Carolyn Jourdan - Nurse Phoebe 03 - The School for Psychics (7 page)

Chapter
10.

“How
far should we go?” Phoebe asked. “The yard here goes on for a
loooong
way.”

“It’s your call,” said J.J. “What works best for you?”

“I guess we should stay on this main pathway down the long axis of the grounds and see if I can pick up anything. If not, then try a perpendicular axis. The paths aren’t laid out on true compass points. It’s on a grid, but the layout is rotated about forty-five degrees so the long axis runs from the château at the southeast through the fancy part of the gardens, past huge expanses of lawns, and then to the more forested and less maintained areas at the northwest end. We may have to do some backtracking, too. A huge stretch of the grounds is bisected by a long skinny lake, which makes it hard to cross from one side of the gardens to the other.”

“Lead on,” he said.
“I’m content to walk as long as you’d like.”

“I don’t
really know what I’m doing,” Phoebe confessed.

“That’s a good sign in this kind of work,” J.J. said. “You have to feel your way as
you go with no preconceptions. It’s been my experience that the people who
know
things in advance are almost always wrong.”

They walked arm-in-
arm down the packed stone pathway. Thank goodness they were dressed warmly. The place was beautiful, but very cold. There were people in sight in every direction, but not many of them.

They didn’t speak as they walked along. Phoebe tried to blank her mind, let it wander, not fasten
ing on any particular topic. They walked a long way before she got any signal at all. When she felt it, she stopped so suddenly she actually skidded slightly on the gravel. J. J. was too sensitive to her movements to slam into her, though. He stopped and stood next to her quietly.

Sh
e looked around. They were at an intersection of several walkways. Trails went out in four different directions. And there was even a fifth choice—a small path went off into the woods at a forty-five degree angle, headed almost due north.

She didn’t move. She let herself feel all the directions. Something was pinging
against her skin from the north. She shook herself slightly to loosen any tension, the way the Boss had taught her. Then she waited. Yes, something was coming toward her from the north. She didn’t speak for fear of losing the delicate connection.

The
trail leading through the woods was good, but not quite right. She started out on it, but soon veered off to the left, taking them through the leaf-strewn forest. The signal got stronger when she did that. She lifted her head and homed in on the direction. She began to sense something speaking to her. She wanted to speed up, but didn’t dare because the ground was uneven and bare branches snatched at them from all sides. Moving quickly would be difficult for J.J.

“Come to me,” someone
said. She heard it as plainly as if it had been spoken aloud. She knew it hadn’t been, but it certainly got her attention. She’d rarely had a full-blown auditory communication like that. It was what some people might call an auditory hallucination and she was wary whenever it happened. It was essential to stay grounded in the real world.

Then she heard it again,
loud and clear, a man’s voice saying, “Come to me.”

Holy moly, it was all she could do not
to break into a run, but she restrained herself. She led J.J. through the forest. They topped a rise and then she saw it—a tiny white masonry pavilion sitting in the middle of a small formal garden. She gasped. Whatever it was, whoever
he
was, he was in there.

She stood looking at the building from fifty yards away
, shivering and jerking slightly. She realized she couldn’t make herself go any closer. She felt as if she was being held in place.
Uh oh
. She knew from experience that when she lost muscle control, get ready, she was about to be shown something—a little internal movie would start soon.

She stood rooted to the spot, waiting for it,
then she began to have a vision of activity occurring inside the pavilion. She was seeing the events from a different angle than from where she was actually standing.

It was of a man with white
hair tied back with a ribbon into a short ponytail. It might’ve been powdered hair, or maybe a wig. He was dressed in a jacket and knee britches in a medium shade of blue silk. He flopped down on a long chair and began to untie his white cravat. A woman in an elaborate silk gown and taller white wig walked toward him. She bent down toward the man.

Then the scene faded.

“Found it,” she whispered. “Don’t know what it is, but it’s here—or was here at one time. And I’ve seen some people. I don’t recognize them, but at least I know what they look like.”

“Tell me.”

“There’s a small but exquisite domed garden pavilion in front of us. Inside it is … was … a man with powdered hair or a wig, dressed in blue knee britches, and a lady with powdered hair and a fancy gown. I can feel what the man was feeling, but nothing in relation to what the woman was experiencing.

“
The man was here to relax in a way that was not possible anywhere else and his only wish was to sit in this building with her and be alone for a while. That’s what this place was built for. He loved her. She was his friend.”

Phoebe wanted to cry at the warmth of feeling between the man and woman. She wished she’d ever had such a
close and deep friendship with a man. It was what she’d been looking for all her life.

“How old are they?”

“The white hair makes it hard to say. Not old. Neither of them is fifty yet. He’s somewhere in his late thirties or early forties, I guess. She’s younger, her early thirties maybe. But that’s just a guess.”

“Any sense of
who they are?”

“Yes, but I don’t trust it. The color of blue he’s wearing makes me think
the man might be Louis XV. He’s exhausted and desperate for some peace and quiet, like someone who’s shy and has to submit himself to crowds frequently. But whenever I use my brain to say who it is, I’m just guessing.

“
All I know for sure is that this is a really important man, there is a great deal of warmth and love radiating from him, and the lady is very attentive to him and trying to help him any way she can. Maybe it’s CR and Madame P.”

“Describe the furniture,” J.J. said.

“I only saw one small area. The man sat down and put his feet up.”

“Was
the chair made in one piece or two? Was it a long chair, a
chaise longue
, or did it have a separate foot stool, a
duchesse brisée
?”

“I’m not sure
.”

“Shall we go in?”
he asked. He had to urge her to move. He could tell she was reluctant to go any closer.

Phoebe sighed
and moved at his instigation. The emotion around the place was overwhelming. Great love and tragic loss. The couple, whoever they were, weren’t permitted to have as much time together as they might’ve. Something sad had come between them.

“Great sadness here, grief,” Phoebe said. “It’s
coming from him. It’s hard to bear it.”

“Is it all coming from
what’s in front of you? Or is some of it coming from behind and to our left?”

Phoebe looked around her and realized for the first time that they were close to a fancy house. She’d been so homed in on the signal
from CR, she hadn’t been aware of anything else.

She turned to face the grand building
, but she got almost nothing from it.

“Maybe a little, but not much time spent in there
. That’s a woman’s house,” she said, turning back toward the pavilion. “But something very important happened in this little place. This is where he was himself. The guy I’m supposed to find was here for sure. I’m certain.”

“Take me
to it,” he said.

Phoebe walked J.J. down one of the narrow
gravel paths that led to the tiny jewel box of a building. Then she led him up three wide, shallow stairs to a set of French doors. “The place is shaped like a stubby cross that radiates out from a large central room.” She shaded her eyes and leaned forward to peer though the glass.

“The
main room is round, or octagonal really, with a domed ceiling. There are four small rooms off this large central room. They’re evenly spaced to jut out toward the east, west, north, and south. It’s the most perfectly proportioned building I’ve ever seen.”

“Try the door.”

Phoebe did. It was locked.

“There are four
sets of tall entrance doors,” she explained. “French doors, that give access to the interior. They’re equally spaced around the central room. And each of the four small rooms off the central area has three sets of long French windows.” She closed her eyes and counted to herself. “That’s
sixteen
sets of long windows if you count the exterior doors. It’s stunning. We’re at what I assume is the main entrance since it faces the garden and the path and the other house.”

“There’
s something small and made of metal to your right about two and a half feet off the ground,” said J.J. “What is it?”

Two
large planters sat beside the doors, one on either side, each containing an ornamental tree. Phoebe went to the one on the right and felt around in the dirt behind the trunk of the tree. There was small box jammed into the loose soil. She pulled it out and opened it. Inside it was a key. She laughed and told J.J. what she’d found.

“It’s the same the world over,” J.J. said.
Then he quoted from Shakespeare’s
Henry V
, “What have kings that commons have not, too, save ceremony?”

She used the antique key to unlock the door and they went inside, closing the door behind them. It was a lot warmer
once they were out of the wind. She described the building to J.J. “There’s an elaborate marble floor with different colors of stone radiating in a pointy pattern almost like the face of a compass. I think this might be the floor in the book the Boss showed me, but I’m not sure.

“
The walls and ceiling are painted white and have a lot of gilded carving. There’s a great deal of decorative trim. It’s all gold leaf or painted gold.” Phoebe tilted her head, there was something wrong about the way the place looked.

“It’s strange, b
ut I know this room used to be green. It was a garden room, for eating lunch and hiding out in peace. I think it must’ve been redecorated by Marie Antoinette. It has a Louis XVI feel to it now. It’s fabulous, but I think they might’ve overshot the mark a little with the white and gold. It’s a bit too formal, a sort of rigid inhuman perfection. It’s not a place you could chillax in any more.”

J.J. made a slow circuit of the main room inspecting the walls.

“Can you imagine becoming king of France at the age of five like Louis XV did?” he said. “He was the great grandson of Louis XIV. All of the intermediate heirs had predeceased the great king. They say Louis XV loved cats and, as a little boy, he carried his cat with him into the highest-level government meetings. They had to make his cat a Cabinet Minister because only Ministers were allowed in the meetings.”

They both smiled at the
brief insight into the vulnerable humanity of a little boy who would never know a normal life.

“
There’s no furniture in here at all,” said Phoebe. “The whole place is empty, but the walls and floor and ceiling are so highly decorated, you hardly notice it.” They walked into each of the side rooms in turn. “There’s a fireplace with a mirror over the mantle on the far wall of this room, so what appears on the outside to be long windows are fake somehow.”

J.J. walked around the room
, stopping a couple of times to examine something only he could see.

“
If I had to guess,” Phoebe said. “I’d say one of the rooms is a bedroom or a place for napping and one is sitting room. Another might be a kitchen and the last one, maybe a restroom?”

Th
ey went into a room that had a narrow staircase in one corner, going down into an indistinct gloom. J.J. noticed it immediately and turned his head toward it. “What’s that?”

“It’s a
very rickety looking staircase going down into the bare dirt underneath the building, to maybe a basement or a cellar, but it’s dark down there. I can’t see anything. The railing looks pretty precarious.”

“There’s a tunnel from here to the big house
nearby, the Petit Trianon,” he said. “Probably for bringing food across. To keep it warm during the trip. And this room we’re in, what you’re calling a kitchen, is a warming room. This was very important to the French and then the Russians who copied French manners. Food that was still warm when it hit the table was a demonstration of vast wealth.”

This was a new concept for
Phoebe. “
Kings
used to eat their meals cold?”

“Yes. During dinners at Versailles it was common to have to break the coating of ice in your water glass before being able to take a drink.”