The Priest's Madonna (28 page)

I did, finally, just before Christmas. I woke one morning feeling as though the weight that had been pressing on my chest had lifted, and I sat up in bed, calling for Mother. When she entered my room, she rushed to me and hugged me hard. “Your eyes are clear, sweet—are you better?” I nodded. She rocked me in her arms. “First Father and then you—it has been a trial. But God has answered my prayers.”

The next day, when I felt well enough to leave the house, I demanded Bérenger take me into the church. He had told me about the installation of the new pulpit, and I wanted to see it for myself. He escorted me; I leaned happily on his arm.

The new pulpit towered over the nave like a jeweled giant. It recalled the design of the tabernacle—the two pieces worked nicely together, in fact, bringing a coherence to the interior. It was so large, so striking, that I only belatedly noticed that the floor of the nave had been tiled in a bizarre black-and-white checkerboard pattern.

“It was the only tile they had available,” Bérenger explained, “I didn’t want to wait longer.”

We approached the pulpit to get a closer view. At its foot were the same planks I’d seen a month earlier.

“Ah,” I said accusingly. “That must be where you’ve been digging.”

“It’s a wonder to preach from way up there, Marie,” he replied evasively. “You’ll see, this Sunday. My sermons feel more forceful, anyway, even if they’re the same old drones.”

T
HEN, FIVE DAYS before Christmas of that year, 1891, the mayor shot himself in the head with the pistol that Madame kept in the top drawer of her desk. We all heard the report, though most of us dismissed it as a hunter’s shot, and imagined we would hear of the pheasant or the boar that one of the boys had gotten later that evening. It was Mme Siau who told us. “The mayor’s shot himself,” she said at the presbytery door. “I’ll need some help mop-ping up.”

He left no note, only a half-drunk bottle of liquor on Madame’s desk. I couldn’t help but think that he had chosen that spot as a way of reprimanding Madame for her long absence: blood splattered on the expensive Oriental carpet, the window, the books. With our hardest scrubbing, we could only remove a portion of the stain.

It was a sad day when we buried him. As his death was a suicide, he could not be buried in consecrated ground, nor could Bérenger say any blessing over his body. M. Paul, M. Chanson, and M. Verdié dug a grave in an unused corner of the castle garden—which happened to abut the cemetery, though it was separated from it by a tall, vine-covered wall—and we gathered there, the whole village.

Madame came—I had sent her a telegram. She wore a black widow’s shawl and stood at the edge of the crowd. Joseph, Gérard, and M. Verdié lowered his body, wrapped only in canvas, into the ground. Each of us threw a handkerchief, a coin, a twig of rosemary, or a handful of dirt on the grave. Many wept, for the village cared for him; he had been a good mayor and a good man.

Afterward, many of us adjourned to the château, where Mme Siau had prepared a pot of salted cod soup and M. Flèche supplied a torte. I say many but not all, because some refused to set foot in the château. They deemed the castle cursed and said that the mayor had gone crazy, just like the Berthelots before him. His suicide was a sign that the coming year would be doomed, and entering the castle would guarantee a failure of their crop, a bankruptcy, a death in their family. Others declared they would never again acknowledge Mme Laporte. An untimely death always invites blame, and who better to blame than the wife who had abandoned her husband, and a Jew besides? There was hateful talk. Madame clois tered herself in the château. A few of the teenage boys hung about outside, looking menacingly up toward the windows, stubbing out cigarettes against the front door. Mme Siau shooed them away, but they returned, their eyes alight with criminal fantasies.

The morning after the burial, which happened to be Christmas Eve, my mother and I went together to the château. We brought a black-and-white pudding. Mme Laporte answered the door in a high-collared nightgown, her hair lank, her face drawn and pale. “Please forgive my appearance,” she whispered. “I am not feeling well.” She accepted the pudding graciously, then moved back into the darkness of the house.

“We hoped you might join us for supper this evening, Madame If you haven’t other plans, that is.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, and shut the door.

She did not appear that evening. As we had an hour or two between supper and Mass, I walked over with a sampling of the foods we’d enjoyed: pigs’ feet, bread, beans, potatoes, and salted cod. I knocked twice, three times. Just as I was turning to go, the door opened: Madame stood, barefoot and still in her nightgown, on the threshold.

Her face bore such an expression of misery—I am not sure how to describe it, for it was unique to her. It was not pure grief, though that was there, the heaviness in the skin and eyes, the searching gaze, the guilt, but there was also real fear, horror even, in the dilation of her pupils, the scattering glances she made at the darkness, the path behind me. She embraced me, which was startling, for she did not tend toward the demonstrative; then, perhaps sensing my surprise, she released me, smoothing my hair. “It’s good to see you,” she said.

“Are you ill?” I asked.

She did not answer, but led me to the parlor and sat down next to me on the settee, keeping my hand in her lap and stroking it like a cat. I was taken aback and fought the urge to tug my hand away. We sat like that for a time until she let out a little laugh, and placed my hand back in my own lap. “You’ll think I’ve gone mad,” she said.

I was thinking the very thing. I had been much affected by the mayor’s death, and was inclined to believe in haunted houses, castles or otherwise.

“Are you well, Marie? You look well.” There was an artificial brightness to her voice.

“Very well, thank you.”

“And your family? You are living at the presbytery now, I understand?”

“Yes. We’re all well. My father was ill, but he’s recovered. Michelle and Joseph have moved back home. They have a baby now.”

“So I saw. Delightful. And Monsieur
le curé
?”

“Fine, thank you.”

We did not know where to go from there. I was concerned about Madame, but her uncharacteristic lack of composure and neediness disoriented me. I felt I did not know her as I once had. I wanted to ask why she had stayed away so long, why she had lied to me so many years ago. But she was changed, though whether it was due solely to her grief or to some other cause, I could not tell. I fiddled with the brocade of the settee, wondering whether I should leave her alone, whether my presence was too much of a strain. Then I wondered whether she truly grieved at all. Perhaps it was a show she put on for seemliness.

“Philippe cared for me quite a bit it seems,” she offered, shyly. “I hadn’t known.”

“Hadn’t you?”

She darted her eyes at me guiltily. “Marriage settles into its own rhythms, Marie,” she said. “These become ruts, and then gullies, ravines. You can’t get out easily.” She lifted a hand to the collar of her nightgown and adjusted the cloth at her throat. “He was not the type to do such a thing,” she said, and her eyes grew unfocused and once again full of fear. “He was so happy all the time, so glad to be in the company of other people. Of all of you.”

“He fell into drinking after you left,” I said.

She nodded absently, her finger dipping below her collar, moving back and forth against her neck. She would suffer always with this guilt, this final violence.

“I loved him once,” she said. “He seemed to embody the France my father so loved—he was generously, profoundly democratic. Philippe never had a bad word to say about anyone.”

I nodded; it was true.

“He sent me a letter,” she said. “He told me I was like a star, distant and glittering. That was all the letter said. Two lines: Dear Simone, You are a star, distant and glittering. Philippe. I laughed when I got it. I thought it was a love letter.”

“It was, I guess.”

“It was his note.” She brought her eyes into focus then and turned to me.

“Why did you tell me he was your cousin?” I asked.

Her eyes flickered in surprise. “An impulse, Marie. I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t an impulse. You planned to tell me. You were the one who brought it up. You could have left all of it unsaid.”

She nodded slowly.

“Monsieur Laporte told me the truth,” I continued. “But I could easily have found out from anyone else in the village who had been here long enough. It wasn’t even a good lie.”

She laughed sadly. “You’re right,” she said. “It wasn’t. I’m not accustomed to lying.”

I waited.

“I was protecting myself. That’s all. It was a fib, really. A way to avoid telling a much longer story that I wasn’t quite ready to tell.”

“So I imagine your father’s alive and well?” I said cavalierly. She flinched, and I immediately regretted the question.

“No,” she said. “That part was true. He died before I came to Rennes, before I bought the castle here.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s all right. You have a right to know.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me the truth, though? It’s not so much longer. It’s not even such a different story, after all.”

“I suppose not,” she said, though her tone was evasive.

“What about the caves?” I asked. “Was that an invention, too?”

She considered me for a long, serious moment. “No, Marie,” she said. “That was no invention.”

I breathed, relieved. But before I could press her further, she began to question me.

“I must know about the stone, Marie. Where in truth did you find it?”

I felt that if I was demanding her honesty, I had to give her the same. “Here,” I said. “In the church.”

She nodded, as if she’d expected the answer. “Is it still there?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Behind the church, anyway. In the cemetery. Monsieur
le curé
removed it to tile the floor.”

She fell silent a moment, then asked, “Please tell me how you found it.”

I told her the story of its unearthing, feeling my betrayal of Bérenger lodged like a bone in my throat. I left nothing out, however, from the Austrian’s initial letter to my discovery of the flask, from the story of the madwoman and her visions to my latest recovery of the old register and the entries that mentioned the tomb.

“You haven’t yet found the book?” she asked when I had finished.

“No. Monsieur
le curé
might have, though, for all I know. I’m sure he’s found the tomb.”

“And what will he do with it, do you think, if he finds it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“How curious,” she mused. Then she glanced at the grandfather clock, a queer light in her eye. “Do we have time, do you think, Marie, to look at the stone before midnight Mass begins?” It was eleven o’clock.

She buttoned an overcoat over her nightgown. The night was frigid, the wind stinging our cheeks. We carried a lantern but did not light it, for we wanted to remain inconspicuous. Luckily, most everyone was tucked up in his house, reveling in the holiday. We passed the tavern, where a few men hunched at the bar, and continued on toward the church, tiptoeing through the garden to reach the cemetery.

Once there, sheltered by the church walls, we lit our lantern. The light barely dispelled the darkness; we could see only the few closest graves, their stones tipped and half-sunk in the soil like a miniature ruin. Animal refuse and unearthed bones were strewn across the ground: the dogs and boars were not averse to digging.

Holding the lantern high, I led Madame along the church wall to the place where I knew the knight’s stone to be. “We’ll have to turn it over,” I whispered, setting the lantern on the ground. “It’s very heavy.” Together we pushed it away from the wall. It thumped against the hard earth. Madame dropped to her knees beside it and I held the lantern aloft once more, shining light over the stone’s curvaceous surface.

“Oh,” Madame gasped. She bent reverently over the stone, tracing the shapes with her fingers. “It’s larger than I had thought. And much rougher than your sketch, Marie. Difficult to discern what the shapes are exactly.”

“Yes,” I admitted. “I drew from memory. I might have taken some liberties.”

“It’s centuries old.”

We were silent a while longer as Madame examined the carving. I huddled in my shawl. The stone walls sheltered us from the worst of the wind, but the air was bitter cold.

“I will confess to you, Marie. When you brought me your sketch, I thought it depicted a particular story about the secret transport of a child. But the shapes are far less defined than I had imagined. It’s impossible to tell whether a child is present at all. It could be almost anything: a statue, an urn, even. Still, one could imagine—” She broke off, tracing the stone once more with her fingertips.

“What was the story?” I prompted.

“I had two in mind, really. One I spoke to you about. I thought the stone might have depicted the flight of Sigebert IV, the son of the murdered King Dagobert II. It was unusual, a knight riding with a child. And the bears or creatures in the top panels seemed to imply that the horse and rider were moving below-ground, as if they were in hiding. But I had a second theory as well, one I did not share with you.”

Madame inhaled deeply. Then she stood, brushing the dirt from her skirt, and gestured toward the lantern.

I followed as she picked her way through the graves until we came to a small upright stone. Squatting, I read the lettering in the lantern-light: LADY JEANNE CATHERINE BERTHELOT. DIED 1781. This must have been the woman the mayor had referred to, the woman who had gone mad at the death of her son.

“She was an ancestor of mine,” Madame said. “My father’s great-aunt. I never knew her.”

Madame, I learned, came to Rennes not simply to buy a castle, but to find the answer to a question, to satisfy a matter of curiosity that had grown into an obsession after the death of her father. When she was a teenager and had begun to ask about the Christian branch of the family, her father had told her the tragic story of his great-aunt Jeanne Catherine de Berthelot, the onetime resident of the château, a woman of noble birth who harbored delusions that she and her children were descendants of Jesus, literal children of God.