The Eleventh Year (23 page)

The man turned on his heel and quickly disappeared. Alexandre rang for the maître d'hôtel, who arrived out of breath. “I'm going now, to find Monsieur Paul,” he stated. “Say a prayer for both of us, Armand.” And without looking back, he pushed his way out of the château and ran to the waiting car. He wanted to dismember his brother, to pound his head against a wall. Killing Paul would be an act of vengeance that purged and cleansed. Alexandre had never felt so alive as at this very minute, contemplating what he was about to do.

A
lexandre walked
in on his brother as he was packing books into a cardboard box in preparation for moving to Jamie's apartment. Paul was in his shirtsleeves, his fingers holding a first folio of a Donizetti opera. Surprise gave way to sudden alarm. He had never seen Alexandre like this, his eyes narrowed, his face suffused with blood, his hands clenched into fists. Before he could open his mouth, his older brother had seized him by the open collar of his shirt, and he could feel the delicate material ripping. Alex pushed Paul against the bookcase so roughly that the younger man could not react, so startling had been the attack.

Alexandre could not speak. He closed his fingers around Paul's neck, shoved him once, twice against the panels of the bookcase, hearing him slam against the wood. Paul's head had been hurt, a spot of blood was oozing from his hairline. Alexandre tightened his grip on his brother's throat, felt the pulse of life there, and knew only the need to blot it out. Suddenly Paul, frightened and totally bewildered, reacted. From days of wartime conditioning to save himself, his knee shot up into his brother's groin, and it was Alex now whose eyes widened with surprise and pain. He stumbled backward, bending over, his bad leg all at once a mass of shooting stabs of pain. He felt a wave of nausea and collapsed on the carpet.

Paul, his head bloody, his shirt torn off his body, stood shaking against the bookcase. “My God,” he said. “What's going on? You tried to kill me!
You tried to kill me”
There was shock in his voice and then stillness in the room. “Why?”

“Because you're a god damn thief, and a liar and a cheat. Because I've been working to support Mama and have given you money, and you have ruined us.”

The truth began to dawn on Paul, and his stomach contracted. “Popov,” he gasped. “But it was only twenty thousand francs. If you want, I can pay you from my next few months' salary from Bertrand—”

“You son of a bitch, the château is just about destroyed! It was one thing for you to breed several horses of your own, for you to indulge a favorite pastime. But to allow this man to invade our land—my inheritance, Paul, mine! He brought along one hundred stallions. They have eaten away the gardens, ruined the park—”

“I didn't know.”

“No, you didn't know. You cared only enough to take his money. That's all you ever do, Paul. You take people for what they're worth and shake off all responsibility afterward—” His voice rose, and suddenly he stood up again, swiftly, and advanced toward his brother. Grasping him by the arms he said, beginning to shout. “I've heard about Jamie! You don't even have the decency to marry the girl—”

“That is none of your god damn business!” Paul cried, pushing Alex off with a shoving motion of his arms. “What are you going to do? Have me thrown in jail?”

At this moment Charlotte, having heard the shouting, rushed in, her face a mask of horror. She uttered a short cry and wedged herself between the two young men. Her thin form was very strong, and she prevented each from once again getting at the other. “You will both stop and explain to me what is going on in my house,” she announced.

“Your little favorite has made off with twenty thousand francs and destroyed the château,” Alex said, disdain replacing the rage and filling him now with an empty disgust. He wanted to be done with them both, to return home, to see Lesley. “Let
him
tell you! But I'm never going to help either one of you again. I'm through—completely wiped clean of any obligations! See if
you
can support Mama and her expensive life style all by your honest earnings, Paul!” He turned his back on them and went limping out of the room.

Charlotte sat down on her younger son's bed, brushing her fingers through the side curls at her temples. “Your head is bleeding,” she finally declared. Then she looked up, shook her head from side to side. “Good God. Sit down, Paul.”

He did as he was told, beside his mother. She took a lace handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed at the blood on his forehead. “You have done many foolish things in your existence,” she commented. “Alexandre is many things but not a fool. I have always needed Alexandre.”

“Alex is crazy,” Paul said.

“But which is worse? A fool or a madman? Alexandre the Great, after whom I named your brother, and Napoleon, and Caesar—They were all madmen, weren't they? But not fools. What have you done? Tell me exactly.”

He told her, in a dull voice drained of emotion. “So. We are more than ever in need of funds, just when I thought we were coming into the clear. What have you done with the twenty thousand, Paul? Not that in itself it represents a lot. Compared with the destruction of Beauce—”

“It's…gone. I bought some paintings. I—” He had bought Elena Egorova a ruby. Why had he done so? She had refused him as a lover, and he had understood the terms. Yet he had purchased her this magnificent jéwel. “I bought a racehorse.”

She looked at him with withering contempt. “Paul.” She took hold of his arm, lightly shook it. “The answer is Lesley Richardson. And the way things are going, I'm not at all sure she's going to go through with this marriage. She seems tense, secretive.”

“I know. I've felt it too. From the very start.”

Charlotte's eyes hardened. “We cannot,” she declared succinctly, “afford to lose Lesley Aymes Richardson.”

Paul looked at his mother, then at the unpacked boxes on the floor and at the scattered sheets of the
Lucia
libretto that had fallen when Alex had attacked him. He thought about his life, scattering around him like the sheets of the folio. Then he asked the ultimate, Garden of Eden question, which he had never dared to ask before: “Mama, who is my father?”

Her sculpted features froze. But she replied: “No one. You are my son and mine alone, Paul.”

He had to smile: Charlotte von Ridenour was the only woman he knew, save perhaps Elena, who would have had the style to answer him thus. He had never liked his mother, had often mistrusted her. But she was unique. Her answer had saved them both.

L
esley sat by the secretary
, her fingers idly playing with a pen. Something hard inside her had refused to allow her to visit Jamie's new apartment. She had behaved childishly with her friend when Jamie had stood, bags in hand, at the threshold of the suite. No good-byes. She wasn't about to let Jamie exit so easily. Paul was wrong for her, and Lesley felt abandoned. Now she was sorry. She already missed Jamie, felt alone as she never had before. The immense suite stared back at her with its luxury and emptiness. Jamie and she had been far happier in their little room at Vassar, decorated with love and originality.

Everything was falling apart. Lesley laid her head down on her arms, overwhelmed with sadness. She hadn't touched a paintbrush in days. She'd thought of Alexandre, of Paul and Jamie, of Jamie's determination to move out on her own. She too should have been doing that. Their great common dream, to come to Paris and study, and paint, and write. Jamie was already doing it all, and Lesley had only allowed floating events to crystallize about her into an engagement, an impending marriage. She'd met a man, and before she'd even had a chance to get to know him, there had been plans. Lesley sat up, suddenly angry. Why was it that this marriage was making her feel so manipulated? She wished, right now, that she could have called it off.

The hotel telephone rang, discreetly, and she went to it quickly, wondering if it was Jamie. She'd apologize to her friend and go right over with a basket of seasonal fruits, flowers, plants, as a housewarming. Why hadn't Jamie wanted Lesley to share the apartment with her, instead of Paul? That man, always using Alex, always despising Alex, and using Jamie too. She came to with a sudden start and thought: I'm jealous! I wish I'd done what Jamie did, what her anonymous background has allowed her to do.

She sighed, picked up the receiver. “Monsieur de Varenne is here to see you, mademoiselle.”

“Send him up, please.” What would she say to Alex? She loved him so, but sometimes the core of his being eluded her. He had his own demons to face, each and every day. Sometimes she was actually afraid of him. What would she say? “Darling, I love you, I want you—but please, let's hold off the marriage and go live in total anonymity in Cherbourg, or Villefranche?” One could do this if one were Jamie Lynne Stewart, daughter and granddaughter of nice simple people.

Looking at her face in the vanity mirror, she pinched her cheeks. Why was Alex coming to her now? Probably because he wanted the cool freshness of her. That was what he'd told her once. She was his cool, fresh spirit. Only she felt about as fresh as a limp rag.

She heard the tap on the door and went to open it. Paul de Varenne stood staring at her, his head bandaged oddly, circles under his eyes, a tear in his shirt. She blinked. And then remembered: “Monsieur de Varenne.” Of course. Both brothers were.

“Won't you let me in, please, Lesley?” he was asking. His voice had an edge of despair to it that was in direct contrast to his usual robustness. He looked awful.

She made a gesture, stood aside while he passed inside. There was something disagreeable about him that never failed to put her on edge. She had already been so demoralized that his sudden entrance only served to exacerbate her raw nerves. She was doubly annoyed by his appearance, which seemed to demand sympathy she just couldn't muster. Feeling a little guilty, she asked: “What happened to you, Paul?” He was, after all, her fiancé's brother.

“Alex beat me up.”

Lesley raised her hand to her mouth, stunned. “Alex? He's the gentlest—”

“One would have thought so. Yet he tried to kill me with his bare hands. Over a silly matter of a few thousand francs, in fact. Sometimes I think he's really lost his mind!”

Lesley sat down, disoriented. Then she rose, confused, and went to the sideboard on which stood a silver tray with two decanters containing sherry and cognac. She poured a shot-glass of cognac into a tall silver goblet, handed it to Paul. Then, absently, she filled another with sherry for herself and sat down again, smoothing her skirt. Alex had tried to kill his brother. Nothing made sense.

“Why are you here?” she asked abruptly. “Surely if Alexandre was this angry, he must have had a reason. You can't possibly think I'd be sympathetic.”

“Why are you so unpleasant to me, Lesley? Do you really hate me?” He sat sipping his cognac, looking at her with wide open brown eyes, his “candid eyes.”

She was unmoved. “Paul, what difference do my feelings have, anyway? I don't hate you. I just don't feel there is any relationship between us. You're a member of Alexandre's family, that's all.”

“Always the proper little English girl.” He sat back, making himself more comfortable against the soft cushions. She was sitting stiffly forward, the picture of propriety. There was a pallor to her small face that lent it a pathos that intrigued him. She had always intrigued him, from their first meeting. She was such an odd, frail yet vibrant beauty, and this combination was a challenge. Elena was all overt sexuality, all hardness; Jamie all pliant female fecundity, the nurturing Mother Earth. Who was Lesley?

“You don't really love my brother,” Paul said, and for the first time Lesley heard genuine interest in his tone. She was on the verge of an outraged, loyal reply, when he shook his head and stated: “Love is black and white, Lesley. Jamie loves me. It's clear as day. If I were to ask her to make the ultimate sacrifice, she wouldn't hesitate.”