gritty powder. Jean-Luc had one speed for all of them—maniacal—and while he careened along switchbacks and blind curves with one hand on the wheel, the other fiddling with temperature knobs—“Is that warm enough? Are you feeling a draft?”—he poured forth an endless stream of knowledge of the biscuit-coloured gorges and the rivers that ran through them, of the lupins that would burst into blossom any day now, the red-tailed fox and marmots, and the names of the hermits who lived in the caves from the time of the Crusades to the Second World War. “Not the same hermits, of course, haha! That would be absurd.”

Jean-Luc braked for only one reason: sheep. Sheep appeared, it seemed, out of the gravel itself, carpeting the road in a vast, shaggy, slow-moving mass, on their way, apparently, to high sweet pastures that winter melt had in recent days made accessible. Silvina knew little about sheep, so until the creatures had proven they knew enough to part as well as bleat in response to oncoming crazy French drivers, she was certain they would be minced mutton.

She’d never seen so many varieties. There were black-faced sheep with prim little mouths; curly-haired sheep with bangs so long one wondered how they didn’t just topple off precipices; there were prong-horned sheep and curly-horned sheep, red-haired, yellow-haired, and splotched black-and-white like Jersey cow sheep. Some of the world’s rarest breeds were being introduced into this part of the world, Jean-Luc explained, and all were thriving.

Whether people too were thriving, Silvina couldn’t be certain because she kept her eyes squeezed shut for much of the journey—toes curled and hands balled into fists too, for good measure. Of the eight people she did see, every one was a shepherd. Jean-Luc knew all the herders by name. The men who weren’t gridlocked by their own sheep jams, he called over by gesticulating through the open window (the draft he never asked about) and pointing at Silvina with a great swing of the forearm as if to announce, “Found a live one, boys! She cooks, she cleans, doesn’t talk your ear off!”

They were a handsome lot, all craggy and lean in their fleece vests and trousers tucked into high boots, but Silvina couldn’t understand a word they shouted to Jean-Luc. Some were Basque, he explained; others still spoke old dialects of Languedoc, the tongues of Aquitaine, with smatterings of Galician and Catalán thrown in.

“The culture of these peaks is unlike any other,” he said, accelerating toward the edge of an escarpment. “They’ve been places of refuge for centuries, and nowhere will you find more honest men.”

Silvie slapped a hand over her eyes one last time, certain she wouldn’t survive long enough to confirm any of it.

At what point they entered the official boundaries of Queen of Heaven, she had no idea. The final few kilometers, past a thriving little community called St. Jacques de la Rivière, entailed a slow, steep ascent between walls of stacked limestone that pressed in on both sides. They came to a plateau that was high enough to make her ears pop, then drove through an evergreen forest so dense and pungent her nostrils stung. Finally, he stopped the car.

“
Voici le prieuré et la maison de ton amie
.” Here is the priory and the house of your friend.

Jean-Luc unloaded her suitcases and carried them to the front door, and then he received a call from his wife who wanted him to pick something up while in Foix, and he hadn’t. Slapping his chest, waving a palm in self-defense, he thrust a business card at Silvie, then stomped to the van and, spitting gravel, drove off, leaving her alone at the edge of the woods in front of the house she’d waited too long to visit.

Silvina wiped the sweat from her hands. She lifted the dark brass ring in the center of the nose…of the king’s…she lifted the ring in the center of the door, and knocked.

She waited and knocked again.

There were no parked vehicles around the house. The sprinkles of tiny pink blooms that spread across the scruffy lawn and ruts of driveway appeared uncrushed. She checked her watch. 12:52. Dr. Shirazi had been staying at Vivian’s house since the accident; he’d been the one who arranged her transportation with Jean-Luc.

She rapped a third time, then stepped off the flagstones onto spongy ground to peer through a window. Pots and pans hung on a tongue and groove wall panel in a diagonal pattern, their copper bottoms gleaming. A basket covered in blue gingham sat on a marble top island. Bunches of dried herbs hung from the ceiling on swagging loops of brass chain. The kitchen, what Viv called a
foganha
, looked like a still life from a calendar that would feature cassoulet recipes and tips for growing heritage tomatoes. She cupped her hands around her face and leaned into the glass.

“Hello!”

Waiting, hearing nothing, she picked her way through leaf debris to the side of the house. Tucked into the edge of the forest was a small stone outbuilding with a sagging roof that was too narrow to be a garage. Nearby, half buried in drifts of twig and dead needle sprays, was a hive-shaped bread oven. If it weren’t for the thick black cable that extended from the second floor window to poles along the road, she could be standing in Languedoc of a thousand years ago.

She thought she heard a metallic click. Thank God! Silvina dashed around to the front of the house, tucking in long blonde tendrils that had worked loose from the knot at her nape. The door was still closed. Dust devils swirled like tiny galaxies at her feet, while a rash of anxiety prickled across her upper chest. Maybe the click she’d heard didn’t come from a deadbolt but a safety catch from someone armed and intending to warn her off. She glanced across the road to a wall of limestone with stunted juniper and holly pushing through its veins. The property was surrounded on both sides by dense walls of cedar; she had no idea what or who lay further up the road. Perhaps that village Claire-Elise came from. What had Alphonse called it? Cerabornes.

Vivian Lansdowne had been no hermit; even from this secluded enclave, she’d maintained an active presence in British theatre and the film industry. But she did live by herself and had fallen to her death somewhere in these mountains, three days short of her 68th birthday. By the time they found her body—no, Silvina refused to go there. It takes only seventeen seconds to activate a chain of thoughts, and unless those links are going to pull you to something better…

She touched the door with her fingertips; this time, it swung inward a few inches.

“Hello, I hope I’m not too early. It’s Silvina. We said one o’clock, right?”

Wind whistled like discordant pan pipes through the treetops; there were no other sounds. She pushed the door open and, glancing left and right, stepped inside. She kept the door ajar behind her, unable to shake the feeling that she was being watched. Whether she was safer inside or out was impossible to know, but it was a good stout wooden door with a modern deadbolt, a metal latch, and a sliding wooden plank as thick as her wrist.

The entryway was small and dark. Jackets of heavy tarp and wool piled atop each other hung from a row of wall hooks. Beneath them was a jumble of footwear: wellies and hiking boots, running shoes with thick cotton laces—sensible stuff for a country life. The house, according to Vivian, had been a toll collector’s station in the 1700’s, and centuries before that, the
ostal
of an influential family whose wealth would have been apparent to all by the luxury of a second floor, accessible by ladder.

The central stairwell, where the ladder might have been, was narrower than the corridor that led to it, reminding Silvina of something Viv had said in one of their phone conversations. “The stairs in this house are ladder rungs with backing nailed onto them. The first bed springs Tar and I tried to carry upstairs got jammed and had to be blowtorched to pieces.”

On either side of the corridor were arched doorways with heavy ornate molding in dark wood. The house smelled of wood fires but held no warmth, of baked bread and sage that made her stomach growl, reminding her that she’d eaten nothing today but a small carton of fig vanilla yogurt.

The most startling feature was the colour of the walls. So this, she thought, looking around, is motion-sensitive blue. It was the same shade as the door, but the door was high gloss, while the matte teal on old plaster took on depth, almost an oscillating shimmer, with layers accrued in the way that eggs build colour when dipped into dye baths. The air itself seemed saturated with the hue, casting off glints like miniscule storyboards of graystone, deep forest moss and storming oceans.

Silvina shivered in the damp gloom. No lights were on in the entryway or stairs, and illumination from the front windows seemed to stop at the arches, creating an illusion from where she stood of dressing room mirrors, facing and reflecting each another. She pressed middle fingers into her temples with small circling motions.

“Is anyone here?” she called out again.

Obviously not. Well, too bad, she was, and there was no undoing it. She opened the door, pulled in her two suitcases and laptop shoulder bag, and slid them into the corridor. After checking that the door was firmly closed, she carried her luggage into the
foganha
, the kitchen, on her left.

She scanned the polished copper pots and one enamel dipper on the wall, the marble island with stools tucked beneath. The sink was of old porcelain, nicked and rusting with two long curving taps and a smaller dipper attached to a chain. There was a gas oven with two burners. Plank shelves on plain iron brackets held canned goods and spice jars, stoneware, mismatched tumblers and cocktail glasses. The wall plaster had crumbled away in places to reveal lath and bare stone, which may have been deliberate shabby chic on Vivian’s part.

Across the corridor, through the matching archway, was the parlour, what Viv called, “our coziest, most delicious room.” There was a deep stone fireplace on the side wall with a half circle hearth that arced into the room with quartz-studded flagstones in pink and dove gray. A large black cauldron hung inside the fireplace above a teepee of logs, and a set of iron pokers rested in a rack beside a basket of wood chip kindling.

There were bookshelves crammed with hardcover art books and figurines in clay and stone inside bell jars. There were pillars of hat boxes patterned in stripes, polkadots, and pastoral scenes. The coziest feature, which nearly compensated for the cold, came from a pair of oxblood leather wing chairs, angled and facing the fireplace. Beside one of the chairs was a cloth and wood rack that held balls of wool and knitting needles. On a side table, a crossword puzzle book lay open to a half-finished puzzle.

“Aah, there you are. How were the roads? Have they repaired the washout? I was afraid at St. Jacques they might stop you from...”

Silvina spun around, grabbing the back of one of the wing chairs to slow her momentum and to take in the stooped, slender man in the doorway.

“Dr. Shirazi? I’m so sorry, I tried knocking. The door was unlocked—well, it was open a bit, actually...I didn’t hear you. I didn’t hear anyone.”

For a long, awkward moment, they assessed one another. He was staring through thick horn-rimmed glasses, not in shock or fear but confusion; and then he looked disappointed, as if he’d been awaiting someone who stepped out for a while, and she, most decidedly, was not that someone.

Silvina wondered briefly if Jean-Luc had dropped her off at the wrong house. What had he said at the end of the driveway? “Here is the house of your friend.” But had she specifically told him in Foix who she was? Had he even asked?

If this frail, silver-haired man in Bermuda shorts and hand-knit knee socks was Dr. Tariq Shirazi, famed archeologist and scholar, he looked thirty years older than the photo Viv had sent of them, taken last summer on their holiday in Nice. Perhaps, she was seeing the effects of deep grief.

“I’m not sure about the wash-out,” she said with a smile. “I’m afraid I had my eyes closed for most of the drive.”

He gave her a wan smile, not much, but it was something.

The wop-wopping of Silvina’s heart had slowed, and now she wondered how a man of such fragility could negotiate steep stairs, unnoticed, when she’d just passed the stairwell less than a minute ago. Maybe, convinced the house was empty, she’d had her own blinders on, while he, clouded by shock and careful of his footing, had not seen her either.

She crossed the room with her hand outstretched. “I’m Silvina. It’s an honour to meet you, Doctor Shirazi.” A few feet away from him, she stopped and dropped her arm.

When she was five or six, Silvie’s grandmother bought her a ViewMaster at a yard sale. It was a hand-held plastic projector that one clicked to view colour images in 3-D. Her favourite slides had been the Seven Wonders of the World: click, the Pyramids; click, the Great Wall of China, click. What she was seeing now in dramatic succession might be called the Seven Desolations: loneliness, mistrust, sorrow, fear…