The Blood Promise: A Hugo Marston Novel (39 page)

“Don’t tell me it was while you were at Chateau Tourville.”

“Good guess.” They acknowledged the significance with a shared look. “Anyway,” Hugo said, “I remember reading that a doctor assigned to treat him died under strange circumstances the week before the Dauphin’s alleged death, and the doctor’s widow said that he’d refused to take part in some irregular practice to do with the patient.”

“Over the years several people have claimed to be descended from him, but no one’s had any proof. Until now.”

“Right,” said Hugo. “This Pichon, he was planning to smuggle the Dauphin to America as a show of good faith, a royal life spared. He mentions the Temple, he’s referring to the tower of the Temple, the prison where Louis Charles was held until his supposed death. And remember, Marie Bassin, she told me her mother had mentioned the name Louis in connection with the chest. It must have been some kind of family story, a legend that seemed too outrageous to be true. One that even the Bassin family didn’t take seriously.”

“Hugo, this is . . .
incroyable
.”

“It is. Truly history.”

“Who is the letter being sent to? He says,
mon cher
Thomas, but who would that be?”

Hugo smiled. “That’s what makes this so remarkable. It was sent to the man who was the US minister to France from 1785 to 1789, the year the French Revolution started. That man was Thomas Jefferson.”

Lerens shook her head and let out a low whistle.

“If I remember my history correctly,” Hugo continued, “Jefferson was pretty much in favor of the French Revolution. He was hoping for a democracy to spring up but he got sick of the executions, he felt like people were being massacred for no reason. Or not good enough reason. Anyway, he left with a very sour taste in his mouth. You can see that from Pichon’s words.”

“Saving the Dauphin, sending him to America . . .”

“A show of good faith, indeed.”

“And the family he was supposed to go with?”

“The Bassins. I think he was spirited away to that house, the same one we visited.”

“
Alors
, wait a moment,” Lerens said, sitting forward. “Did you say they left that place, and sailed via Marseilles to America?”

“With one child.”

“The letter,” Lerens furrowed her brow. “It said . . . there should have been two sons on board.”

“Yeah. And we know from all this craziness that the Dauphin made it there. I can only think that the Bassins’ real son died. When that happened, I don’t know, maybe they decided to change the plan and keep Louis Charles as their own. That would explain the sudden move away from their home, the name changes, and the fact that Louis Charles was never known to have come to America.”

“Because he came as the Bassins’ son, not as the deposed King of France.”

“Right.” Hugo’s mind was racing, imagining the death of the young Bassin boy. “You know, Camille, and I don’t know if you’d want to do this but . . .” He trailed off.

“What, Hugo?”

“If we’re right that the Bassins’ son died. Well, they couldn’t tell anyone. They had to keep it a secret, right?”

“Of course. Otherwise the switch with Louis Charles couldn’t have worked.”

“Which means that . . .” Hugo sighed. “I think it’s likely the little boy was probably buried by his parents somewhere on the Bassin property. And all this stayed a secret, Camille, which means his grave is still there.”

They assembled on the lawn behind the Bassins’ rambling house, forced to wait until Sunday morning because that was the soonest Georges Bassin could be there. Hugo had worried that their purpose might upset the church-attending Georges, but the old man had shaken his head and said no.

“It may be a little gruesome,” Georges said, “but it’s necessary. And it strikes me that given what we’re doing, well, it’s perhaps appropriate to do it on the Lord’s day.”

He’d consulted his sister Marie as soon as Hugo had called him to explain the situation, and they’d agreed, and informed the investigators, that there was only one place on the property a grave could be. Most of the land had been leased for years to neighboring farmers, ploughed, planted, and harvested over and over for decades. The only untouched, unmolested spot on the Bassin’s land was a stand of trees on the nub of a hill, half a mile from the house and at the intersection of three ancient footpaths. A stand of trees taking up a few thousand square feet, no more than that, and as far as George and Marie knew, pretty much untouched since the day their family moved in.

Hugo stood with Georges on the lawn, looking over the open field toward the copse. They stood beside a bed of rose bushes, bare now and clipped, made ready for winter by the gardeners who tended them.

“I bet this garden is something in the spring and summer,” Hugo said.

“
Certainement
. I hope you’ll come back and see for yourself. The scent is sublime, and that little circle of grass in the middle has been a picnic spot for the Bassin children forever.”

“The rose garden’s been here a long time?”

“Long before I was born. It’s always been the pride and joy of our family’s matriarchs, and now that Marie plans to move in, I’m sure she’ll keep it that way.”

A grumble of engines caught their attention, and they looked toward the driveway where a truck was coming to a stop with a backhoe in its trailer bed. Tom, Marie Bassin, and Camille Lerens looked as a tall woman climbed down from the cab of the truck.

Jennifer Winkler was the prefecture’s leading forensic anthropologist, someone who’d worked with both Lerens and Raul Garcia in the past. Rail thin, she stalked toward them in khaki pants and matching jacket, a blue police cap on her head. She’d spent two days in the copse before summoning the investigators to brief them. And by briefing them here, Hugo assumed she’d found something.

“
Bonjour
,” she said, as her audience closed in around her. “I’m Jennifer Winkler, as most of you know. I need to tell you what I’ve been doing and what I’ve found. Just don’t get your hopes up too high just yet,
d’accord
?”

Hugo and several of the others nodded, waiting for her to continue.

“You asked me to find a grave two hundred years old. There are a number of techniques I use to try to locate a burial that old. The first is ground penetrating radar, or GPR, but the results are often inconclusive or full of false positives.” She looked at Hugo. “The FBI doesn’t even use this technique any more, that’s how unreliable it is. I did use it here, only because the search area is small and therefore we can tolerate a few false positives. Now, another method is simply to walk the area and see if there are any signs on the ground surface.”

“For a burial that old?” Georges Bassin asked.

“Seems strange, but yes. The soil will settle over time and there can be a slight depression visible to a trained eye.” She shrugged. “Actually, you can see it yourself if you walk through a cemetery, just look for the depressions that often show up in front of the headstones. Of course, it’s harder here because there’s a lot of debris on the ground, sticks, branches, leaf litter. But with a small search area you just need to clear the area to see the ground surface. Questions?”

“Yes,” said Lerens with a smile. “Did you find something?”

“I’m getting there,” Winkler said. “The last method is to use a backhoe. We refer to it as ‘the forensic backhoe.’ Forensic anthropology joke, there. Anyway, we use that to slowly remove the soil, like they do at an archeological dig. We usually start by removing maybe six inches to a foot from the search area. It sounds clumsy, but a skilled backhoe driver can remove an inch of soil at a time if need be. Once the upper layers of soils are gone, that’s when the fun begins. That’s when you can sometimes see the burial shaft.”

“I don’t understand,” said Georges Bassin. “Isn’t there just more soil there?”

“Yes, of course, but the soil within the burial will be a different color and have a slightly different texture than the undisturbed surrounding soil. That difference may be very subtle, especially after so much time, but it will be there. As long as the area hasn’t been disturbed since the coffin was buried, of course.”

“What would be left of the coffin, or skeleton?” Hugo asked.

“Out here, and after two hundred years, the wood coffin will probably be gone.”

“And the bones?” Hugo pressed.

“Whether or not bones survive depends on the soil type and water drainage in the area. If you have an area that frequently floods or an area where the water table fluctuates, the bone would disintegrate faster. If the climate is relatively dry and/or the soil has good drainage, the bones could still be in great condition, you would be able to pick them up and they won’t fall apart in your hands. In fact, I’ve excavated burials that dated back to before Classical Greece—so around 550–500 BCE—and some were in great shape, while others turned to dust in your hands.”

“The copse is pretty elevated,” Georges Bassin said.

“It is,” Winkler agreed. “So I think we might be in luck, assuming we can find the right spot.”

“And the odds of that?” Lerens asked.

“Ah, yes. I apologize, I didn’t mean to toy with your hopes,” Winkler smiled. “But I think I already did. Shall we go dig?”

The procession behind the backhoe was slow and silent, but Hugo knew that everyone’s nerves were keyed high. Finding a skeleton, a little boy’s bones, would confirm his theory and add to the evidence supporting the idea that Alexandra Tourville had blackmailed Charles Lake.

But Hugo also knew that everyone in the group saw this mission as more than just a collecting of evidence. Rather, they were in search of a child abandoned to his grave by his parents, a mother and father who in simple terms had replaced him with the kidnapped heir to the throne of France.

As they started up the last rise to the stand of trees, Hugo looked over the fields and saw the lines of police officers holding back the throng of media. News trucks and reporters’ cars filled every available lay-by and field entrance, the tiny bodies of reporters milling around each other looking for the best angle, the best shot toward the woods.

Jennifer Winkler led them into the trees on a grassy path just wide enough for the backhoe. Dr. Alain Joust and two evidence technicians were in attendance; they’d help Winkler photograph and preserve whatever they found for analysis back in Paris. Marie and Georges Bassin had already given DNA samples, eager to help identify their long-dead ancestor if at all possible.

The site was near the eastern edge of the trees, the place with the best view of the Bassin house and the surrounding countryside. Winkler had cleared the area by hand and the depression in the soil was plain for them all to see. They stood to one side as the backhoe operator took off a layer of dirt, peeling it away like a strip of bark from a tree. Winkler stood closest, supervising and directing the operator with hand signals, having him strip out another inch-deep layer, and then another. She held up her hand for him to wait, then knelt to study the soil.

“Look, you can see,” she said to the group, who inched closer. “The soil here in the burial site is darker. Even after so much time, it’s less compact than the lighter soil around it.”

She stood and gestured for the operator to resume, and Hugo could see the concentration on his face as he took off more layers of soil, inch by inch. Winkler’s eyes were glued to the ground, and as the bucket of the hoe dipped into and out of the hole she held her arms in a cross, telling him to stop altogether.

She knelt by the grave and waved the investigation team over. “Look closely, see how the soil is slightly lighter?” A soft mumble as that fact was acknowledged. She leant in closer. “And look here, see the very faint red lines in the dirt?”

“That can’t be blood,” George said, “surely not after—”

“No, no,” Winkler said. “They must have used nails to hold the coffin together. I wondered if they’d still be here, and we might find some still. But what you’re seeing here are stains in the soil were the nails resided after the coffin disintegrated.

She was, Hugo saw, a teacher as well as a technician, enjoying her work and appreciating a good audience. But now she went to work in silence, Hugo and the others drifting away to give her space. She spread a square blanket of canvas by the hole, to lie on and to collect evidence, Hugo assumed. She began working by hand, at first kneeling beside the hole and then lying on her belly before finally stepping gingerly inside, digging and scraping with a hand-trowel and some other tools Hugo couldn’t name. She dug around like a surgeon, with gloved and careful hands, to find what she knew to be in there and Hugo continued to watch, fascinated. Beside him, though, Tom was getting antsy, and if he couldn’t do anything physical then he wanted to talk.