Bright Hair About the Bone (26 page)

She waited, puzzled and alarmed, to hear the countess's pronouncement.

“Laetitia, my friend Daniel regarded you with the affection of a father for his only child.”

The simple sentence whistled over and landed with the shattering effect of a whizbang.

The countess waited for Letty's response.

In her uncertainty and with an increasing feeling of dread, Letty cobbled together a reply of sorts: “Well, of course…yes…he would be likely to, wouldn't he? Daniel was a bachelor. He was much in my life when I was a child. My father was posted abroad with his regiment for long periods and my mother never accompanied him—her health was never wonderful and she hated hot climates. My earliest memories are of Daniel coming through the door with his arms full of presents…” Her voice petered out as she struggled to understand, to steady the feeling that the ground was opening under her feet.

There had flashed into her mind a long-forgotten memory. She must have been very young because she'd been playing with a doll, sitting on the window seat looking out down the drive. She'd seen his car driving up and had shouted eagerly, “Daddy! Daddy's here!” Her mother had turned pale and dropped her sewing, while Letty charged to the door and flung herself at Daniel when he entered. Of course, the misunderstandings of a solitary child were easily explained and the relationships were subsequently untangled to everyone's satisfaction. She had never referred to the incident again and she did not do so now. None of the countess's business.

“It must have been very confusing for you, my dear. What damage we adults, we parents, unconsciously do with the good intention of sparing the children the truth.”

“Well, no actually,” Letty lied. “I had two fathers and loved them both. When my mother died they were both distraught. Daniel and Sir Richard were always good friends and her death brought them even closer. Daniel moved in and lived with us, sharing the thankless task of keeping me on the rails.”

“I had guessed as much,” said the countess. “So—what more natural than that this caring man should, to the last, have your welfare in the forefront of his mind? Daniel loved it here—the château, the estate…and I'm certain he had an affection for Edmond. They had disagreements, of course—you'd expect it of two such opinionated men and my son can be quite unpalatable at times, I know it. But I believe their friendship and admiration for each other ran deep. They shared the same values.”

Thoughts whirling out of control, Letty was relieved to hear the growling of a powerful engine as the big car swung into view and braked on the gravelled sweep in front of the château. D'Aubec stepped out and strode, laughing, towards them, his secretary Constantine following, carrying a briefcase. Expensive suit, white shirt, and silk tie pulled casually to one side, Edmond was hardly recognisable in his business clothes. He came in through the French window, dismissed Constantine with a few crisp instructions, then hugged the countess, his eyes seeking out Laetitia over the top of his mother's head.

“I know, Maman—you were imagining me dead by the roadside. It was a long meeting and I ought to have spent the night in Lyon but—too much to do here. I wanted to get back.”

“You look tired, darling. How did it go, your business with André?”

“You know André! But it went well! Yes, I really think—well! Dashed frustrating for most of the time and I had to concede on quantity, but the sum we agreed on looks acceptable. More than acceptable!”

Letty was glad to remain silently in the background, lost in her own turmoil, while they discussed the details of the business deal. Mother and son laughed together in a self-congratulatory way.

“You'll soon have those rose diamonds, Maman!”

“Like a pair of pirates,” Letty thought, “gloating over their loot! How many more jewels does the countess need?” and she busied herself with the teapot, suddenly out of place in their company. In an instant the goodwill and—yes—friendship they had built up over the past weeks had dissolved.

After tea Edmond excused himself and Letty started off for the library. In the quiet room she had the time she needed to order her thoughts and adjust her expression before d'Aubec appeared. Now in box-cloth trousers and soft shirt, he looked much more like the man she had grown close to over the last days. “That's better! I was a bit overawed when you looked as though you meant business!”

He used her sudden warmth towards him to lean over and kiss her cheek lightly before settling at the table. More disturbed than she was ready to admit, Letty fell silent, unexpectedly sad that the closeness that had developed between them was about to be cut short. Had he any suspicion of his mother's insane schemes? Catching her speculative glance, he grinned and winked, fidgeted in his pocket, and held out his hand across the table.

“I wasn't so busy in Lyon I didn't have time to do a bit of shopping! I had you in my mind all the time, and, I regret to say, a goofy grin on my face. Disastrous! André must have wondered what was wrong with me. I let him get away with far too low a price. But I bought you a present. Something you'll like!”

Letty tensed, then held out her right hand, preparing an embarrassed refusal. But no jeweller's box with winking diamond ring or pearl necklace was on offer. She stared in surprise at the cellophane-wrapped confectioner's package.

“Nougat! With almonds! From Montélimar! My favourite. Oh, thank you, Edmond.”

Well, this answered her question. The count was not a man to do his wooing with a lump of nougat. She began to suspect that young Edmond had no idea of the fate being proposed for him.

         

It was seven o'clock and the day still brilliant when she closed the last of the notebooks. “Well, there we are. It's finished. Just one puzzle remaining, I think. One document I can't account for: this one from 1810 or thereabouts. Any idea what it means? Does it mean anything? It seems to be sketches and a summary of works to be carried out here at the château…after the return of the family from exile in England. Part of the statement of re-possession, I would expect. Rather grand plans for the stable building and the chapel…very specific…drawn up by an architect, I'd say, judging from the phrasing. And, here at the bottom, in flowing script—in a different hand from the bureaucratic one that drew up the body of the document, I think—there's a sentence that doesn't fit with the foregoing specification.” She pointed it out.

“Looks like a doodle,” said Edmond, intrigued. “You know…boring meeting…‘Let's all look at note twenty-seven subsection eight, shall we? Can the architect please elucidate…' Yawn, yawn. Scribble, scribble. Impressive handwriting, though. Could it be a quotation? Seems to be in old French—the spelling's old even for the nineteenth century.”

“Daniel seems to have thought the same,” said Letty. “Look here, I've found another sheet in his handwriting where he seems to have been working out a translation. Surely this is a commentary, don't you think?” She read out a sentence: “‘With the Lady of Ancient Days lie the worldly belongings of our Holy Queen.'”

“‘Holy Queen'? Well, that will be ‘Notre Dame'—Our Lady, the Virgin Mary, patron saint of the abbey and her ‘worldly belongings'…? Check the French. It does say ‘belongings,' does it? Not ‘remains'?
Les biens temporels.
Hmm…yes…well, only Our Lady would, by extension, be regarded as the guardian of the abbey treasure—that could be regarded as ‘earthly' all right.” Edmond tried to keep a rising excitement out of his voice. “But don't forget that the town is called Fontigny Sainte-Reine—‘Holy Queen'—another and probably much earlier reference to Mary.”

“Wait a moment, Edmond. Abbey treasure, did you say?”

“Ah. Just another of our Burgundian tales.” According to tradition, the citizens didn't just sit about waiting for the arrival of Napoleon's wrecking crews. The precious and movable elements of the abbey's riches disappeared. It had been the wealthiest monastic establishment in Europe—its abbots lived like princes and were often criticised for their fondness for precious objects and high living. By the sixteenth century, though, the abbey was already in decline, and I really doubt there was much left to pillage by the end of the eighteenth.

“But who knows what the attics and cellars of the town conceal? Pieces do pop out from cover every once in a while. There's a well-known local story that there are quantities of gold and silver work hidden away somewhere in the vicinity. There isn't a child in the town who hasn't dug, in hope, in his father's back garden. But who's this other guardian—the ‘Lady of Ancient Days'?” he said. “Never heard of her! Seems to bring us round full circle to our useless old friend Lady Uffington.”

“Not useless, perhaps. Remember my godfather was writing that postcard to
me.
I think he was simply directing me here—to the house of d'Aubec. The goddess on horseback is—you say—your coat of arms. Heraldically, she represents
you
…your possessions…all this. Daniel seems to have been directing me to Brancy.” She paused and, hoping to needle him into an admission of some sort, added: “I can't imagine why.”

“No. Irritating, I agree. I do wonder why Daniel couldn't just have written
me
a note and left it on the mantelpiece,” said d'Aubec testily. “‘Edmond, old boy, welcome back from Morocco. Now, go and dig in the stables where I've chalked a cross on the floor…' Something of that sort.”

“Yes, of course,” said Letty. “But he clearly thought leaving notes around the place a dangerous procedure or he would have done that. I'd guess he had his doubts about the staff here. Have you been
infiltrated,
I wonder, Edmond?” she asked in a teasing voice, hoping to conceal her thoughts. If her godfather had gone to this trouble, perhaps he couldn't trust d'Aubec himself to do the right thing by his discovery? It was through
her
he intended to involve the academic world, the solid and impeccably respectable world of the London and Paris museums. And she thought she knew exactly whom to contact when she could get back to London.

The time had come to tell d'Aubec the truth.

“Edmond, there
is
a treasure here. It's not the obvious kind…jewels secreted in the cellar for centuries and that sort of thing. And we're not going to be led to the Holy Grail, a piece of the true cross, or any of the other legendary things buried hereabouts. But what we have here in our hands makes my head spin! It's very, very important. Unique. And much more valuable than any cache of Roman gold!”

CHAPTER 25

W
hat can you mean?”

“These,” she said simply. “The books themselves. You've read through some of them without, I think, quite recognising them for what they are. The pile over there—the prayer books and Books of Hours alone—are worth a fortune but it's these here, the folio vellum manuscripts, that are uniquely valuable. I can hardly believe what I have in my hands!”

“The folk stories? Delightful, I agree,” he said, uncertain and not quite able to catch her mood.

“Oh, these are more than folk stories, Edmond! History, philosophy, theology, and magic, and I think I know the source. And it's the source that's making me shake with excitement! Have you heard of the stories of the Celts handed down through Welsh and Irish manuscripts?
The White Book of Rhydderch
…the poets of Munster…we even know some of their names. They had a rich mythology pre-dating Christianity, and so important was it to these people that it was preserved and passed on orally, to be finally—thank God!—written down by those literate Christian monks who clung to existence in a hostile environment. Perched on sea-swept cliffs, islands in the Atlantic…at the mercy of Viking raiders…” D'Aubec was smiling at her enthusiasm, but she pressed on. “They took the trouble to record the stories. They must, most of them, have grown up listening to them, hearing them as we hear nursery rhymes. The earliest of the Irish sagas hark back to a time when their god-like ancestors were in possession of the island. They called them the
Tuatha Dé Danaan
—the tribes of the Goddess Danae.”

“Danae? Should I have heard of her?”

“One of the ancient names for the Mother Goddess.”

“And what has this to do with the monks of Fontigny?”

“The same scene. The monks could write. It's as simple as that. The Welsh and Irish culture was preserved, though sketchily, and is available to us, but it's always been thought that no trace remained of the Celts of old Gaul. And that is a tremendous loss, as this country was the centre of their culture, according to scholars, including Father Anselme.”

“Culture, you say? But weren't the Celts a warrior society—bands of barbarians—and not too concerned with the finer qualities of life? The classical writers are silent on the more civilised aspects of their society, aren't they?”

“Of course. They did what victors always do—they undervalued the opposition and edited out of their accounts any reference to creativity and culture. Though they do stress the courage and fighting skills of the enemies of Rome. They were afraid of these huge, fair, tattooed men who charged naked into battle. And these warriors harried the classical world mercilessly; they got as far south as Delphi and sacked Rome itself. No wonder they became stereotypical bogeymen for the classical writers. But they had, we're beginning to discover, a very fine side to their nature. Their metal-working shows an artistic flair far more impressive than that of the classical world to some eyes—certainly to mine. They had a high culture of religious belief and a developed literature. We don't know exactly where their origins are, but the foundations of their society may well have been laid two thousand years B.C. They pre-date the Romans.”

“Does Caesar have a view?”

“He certainly does! A rather close-up view. He killed a million of them. He confronted Vercingetorix of the Aedui tribe in pitched battle at Alésia not so far from here, and he could well have lost. But he too prefers to restrict his comments to the Celts' behaviour on the battlefield. The more formidable he makes them appear, the greater his own achievement, of course. He does, however, mention their religion, and is one of our main sources of information on the druids, who controlled the lives of the Celtic tribes. We know tantalisingly little about these gentlemen.”

“The druids? Their priesthood, you mean?”

“More than that. They were the practitioners of the religion, certainly, but much else. They were the lawgivers, the doctors, the bards, the intellectual force of the society. It took twenty years of learning to become a druid. Children would be sent away for training, to acquire the ancient lore and the facility to recite it. Yes, recite. The essence of their culture was passed down by word of mouth. Not a word was written, and that's a puzzle because the druids did understand Greek and could probably have committed their history and literature and science to vellum or papyrus.”

“What secrets must have been lost!”

“We can only guess and regret. In Ireland, there were storytellers, the
filíd,
who, it's said, originated in Gaul, and they were a sort of light through the Dark Ages, a bridge, I suppose, between the Celts and the medieval society. They had an immense repertoire—there's a record in an eighth century text of one of these
filíd
who was employed by the king of Ulster to recite stories and poems by the fireside in winter, and he was able to keep up the flow from the feast of Samhain to the feast of Beltane. That's six months! A lot of stories!”

D'Aubec reached for one of the large leather-backed books and opened it with more than his usual deference. “And you're telling me that the Gallo-Celtic stories may have been preserved, by word of mouth, over the centuries and lasted until they were finally heard and committed to paper, well, calf-skin, by men who could write and illuminate and who were encouraged to do this by…well, who knows? And I've been struggling to read them!” He began to shake with laughter. “I'd like to think it was some remote ancestor of mine who was responsible but that's probably a romantic idea. Am I holding in my hands something approaching the importance of Homer's
Iliad,
do you suppose? Good Lord! No wonder Daniel was getting so agitated! But what exactly do we do now?” He frowned a warning. “They're not going off to London! Don't think it!”

“No,” Letty agreed. “But they must be preserved and translated. There are experts in Paris—I bet you already know some of their names—who would faint with excitement at the idea of getting their hands on them.”

“Laetitia, will you stay on here?” His tone was formal. “I agree that these books must be published, the knowledge made public. Come and work here full-time on the books. Finish what Daniel started.”

“Heavens, no! I'm just an enthusiastic amateur. And I've been staggering along, following Daniel's notes. My own knowledge wouldn't take me to the end of the first page! You must entrust them to a professional. You don't want me!”

“But I do want you, Miss Talbot. And you know how spoilt I am—I always get what I want.” He spoke lightly then added, more seriously, “But I do understand what you're saying. I'll keep them safe until I can get someone down from Paris.”

         

It was still early and Letty would very willingly have gone on talking and speculating about the texts, reading and exchanging ideas, but d'Aubec was beginning to pack up his things and tidy up the piles of books. Sensing her disappointment, he looked at her speculatively for a moment then said, “Why don't we just leave all this? It's a wonderful evening and I've kept you cruelly cooped up here for nearly two weeks. Let's have some fresh air. Come to the stables—there's something I want you to see! Something very special!”