Sepulchre (43 page)
When she had seen all the Place aux Herbes had to offer, she decided to venture into the side streets surrounding the square. She walked west and found herself in Carrière Mage, the street where Isolde's lawyers were situated. At the top end were mostly offices and ateliers de couturières. She paused a while outside the workshops of Tissus Cathala. Through the glass door she could see displays of cloth of every colour, as well as all manner of sewing materials. On the wooden shutters either side of the entrance, paper drawings of les modes masculine et féminine were tacked up with pins, from gentlemen's morning suits to ladies' tea dresses and capes.
Léonie occupied herself by examining the sewing patterns, regularly glancing up the street towards the lawyers' offices, thinking perhaps to see Isolde and Anatole emerge. But as the minutes passed and there was no sign of them, the lure of the shops further down the street drew her instead.
With Marieta trailing behind, she walked in the direction of the river. She stopped to look through the plate-glass windows of the several establishments trading in antiquaries. There was a librairie, its windows filled with dark wooden bookcases and bound red and green and blue leather spines. At number 75, an épicerie fine, there was the enticing smell of strong and bitter ground and roasted coffee. For a moment, she stood on the pavement looking in through the three tall windows. Inside, shelves of glass and wood displayed examples of beans, paraphernalia, pots for the stove and for the fire. The letters above the door read Elie Huc. Inside, strings of dried sausage hung on hooks to one side of the store. On the other, bundles of wild thyme, sage, rosemary, and a table covered with dishes and jars filled with pickled cherries and sweet glacé plums.
Léonie decided she would make a purchase for Isolde, a gift to thank her for arranging this trip to Carcassonne. She stepped inside the Aladdin's cave, leaving Marieta to twist her anxious hands on the pavement, returning some ten minutes later holding a white paper packet containing the finest Arabian coffee beans and a tall glass jar of crystallised fruit. She was becoming bored with Marieta's anxious face and doglike presence. Dare I?
Léonie felt a spark of excitement at the mischievous idea that had slipped, unbidden, into her mind. Anatole would scold her badly. But there was no need for him to find out if she was quick and if Marieta held her tongue. Léonie glanced up and then down the street. There were some unaccompanied women of her class out taking the air. Admittedly, it was not the norm, but there were a few. And no one seemed to pay the slightest attention. Anatole fussed too much.
'I do not wish to carry these,' she said, thrusting the packages at Marieta, then making a show of staring up at the sky. 'I fear it might rain again,' she said. 'The best thing would be for you to take the packages back to the hotel and acquire an umbrella at the same time. I will wait for you here.'
It is a task that will take no more than ten minutes,' Léonie said firmly. 'You will be there and back without him ever knowing.' She patted the white package. 'The coffee is a gift for my aunt and I do not wish it to spoil. Bring the umbrella back with you. We will have the reassurance of protection from the rain, should we need it.' She drove home her final point. 'My brother would not thank you were I to catch a cold.'
Léonie smiled, delighted by her harmless subterfuge. She did not intend to go against Anatole's instructions and leave the Bastide. Conversely, she did feel she could, with clear conscience, walk as far as the river and catch her first glimpse of the medieval citadel from the right bank of the Aude. She was inquisitive to see the Cité about which Isolde had spoken and for which Monsieur Baillard had such affection.
If Marieta did, by bad luck, arrive back before she did, Léonie could simply explain that she had taken it upon herself to seek out the lawyers' offices in order to be able to walk back with Isolde and Anatole and had thus become separated from the maid.
Pleased with her plan, she crossed the rue Pelisserie, her head held high. She felt quite independent, adventurous, and liked the sensation. She passed the marble columns of the Hôtel de Ville, flying a pristine tricolore, and walked towards what she identified from the plan to be the ruins of the ancient Monastère des Clarisses. At the top of the single remaining tower, a decorative cupola covered a solitary bell.
Léonie exited the tight grid of bustling streets and entered the tree-lined calm of the Square Gambetta. A plaque commemorated the work of the Carcassonnais architect, Leopold Petit, who had designed and supervised the gardens. There was a lake in the centre of the park, with single jets of water shooting to the heavens from beneath the surface, creating a white haze all round. A bandstand in the Japanese style was surrounded by white chairs. The ramshackle arrangement of the seating, the debris of icecream biscuits and waxed paper and the wet ends of cigars suggested that the concert had finished some time ago. The ground was littered with discarded flyers for a concert, muddy footprints upon the white paper. Léonie bent down and picked one up.
From the green and pleasant spaces of Gambetta, she turned right along a rather dull cobblestoned street that ran down the side of the hospital and promised to lead to a panoramic viewpoint at the foot of the Pont Vieux.
A brass figure was mounted on top of the fountain set at the crossroads where three roads met. Léonie rubbed the plaque to read the inscription. She was variously La Samaritaine or Flore or even Pomone.
Keeping watch over the classical heroine was a Christian saint, Saint Vincent de Paul, who surveyed the scene from the Hôpital des Malades at the approach to the bridge. His benign stone gaze and open arms seemed to gather in the chapel alongside, with its high arched stone doorway and rose window above.
Léonie turned full square and had her first uninterrupted sight of La Cité, the citadel set high on a hill on the opposite bank of the river. She caught her breath. It was both more magnificent and more human in scale than she had pictured. She had seen the popular postcards of the Cité that carried the famous words of Gustave Nadaud: 'Il ne faut pas mourir sans avoir vu Carcassonne '- one must not die without having seen Carcassonne - but had thought it no more than an advertising slogan. Now she was here, it seemed a true reflection of fact.
Léonie could see the water was very high. Indeed, in places it was lapping over the bank and up on the grass, washing against the stone foundations of the chapelle de
Saint-Vincent-de-Paul and the hospital buildings. She had no intention of disobeying Anatole further, and yet she found herself stepping up on to the gentle slope of the bridge, which spanned the river in a series of stone arches.
The far bank was mostly wooded. Through the treetops and branches Léonie could see watermills, the flat roofs of the distilleries and the textile workshops with their filatures mécaniques. It was surprisingly rural, she thought, remnants of another, older world.
Léonie looked up to see a battered stone Jesus hanging upon a cross in the central bee of the bridge, a niche in the low wall where travellers could sit awhile or remove themselves from the path of carriages or draymen's carts.
Lascombe had left his estate to his widow for her lifetime. In an unexpected twist of fortune, he had willed that in the event of her remarrying, the property should pass to the son of his half-sister, Marguerite Vernier, née Lascombe.
When the lawyer had read the terms out loud in his dry and scratchy voice, it had taken a moment for Anatole to realise that it was to him that the document referred. It was all he could do not to laugh out loud. The Domaine de la Cade, one way or another, would belong to them.
Now, half an hour later, as they stood in the small Jesuit chapel and the priest spoke the closing words of the brief ceremony that joined them together as man and wife, Anatole reached out and took Isolde's hands.
The witnesses, chosen at random, on the street, smiled at their open signs of affection, although they considered it a pity it was such a modest affair.
Anatole and Isolde stepped out into the street to the peal of bells. They heard the thunder. Wishing to spend the first hour of their married life alone - and reassured that Léonie and Marieta were comfortably in the hotel awaiting their return - they ran down the street and ducked into the first suitable establishment they came to.
Anatole ordered a bottle of Cristal, the most expensive champagne on the menu. They exchanged gifts. Anatole gave Isolde a silver locket with a miniature of her on one side, him on the other. She presented him with a fine gold-plate timepiece with his initials engraved on the top to replace the one stolen in the attack in the Passage des Panoramas.
Léonie felt a moment of disquiet as she descended the bridge. She could no longer pretend that she was not disobeying Anatole's express instructions. She pushed the thought from her mind, then looked back over her shoulder to observe that black storm clouds were massing over the Bastide.
At this instant, she told herself, it would be wiser to remain on the far side of the river away from the worst of the weather. Indeed, it would be inadvisable to return to the Basse Ville quite yet. Besides, an adventuress, a lady explorer, would not give up the chase simply because her brother told her so.
The quartier Trivalle was more unnerving, far poorer, than she had imagined. All the children were barefoot. At the side of the road, a blind beggar with milky, dead eyes sat swaddled in a cloth the colour of the damp pavement. With hands streaked black with grime and poverty, he held out a filthy cup as she passed by. She dropped a coin into it and picked her way cautiously up the cobblestoned road, which was lined with plain buildings. The shutters were all peeling and in a state of disrepair. Léonie wrinkled her nose. The street smelled of overcrowding and neglect. It will be better within the Cité.
The road sloped gently upwards. She found herself clear of the buildings and in the open air, the beginning of the green approach to the Cité itself. To her left, at the top of a crumbling set of stone steps, she glimpsed a heavy wooden door set deep within ancient grey walls. The sign, battered and worn, announced that this was the Capuchin convent. Had once been.
Neither Léonie nor Anatole had been brought up in the repressive shadow of the Church. Her mother was too free a spirit and her father's Republican sympathies meant that, as Anatole had once explained it to her, Leo Vernier considered clerics as much of an enemy to the establishment of a true Republic as the aristocracy. Nevertheless, Leonie's romantic imagination caused her to regret the intransigence of politics and progress that demanded all beauty should be sacrificed for principle. The architecture spoke to her, even if the words echoed within the convent did not.
In reflective mood, Léonie continued past a rather fine landmark, the Maison de Montmorency, with exterior wooden beams and mullioned windows, the diamond panes of glass catching the light in prisms of blue and pink and yellow, despite the dullness of the sky.
At the top of the rue Trivalle, she turned to the right. Straight ahead, she could see the high and narrow sand-coloured towers of the Porte Narbonnaise, the primary entrance into the Cité. Her heart lurched with excitement at the double ring of walls, punctuated by towers, some with red-tiled roofs, some with grey slates, all in silhouette against the glowering sky.
Holding her skirts in one hand to make the climbing easier, she fared forward with renewed vigour. As she drew closer, she saw the tops of grey tombstones with soaring angels and monumental crosses behind the high walls of a cemetery.
Léonie paused a moment to catch her breath. The approach into the citadel was by means of a cobblestoned bridge over a grassy moat, flat and wide. At the head of the bridge was a small rectangular toll office. A man wearing a battered top hat and old-fashioned whiskers stood, hands in his pockets, looking out and claiming payment from the drivers of goods carts, merchants carrying barrels of ale for the Cité.
Perched on the wide and low stone wall of the bridge was a man, in the company of two soldiers. He was wearing an old blue Napoleonic cape and smoking a long-stemmed pipe as black as his teeth. All three men were laughing. For a moment, Léonie fancied his eyes widened a fraction as he caught sight of her. He held her in his gaze a moment, his stare a little impertinent, then looked away. Unnerved by his attention, she walked quickly past.
As she stepped out on to the bridge, the direct force of the north-westerly wind struck her. She was obliged to put one hand on her hat to hold it in place, and with the other keep her swirling skirts free from tangling around her legs. She fought her way forward, eyes screwed tight against the dust and grit thrown up into her face.
But the instant she passed into the Cité, she was sheltered from the wind. She paused a moment to adjust her clothing, then, taking care not to dampen her boots in the stream of water running down the gutter in the centre of the cobbles, she made her way through into the open space between the inner and outer fortifications. There was a pump, with two boys powering the metal arm up and down, spitting water into a metal pail. To left and right she saw the remains of the humble shanty houses that had recently been demolished. At upper-storey height, hanging in mid-air, was a hearthstone, black with soot, left behind when the lodgings had been torn down.