Sepulchre (72 page)
Meredith stumbled back a pace. For a moment, though, she was tempted. She was on his property, she was digging up his grounds without permission. She was the one in the wrong, not him. But the look on his face turned her blood cold. Piercing blue eyes, his pupils dilated. Fear trickled down her spine when she thought of how isolated they were, miles from anywhere, in the woods.
She needed to keep some kind of leverage. She watched cautiously as he glanced around the clearing.
Even if Dr O'Donnell was right, and it had been Julian Lawrence's blue car on the road just after the accident, she could just about believe he might not have stopped to help. But now none of it seemed so crazy. Meredith took a step back. 'Hal will be here any moment,' she said. 'And what difference does that make?'
She glanced around, trying to figure out if she could run. She was much younger, much fitter than him. But she didn't want to abandon Léonie's workbox on the ground. And even if Julian Lawrence thought she was just trying to scare him with talk of wolves, she knew she had seen something, some predator, skulking around the edges of the clearing just before he had arrived.
'Give me the cards and I won't hurt you,' he said. Meredith took another step back. 'I don't believe you.' 'I don't think it matters whether you believe me or not,' he said, then, like a light being switched, he suddenly lost his temper and roared, 'Give them to me!'
Meredith stumbled further back, clutching the cards to her. Then she smelt it again. Stronger than before, a stomach-churning stench of rotting fish and an even more pervasive smell of fire.
But Lawrence was completely oblivious to everything but the cards she was holding. He just kept walking towards her, getting closer and closer, holding out his hand. 'Get away from her!'
Lawrence twisted round and charged to meet him, drew back his arm and caught him under the jaw with his right fist. Taken by surprise, Hal went down, blood exploding from his mouth and nose.
He kicked out at his uncle, striking him on the side of the knee. Lawrence stumbled, but he didn't go down. Hal struggled to get up, but although Julian was older and much heavier, he knew how to fight and had used his fists more often than Hal. His reactions were quicker. He gripped his hands together and brought them down with combined force on the back of Hal's neck.
Meredith dashed to the workbox, threw the cards inside, slammed the lid, then ran back to where Hal lay unconscious on the ground. Julian has nothing to lose. 'Pass me the cards, Ms Martin.'
'I'll kill you if I have to,' he said, in so casual a tone that it made the threat all the more believable. Meredith didn't reply. Now the flickering candlelight she had imagined on the walls of the sepulchre was turning to leaping orange and gold and black flames. The sepulchre was starting to burn. Black smoke was enveloping the clearing, licking over the stones. Meredith imagined she could hear the crackle and spit of the paint on the plaster saints as they started to scorch. The glass in the windows exploded outwards as the metal frames buckled.
'Can't you see it?' she shouted. 'Can't you see what's happening?' She saw alarm flood across Lawrence's face, then a look of pure horror leap into his eyes. Meredith turned round, but she was too slow to see it clearly. Something rushed past her, some kind of animal with black, matted fur, a strange jerking movement, and leapt. Lawrence screamed.
Meredith watched in horror as he fell, trying to propel himself backwards on the ground, and then arching his back like a grotesque crab. He threw up his arms, as if wrestling with some invisible creature, striking out at the empty air, screaming that there was something ripping at his face, his eyes, his mouth. His hands were clawing at his own throat, tearing at the skin, as if trying to free himself from the grasp of a hand.
And Meredith heard the whispering, a different voice, deeper and louder than Léonie's, reverberating inside her head. She didn't recognise the words, but she understood the meaning. Fujhi, poudes; Escapa, non. Flee you may, escape you cannot.
She saw the fight go out of Lawrence and he fell back to the ground. Silence immediately descended on the glade. She looked around. She was standing on a bare patch of grass. No flames, no walls, no smell of the grave.
'No,' she said quickly. 'I didn't touch him. I don't know what happened. One minute he was .. .' She stopped, not knowing how she could possibly describe to Hal what she'd seen. 'Heart attack?'
Meredith crouched down beside Julian, no longer terrifying, but pathetic. His palms lay exposed to the air. There was a strange red mark on each, much like a figure of eight. She put her hand on his chest, then she realised. He was no longer breathing.
Eleven days later, Meredith stood on the promontory overlooking the lake, watching as a small wooden casket was lowered into the ground. It was a small party. Herself and Hal, now the legal owner of the Domaine de la Cade, together with Shelagh O'Donnell, still bearing the evidence of Julian's attack on her. There was also the local priest and a representative from the Mairie. After some persuasion, the town hall had given permission for the service to go ahead on the grounds that the site could be identified as the place where Anatole and Isolde Vernier were buried. Julian Lawrence had plundered the graves, but not disturbed the bones.
In the hours after Julian's death, Léonie's remains had been unearthed in a shallow grave beneath the ruins of the sepulchre. It looked, almost, as if she had simply laid down on the ground to rest. No one could account for the fact she had not been found before, given the extensive excavations that had been carried out on the site. Nor why her bones had not been scattered in all that time by wild animals.
But Meredith had stood at the foot of the grave and seen how the colours of the earth beneath Léonie's sleeping body, the copper hues of the leaves above her and the faded fragments of material that still clothed her body and kept her warm, matched the illustration on one of the Tarot cards. Not the replica deck, but the original. Card VIII: La Force. And, for an instant, Meredith imagined she saw the echo of tears upon her cold cheek.
Caught up in the formalities and endless French red tape, it had so far been impossible to find out precisely what had happened to Léonie on the night of 31st October 1897. There had been a fire at the Domaine de la Cade, that much was on record. It had broken out around dusk and, in the course of a few hours, destroyed part of the main house. The library and the study were the worst damaged. There was also evidence that the fire had been started deliberately.
The following morning, All Saints' Day, several bodies were recovered from the smouldering ruins, servants who - it was presumed - had found themselves trapped by the flames. And there were other victims, men who didn't work on the estate from Rennes-les-Bains itself.
It was not clear why Léonie Vernier had chosen - or been forced - to remain behind when other inhabitants of the Domaine de la Cade, her nephew Louis-Anatole among them, fled. There was also no explanation of why the fire had spread so far, so fast, and destroyed the sepulchre too. The Courrier d'Aude and other local newspapers of the time made mention of the high winds that night, but even so, could they have bridged the gap between the house and the Visigoth tomb in the woods?
Meredith knew she would figure it out. In time, she'd fit all the pieces together. The rising light glanced off the surface of the water, the trees, and the landscape that had held its secrets for so long. A breath of wind whispered across the grounds, through the valley. The priest's voice, clear and timeless, called Meredith back to the present.
The Curé, tall in his heavy black felt cloak, smiled at her. The tip of his nose was red, she noticed, and his kind brown eyes glittered in the chill air. 'Mademoiselle Martin, c'est à vous, alors.'
Struggling to keep her emotions in check, Meredith stepped forward to the edge of the grave. From her pocket, she took two items recovered from Julian Lawrence's study, a silver locket and a gentleman's fob watch. Both were simply inscribed with initials and a date: 22 octobre 1891, commemorating the marriage of Anatole Vernier to Isolde Lascombe. Meredith hesitated, then crouched down and dropped them gently into the ground where they belonged.
She glanced up at Hal, who smiled and gave the slightest nod. She took another deep breath, then pulled out an envelope: the piece of music, Meredith's treasured heirloom, carried by Louis-Anatole across the water from France to America, and down the generations to her.
With a timeless gesture, he seemed to draw in all those gathered on the promontory, then turned and led the small party back down the hill and round the lake. As they struck out across the lawns, glinting with early morning dew, the rising sun was reflected like flames in the windows of the house.
Meredith pulled her coat tight around her. Her toes and fingers were numb and her eyes were stinging. The formalities were over. She didn't want to leave the Domaine de la Cade, but she knew it was time. This time tomorrow, she'd be on her way back to Paris. The day after, Tuesday 13th November, she'd be on a plane above the Atlantic on her way home. Then she'd have to figure out where the hell to go from there.
Meredith looked across the sleeping waters, flat as a mirror, to the promontory. Then, beside the old stone seat, Meredith thought she saw a figure, a shimmering, insubstantial outline in a white and green dress, tapered at the waist, full at the hem and arms. Her hair hung loose around her, shining copper in the sun's cold rays. The trees behind her, silver with hoar frost, glinted like metal.
Meredith thought she heard the music once more, although she wasn't sure if it was inside her mind or from deep within the earth. Like notes on manuscript paper, but written upon the air.
She stood in silence, waiting, watching, knowing it would be the last time. There was a sudden glint on the water, a refraction of the light perhaps, and Meredith saw Léonie raise her hand. A slim arm silhouetted against the white sky. Long fingers encased in black gloves.
In the confusion and chaos of the hours immediately after Julian's death on Hallowe'en while Hal had been at the commissariat and calls were going backwards and forwards between the hospital, where Shelagh was being treated, and the morgue where Julian's body had been taken -Meredith had quietly, and without any fuss, replaced the cards in Léonie's sewing box and returned it to the ancient hiding place in the woods.