The Secret of the Villa Mimosa (20 page)
Read The Secret of the Villa Mimosa Online
Authors: Elizabeth Adler
T
he interior decorator who’d been summoned by Millie from Cannes was going through the Villa Mimosa, assessing the work that was needed to make it habitable. Bea was waiting on the front steps, staring into space, lost in her own thoughts.
She recognized Nick’s little red convertible as it whizzed up the drive toward her. “Millie told me you were here,” he said cheerfully. “Hop in. We’re off to see Nanny Beale’s cottage.”
Her eyes widened. “Really? But how do you know where it is?”
“I jogged old Monsieur Marquand’s memory with another round of pastis at the Café du Marin Bleu. He remembered it wasn’t too far from the villa. Just drive down the lane, he said. There’s a small turnoff near the bottom; you’ll see a few houses. He said we’ll know which is hers because it looks English.”
They drove along a narrow winding road until they spotted the cluster of houses tucked into a fold in the hillside. The cottage was tiny with a picket fence and a patch of garden filled with roses and delphiniums and Michaelmas daisies.
“That’s an English garden all right,” Nick said with a laugh.
Even though the cottage was unoccupied, it did not look neglected. The garden was weeded, the paintwork looked fresh, and the roses had been well pruned. They peered through sparkling clean windows, and from the glimpse of the neat interior, they knew someone was caring for it.
Nick went off to ask a neighbor while Bea waited for him. She sat on a splintery wooden bench in the green shade of overhanging vines, imagining the old English lady tending her pretty garden, maybe sitting here in the evenings watching the changing light over the sea as the sun set. Perhaps thinking about the past and the little boy who had been left to her to bring up alone.
Nick came back with the information that someone came every week to do the garden and clèan the house. The neighbor had given him the name of the agency involved, and if they hurried, they would just catch someone there before it closed for the two-hour French lunch.
They drove quickly to the next village, and Bea waited in the car for Nick. He was gone for ages, and she kept glancing impatiently at her watch. When he finally emerged, he was triumphantly waving a key.
“I used all my charm,” he said, grinning. “But I practically had to guarantee my bank account, not to say my life, before the dragon of an agent would part with it. I also got her to tell me who pays the gardener for his labors. Something called the Flora Beale Trust, managed by a bank in London. It pays quarterly and promptly, and the dragon lady was not anxious for her arrangement to be disturbed. But when I told her I was a writer and that I might feature her in my book about life on the Riviera, she became putty in my hands. Handed the key over in a flash—and with a smile.” He laughed as they drove off. “Ah, the awful lure of fame.”
Still, they felt like trespassers when at last they opened the cottage door and stood looking around. Somehow it felt as though Nanny Beale still lived there.
It might have been an old-fashioned English movie set. A big old Windsor rocker stood in front of the fireplace next to a flowered cretonne couch scattered with needlework pillows. There was a cheerful red paisley rug and dozens of silver-framed photographs of small children arranged on the mantelshelf on the oak bureau. Nanny Beale’s round tortoiseshell eyeglasses rested on the open pages of a copy of Dickens’s
David Copperfield
just as she must have left them. Her gray flannel coat hung in the closet alongside a few simple dresses. Her sensible shoes—black for winter, white for summer—were lined up neatly underneath. On the shelf were her round brimmed hats, the navy and the straw, exactly as Monsieur Marquand had described them.
Bea gave a satisfied little sigh as she stared around. The cottage was simple but certainly adequate. The narrow cherrywood bed with its heavy white quilt, the plain dishes in the kitchen, and the empty crystal vases were good quality, but obviously the choices of a woman who, because of her job, had always lived other people’s lives and had little time to form her own taste. Nanny Beale’s cottage gave out the message that this was a woman who had what she needed and nothing more. And that was enough for her.
Bea sat tentatively in Nanny’s chair. “Nanny Beale, Nanny Beale,” she whispered hopefully, rocking gently back and forth. She ran her hand lightly across the pages of her book, fingering the eyeglasses as if touching them brought her nearer. “I feel sure I must know you.”
She stared intently at the faces in the photographs on the bureau, hoping to trigger a memory, but they had been taken many years earlier, and were of very English-looking children wearing starched white
dresses and stiff little sailor suits and sitting in pony carts outside grand English houses. Or skirts tucked into their bloomers, they were scowling into the sunlight in seaside snapshots that captured them for posterity, paddling in the wind-ruffled ocean at places called Frinton and Margate.
Bea was reluctant to pry further into Flora Beale’s private life, but Nick told her not to be so foolish. “If anyone knew anything about
la célibataire
and her husband, it was this woman,” he said, rummaging through cupboards and drawers full of plain white linen handkerchiefs and lace collars, starched white aprons and pristine cotton sheets. Nanny Beale had kept everything in its proper place. He smiled as he imagined her bossing her young charges, instilling the virtues of tidiness and cleanliness, exhorting them to brush their teeth and always to carry fresh handkerchiefs in their pockets.
Bea watched hopefully as he searched, but all he found were a few old receipts for groceries and laundry. There was nothing of importance, and he looked everywhere, even in the old tin trunk stored in the loft.
He leaned against the bedroom door, arms folded. “Now just where would an old lady like that keep her secrets?” he asked. Then his eyes met Bea’s, and he grinned. He walked into the bedroom and lifted the mattress. He put his hand under and felt around. His fingers closed on something, and he pulled it out.
“
Got it
,” he said to Bea triumphantly.
It was a large manila envelope, stuffed with papers. They took them out and sat at the kitchen table staring at the documents and letters and a small silver key. Several of the letters had English addresses, “Manor”s and “Hall”s, and turned out to be glowing references to Miss Flora Beale’s excellent temperament, her sobriety, and absolute devotion to the children and to her duty. There were also two letters written in a firm French script. Bea and Nick looked at each other with
excitement. They were from Marie-Antoinette Leconte, discussing the employment of Miss Flora Beale.
Flora Beale had written to Madame Leconte applying for the job of nanny to the as yet unborn child.
“I would enjoy the challenge of working in a new country,” she wrote, in the careful rounded handwriting of a women whose education, as she told Madame, “was limited to parochial school and ended at the age of thirteen, when I went into service at the local manor house in Oxfordshire.
“But my experience with children covers many years, Madame Leconte,” she wrote at the end of her letter. “And I am sure you will agree, there is no better education for looking after children than experience.”
Madame Leconte had immediately written back in English, offering her the job. She told her that the child she was expecting meant everything to her…. “More than my own life,” she wrote.
Bea looked up from those sad words. “Monsieur Marquand was right,” she said with a shiver. “Marie Leconte knew she was marked for death.”
“I wonder,” Nick said, “if even then she thought her husband capable of murdering her. And if so, why she didn’t do something about it.”
“I’ll bet it was feminine pride. Remember, she was
la célibataire
, the dowdy, plain woman always on the edge of the crowd, always alone, despite her money. She was the butt of jokes all those years. Even children in the street mocked her. And here was this handsome young guy, playing the loving husband for everyone to see. Maybe she just hoped she had been wrong about him after all.”
“Here’s something else,” Nick said. He held up a document bound with pink legal tape. “Look, Nanny Beale even went to the trouble to get it notarized.”
Their heads were close together as they pored over Flora Beale’s words. “I must put this down in writing,”
Nanny Beale said, “so that one day those who need it, will know the truth.”
It is simple [she wrote]. I knew it as soon as I saw the husband. He had married poor Marie-Antoinette Leconte for her money. Why else would a handsome, ruthless man like that want a woman like her?
Madame Leconte asked me to come to work for her three months before the child was born—
to get acclimated to my new country and its ways
, she said. But in my heart I suspect it was for companionship. She was without doubt the loneliest woman I ever saw.
I knew Madame only a short while before she died, but I found her to be kind, gentle, and intelligent, though she was not a wellborn woman and did not possess the “good taste” of my previous employers. But there was no doubt in my mind that the child meant everything to her. And no doubt also that Madame did not trust her husband.
Madame gave me a letter she had written to her unborn child. She asked me to keep it safely. It was to be given to the child “if anything should happen and I die before him,” she said to me, with that bleak look in her dark eyes, for all the world as if she knew what was to happen just a few weeks later.
Madame Leconte had given me her trust, but she also gave me her most precious possession, the baby that was worth more to her than all her money. She asked me to promise that if anything happened to her, I would care for her child. Of course, I gave her that promise. What woman would not?
And in return she was generous. She told me I would never want for money. She even bought the cottage for me and set up a trust fund that provided me with an annuity for life.
I was in the nursery on the second floor when the accident happened. I heard the sound of raised voices, then a loud bang like a pistol shot. I was
afraid, but the baby had awakened at the noise. He began to cry, and it was some minutes before I ran into the upper gallery with him clutched in my arms.
I stared aghast at the terrible scene in the hall below. Madame Leconte was lying facedown on the marble floor, and it seemed to my horrified eyes there was blood everywhere.
Her husband came from the direction of the library. “My God, there has been an accident,” he cried, rather theatrically, I thought. All the servants were gathering and staring at the still figure of Madame. “
Go. Go away
,” he screamed at us, and the angry look in his eyes sent us all running.
The “something dreadful” Madame Leconte had feared had finally happened. And though he said it was an accident, I knew in my heart he had killed her.
They buried poor Madame the very next day, and immediately afterward her husband departed for Paris to talk to the lawyers. He did not come back. And so I was left the effective guardian of young Master Jean Leconte, whom I always called with the greatest affection, Johnny.
I had promised Madame I would protect her son. For five years I kept that promise, and we lived in peace at the Villa Mimosa. But when the event I dreaded finally came to pass, I was no match for the enemy.
Bea knew what Nanny Beale had written next, before she even read it. She could see it in the dark recesses of her mind; she could feel it, just the way she had in her dream….
It was seven-thirty on a June morning. The birds had already greeted the sunrise and were quiet, and there was not a ripple of breeze to stir the surface of the ornamental pools. Nothing disturbed the silence as the butler opened the front door, bowing
his head deferentially to the little dark-haired boy who raced past him onto the portico, sniffing the air with the eagerness of a released puppy.
He was a small, dark, wizened-looking child, five years old and thin, with sticklike limbs and intelligent dark brown eyes. He bore no resemblance to his blond, blue-eyed, good-looking father, and possessed none of his robustness. Nanny Beale, mindful of her duty to the dead mother, kept him wrapped in cotton, away from other children in case he caught their germs. And mindful of his wealth and his future standing in life, she dressed him in silk from head to toe, like a little Lord Fauntleroy.
Nanny was his friend, and the butler, the chauffeur, the maids and gardeners were his companions. The nursery cupboards were filled with every toy and game imaginable, though he had no young friends with whom to share them. His dearest possession, his truest friend, was a woolly toy dog named Fido because Nanny Beale said a real live dog was too dirty, had too many fleas, bred those frightening “germs.”
They had lived this way ever since he could remember, and he was a happy child, content with his life because he knew nothing else. He was the center of his particular little universe.
He sat on the marble steps, feeling the chill through his little blue silk shorts, happily surveying his domain. The morning air was as fresh as the hope in his heart that this day might be more special than the last, because his days were all the same. He stared across the lawns, past the giant cedars, to the azure sea far below. He could hear the peacocks screeching near the rose garden and smell the different scents of the flowers whose names he knew because the gardener had taught him. His favorite was the mimosa, for which the villa was named, but its sweetness belonged only to the springtime.
The twitter of the yellow and blue canaries and the gay parakeets came from the silver aviary that Nanny had told him his grandfather had built as a birthday gift for his mother long ago, and water tinkled prettily in the elaborate courtyard
fountain, mingling with the rush of the fierce little stream from the grotto on the hill above.
This was his kingdom, his entire world.
There was a new sound, the bronze bell at the gate. The boy lifted his head with interest, scrunching his eyes against the sun.