Sepulchre (38 page)
Next, card II, La Prêtresse. The ethereal, pale, distant features of 'Madame Lascombe', although in an evening gown, cut low at the neck, rather than the formal day clothes of the photograph. Meredith glanced back down, seeing the two figures painted together as the Lovers and chained at the feet of the Devil.
Finally, card VIII, La Force: 'Mademoiselle Léonie Vernier'. Meredith felt herself smiling. She felt the greatest connection with this card, almost as if she knew the girl. In a way, she guessed, it was because Léonie resembled her mental image of Lilly Debussy. Léonie was younger, but there was that same wide-eyed innocence, the same thick copper hair, although loose on the card and tumbling down over her shoulders, rather than tied up in a formal style. Most of all, that same straightforward way of gazing directly into the lens.
She turned her attention to the other cards of the major arcana that had come up in the course of the day: the Devil, the Tower, the Hermit, the Emperor. She studied each in turn, but increasingly with the sense that they were taking her further away from where she wanted to be, not closer. Meredith sat back in her chair. The antique seat creaked. She put her hands behind her head and closed her eyes. What am I not seeing?
Eight was the number of completion, of successful outcomes. There was also an explicit message about interference, obstacles, and conflict. Both Strength and Justice, in older packs, carried the number eight. Both La Justice and La Pagad had the infinity symbol, like a sideways figure of eight.
Music linked everything together. Her family background, the Bousquet Tarot, the Verniers, the reading in Paris, the sheet of piano music. She reached for her notebook, going back through the pages until she found the name she was looking for, the American cartomancer who'd linked the Tarot with music. She switched on her laptop, tapping her fingers impatiently as it sought a connection. Finally, the search box flashed up on the screen. Meredith typed PAUL FOSTER CASE. Moments later, a list of sites appeared.
She went straight to the Wikipedia entry, which was thorough and straightforward. An American, Paul Foster Case became interested in cards in the early 1900s while he was working the steamboats playing piano and organ in vaudeville. Thirty years later in Los Angeles, he set up an organisation to promote his own Tarot system, the Builders of the Adytum, known as BOTA. One of the distinguishing features of BOTA was that Case went public with his philosophy, in sharp contrast to most esoteric systems of the time, which relied on absolute secrecy and the idea of an elite. It was also interactive. Unlike any other decks, the BOTA cards were black and white, the idea being that each individual could colour them in, put their own mark upon them. This, as much as anything, helped bring Tarot into the US mainstream.
Another of Case's innovations was the association of musical notes with certain of the major arcana. All of them, with the exception of card XX, the Sun, and IX, the Hermit - as if those two images alone stood outside the common run of things - were linked with a specific note.
The Tower, Judgement and the Emperor were all assigned to the note C; the Devil was linked with A; D connected with the Lovers and Strength; the Magician and the unnumbered Fool were E.
And more than that, Meredith saw another connection that had been staring her in the face all along. She reached for her inherited sheet of piano music: Sepulchre 1891. She knew the piece backwards - the forty-five bars, the change of tempo in the middle section - in style and character suggesting nineteenth-century gardens and girls in white dresses. Echoes of Debussy and Satie and Dukas.
For a moment, Meredith forgot what she was doing, picturing her fingers flying over the keyboard. Nothing but the music existed. A, C, D and E. The final split arpeggio, the last chord fading away.
In a moment, Meredith was back in Milwaukee, Miss Bridge's advanced music class in senior high, repeating the same mantra over and over. A smile came to her lips. 'An octave is made up of twelve plus one chromatic tones.' She could all but hear her teacher's voice in her head. 'The semitone and the whole tone are the building blocks of the diatonic scale. There are eight tones in the diatonic scale, five in the pentatonic. The first, third and fifth tones in the diatonic scale are the building blocks of root chords, the formula for perfection, for beauty.'
Meredith let her memories come, leading her thoughts. Music and math, seeking the connections not the coincidences. She typed FIBONACCI into the search box. Watched as new words appeared in front of her. In 1202, Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci, developed a mathematical theory where numbers formed a sequence. After two starting values, each number was the sum of the two preceding numbers, 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377 ..
The relationship between pairs of consecutive numbers was said to approach the golden proportion, the golden mean.
In music, the Fibonacci principle was sometimes used to determine tunings. Fibonacci numbers also appeared in natural settings, such as branching in trees, the curve of waves, the arrangement of a pine cone. In sunflowers, for example, there were always eighty-nine seeds. Meredith smiled.
Debussy had flirted with the Fibonacci sequence in his great orchestral tone poem, La Mer. It was one of the wonderful contradictions of Debussy that, although he was seen as a composer primarily concerned with mood and colour, some of his most popular works were in fact constructed around mathematical models. Or, rather, could be divided into sections that reflected the golden ratio, frequently by using the numbers of the standard Fibonacci sequence. So in La Mer the first movement was fifty-five bars long - a Fibonacci number - and it broke down into five sections of 21, 8, 8, 5 and 13 bars, all also Fibonacci numbers.
Meredith forced herself to slow down. To put her thoughts in order. She went back to the Paul Foster Case site. Three of the four notes linked to the name of the Domaine - C, A and E
- were Fibonacci numbers: the Fool was O, the Magician was I, and Strength was VIII. Only D, card VI, the Lovers, wasn't a Fibonacci number. Meredith pushed her fingers through her black hair. Did that mean she'd got it wrong? Or that it was the exception that reinforced the rule?
She drummed her fingers on the desk as she figured it out. The Lovers did fit the sequence if they appeared as individuals rather than as a pair: Le Mat was zero, the Priestess was card II. And zero and two were both Fibonacci numbers, even if six was not.
Case set up BOTA in the 1930s, and in America, not Europe. The Bousquet deck dated back to the 1890s, the minor arcana cards possibly even earlier. There was no way it could have been based on Case's system. What if I turn it on its head?
Meredith thought harder. What if Case had heard of the association of Tarot with music and then refined it for his own system? What if he'd heard of the Bousquet Tarot? Or maybe the Domaine de la Cade itself? Could the ideas have passed not from America to France, but the other way round?
She pulled her bartered envelope from her purse and extracted the picture of the young man in soldier's uniform. How had she been so blind? She had seen how the figure of Le Mat was Anatole Vernier, but hadn't taken seriously the obvious resemblance between Vernier and her soldier. The family resemblance to Léonie too? The long dark lashes, the high forehead, the same trick of looking straight into the lens of the camera.
Meredith felt as if a great weight was being lifted from her chest. The burden of not knowing, like Hal had said earlier, crumbling and folding in on itself as she edged closer to the truth. But instantly, the cautious voice in her head kicked in, warning her against seeing what she wanted to see rather than what was there.
Her fingers flying over the keys in her eagerness to find out everything, anything, Meredith hammered the word VERNIER into the search box. She got nothing of use. Meredith stared in disbelief at the screen. There's got to be something.
She tried again, adding Bousquet and Rennes-les-Bains. This time, she got a few sites selling Tarot cards, and a couple of paragraphs about the Bousquet deck, but nothing more than she'd already found out.
Meredith sat back in her chair. The obvious way forward was to register with family search websites in this part of France and see if she could pick her way back to the past that way, although it would take a while. But maybe Mary could help out from the other end.
With impatient fingers, Meredith fired off an email to Mary, asking her to check the Milwaukee local history websites and electoral rolls for the name Vernier, aware that if the soldier was Leonie's son, rather than Anatole's, she still might not have the right name. As an afterthought, she added the name Lascombe as well, then signed off with a long line of kisses.
She grabbed the receiver. 'Hello?' 'Meredith? It's Hal.' She could hear straight off things weren't so good. Are you OK?' 'I was just letting you know I was back.' 'How did it go?
Meredith glanced at the time and was amazed to see it was a quarter after six already. She looked at the chaotic mess of cards, tagged internet sites, photographs lying on the bureau, evidence of her afternoon's work. Her head felt like it was about to explode. She had found out plenty, but still felt she was in the dark.
She didn't want to stop, but she recognised her brain had reached meltdown. All those high school nights when Mary would come into her room, kiss the top of her head and tell her it was time to take a break. Tell her that everything would be clearer after a good night's sleep. Meredith smiled. Mary was usually - always - right. She wouldn't achieve anything much more tonight. Besides, Hal sounded like he could do with company. Mary would approve of that too. Putting the living before the dead. Actually, now is a good time to stop.' 'Really?'
'You're sure I'm not interrupting anything?' 'I'm sure,' she said. 'I'll finish up here and be down in ten.' Meredith changed into a fresh white shirt and her favourite black skirt, nothing too dressy, and went through to the bathroom. She put a little powder on her cheeks, a couple of strokes of mascara and a little lipstick, then brushed her hair and twisted it up into a knot.
Meredith went into her inbox and clicked on the email from Mary. Only two lines long, the message contained a name, dates, an address, and the promise to email again as soon as she'd got more to tell. A smile broke out across Meredith's face.
She picked up the photograph, no longer an unknown soldier. There was still way more to pin down, but she was nearly there. She tucked the picture into the frame of the photograph, where it belonged. The family reunited. Her family.
The morning after the dinner party, Leonie, Anatole and Isolde rose late. The evening had been a great success. Everyone agreed. The generous rooms and passageways of the Domaine de la Cade, so long silent, had been brought back to life. The servants whistled in the pass corridor. Pascal grinned as he went about his business. Marieta skipped lightly across the hall with a smile on her face.
Only Léonie was out of sorts. She had a vicious headache and chills, brought on by the unaccustomed quantity of wine she had consumed and the after-effects of Monsieur Baillard's confidences.
She spent much of the morning lying upon the chaise longue with a cold compress on her head. When she did feel recovered enough to eat a little toasted bread and beef consommé for luncheon, she found herself subject to the sort of malaise that inevitably follows the passing of a big event. The dinner party having loomed in her mind for so long, she felt there was no longer anything to look forward to.
Meanwhile, she saw Isolde move from room to room, in her customary calm and unhurried manner, but as if a burden had been lifted from her shoulders. The look upon her face suggested that now, perhaps for the first time, she felt as if she were the chatelaine of the Domaine. That she owned the house rather than that the house owned her. Anatole, too, whistled as he walked from hall to library, from drawing room to the terrace, looking like a man who had the world at his feet.
Later that afternoon, Léonie accepted Isolde's invitation to walk in the gardens. She needed to clear her head and, feeling slightly better, was glad of the opportunity to stretch her legs. The air was still and warm, the afternoon sun gentle upon her cheeks. Quickly, she felt her spirits restored.
They chatted pleasantly of the usual topics as Isolde led Léonie down in the direction of the lake. Music, books, the latest fashions.