Cezanne's Quarry (21 page)

“He did that in Gardanne?” She had finally piqued Marie’s interest. “Did he take any of them with him? Did he say anything?”

Hortense sat back. It was her turn to shrug. “What was there to take? Pictures showing Gardanne from the top, Gardanne from the bottom, and Gardanne from the middle. And some apples. And me.”

This time Marie pulled Hortense toward her. “None of the quarry?”

Hortense shook her head. “Why the quarry?”

“That’s where she was killed!” Marie hissed. Just then, the reappearance of the waiter made them both jump a little. Hortense recovered enough to thank him and communicate that they would be sitting there for a while, continuing their nice little conversation. When he left, she leaned toward Marie again.

“What difference does that make?”

Marie’s eyes darted around, making sure they would not be overheard as she mumbled, “They found a piece of one of Paul’s canvases there.”

Oh God.
Hortense covered her gasp with her hand. She felt the morning’s coffee lurch up from her stomach. It was worse than she thought. How stupid of Paul. How often had she told him not to tear up his work, if only to preserve the canvas, if only to save them a few sous? And what if he had taken Solange Vernet there, and in a rage—

“Of course,” Marie continued, “I told him it could be anyone’s, but it was pretty clear it was Paul’s work.”

Paul’s work, as unmistakable as it was unprofitable. Hortense stared out toward the front of the café. Everything was a blur. Voices buzzed around her like annoying insects. She looked at Marie. Was there more? It was her duty to tell her everything.

“Did he find a picture of the quarry at the Jas?”

“No, but. . . .” Marie still holding back on her.

“But what?” She gripped Marie’s arm. “What?”

“He seemed to be interested in a number of paintings and even took two with him. Old ones. Yet he seemed to think they were important.”

“Which ones?”

“Mother said that he kept looking at paintings that seemed violent and,” Marie paused and whispered, “lascivious.”

“What did he take with him?” It took some effort to keep her voice down.

“A woman being strangled and a naked woman being worshiped by a group of men. And,” Marie lowered her voice even more, “all of the women had hair the same color as Solange Vernet’s.”

Hortense closed her eyes against the din and tried to conjure up the images.

“Of course, Mother told him that Paul did those long ago, when he was very young, when he was trying to find his style. But still they could use these as proof.”

Of what? Marie did not even try to say. Of Paul’s temper? Of the fact that he had been so bewitched that he had become insanely jealous?

“Do you know which paintings I’m talking about?” Marie’s face was close to hers. Hortense saw her yellowing teeth and caught an unpleasant whiff of pungent cheese from the midday meal.

She pulled away to think. She swallowed hard and willed her stomach to be still. She knew all of Paul’s paintings. They were always packing or unpacking them, getting them ready for sale or moving them back to a studio. “Yes.” She could picture them. “Some of them he did before we met. I think he said they were inspired by those horrid serial novels in the newspapers.”

The “horrid” was for Marie’s benefit. Hortense rather enjoyed the serials; she even admired some of the paintings. At least they told a story. She had especially liked the large canvas he gave to Zola, depicting a naked man, tall, strong, and muscular, with skin so dark it was almost red, carrying a fainting white-skinned woman into a woods. A woman with dark brown hair like her own. It still gave her a
frisson
of sensuality to think of it. Hortense had always assumed that she was the woman in that painting. But, as for the rest—she closed her eyes again, trying to remember. The woman on the cloud, the many failed versions of the temptation of Saint Anthony, and the clumsy rendition of two nudes in bed during an afternoon lover’s tryst—all the women had golden-red hair. Why had she not realized that before? Her throat was constricting, choking her. She had known for a long time that Solange Vernet had touched something deeper in Paul than she ever had. But she had never considered that he had known her—or someone very like her—in another life. In the life before theirs. A first, incomparable love. A buried, reignited love. How dare he?

“Your coffee is getting cold.”

Hortense realized she had been clutching the cup. She took a sip. Marie was staring at her. Despite what she was feeling, she had to stick to her plan. She
was
the only one. The family owed her. She had given the best years of her life to Paul Cézanne. Even if he were in terrible trouble, even if he had killed Solange Vernet in a jealous rage, she, Hortense Fiquet, needed to get something out of all those years, all her devotion, all her waiting.

“So you think,” she could not resist a little jab at Marie, “that they will see Paul as some obsessed, crazed murderer?”

“Of course not!” Marie almost rose in horror. “Of course he didn’t do it.”

“Then why was he mixed up with her?” Hortense could no longer hold in her anger, and spoke too loudly. She took in a breath and looked around. No one seemed to have noticed. She glanced back at Marie. “Well?”

Marie had the nerve to look away, uninterested. Of course she did not deign to answer that question. She would not say anything against Paul, the beloved brother, the beloved son. A grown man who never really had to worry about tomorrow, because in the end he knew that Papa would rescue him. Until now. This time, money and his family’s influence might not be enough. This time, Paul had gotten himself in too deep.

“You know,” Hortense announced, “I’m going to help Paul get out of this.”

“Really?” said Marie, laying her hand on Hortense’s arm, as if to rein her in. “Don’t do anything foolish.” By which she meant, of course, don’t show yourself in public. “If worse comes to worst,” Marie continued, “Rose’s husband—”

“Maxim!” Hortense almost snorted. “You would trust that little dandy to defend Paul’s life?”

Marie glared at her. Hortense took a slow sip from her coffee. She wanted to make Marie suffer a little. “I don’t know if Paul told you, but after all these years Zola had finally consented to come to Aix this summer. Then his wife got sick and made a big fuss about the cholera.” Neither she nor Paul had been all that surprised that the condescending, hypochondriacal Alexandrine had refused to come. Zola’s account of Aix was not a very attractive one. “Zola wrote us to apologize. He’s taking her to a spa. It’s really not that far from here. So, I sent him a telegram yesterday, asking him to come as soon as possible. I told him it was a matter of life or death.” She paused. “Please don’t mention this to Paul,” she added, as if she were taking Marie into her confidence. “I don’t want to disappoint him if Zola can’t come.”

“Zola? That’s ridiculous!” Marie objected. The Cézannes did not approve of what Paul’s childhood friend had become, a writer of scandalous novels. “He’s not a lawyer. Maxim—”

“You’re right about that. Of course.” Hortense did not need to hear a catalogue of the supposed virtues of Paul’s ne’er-do-well brother-in-law. “But Zola does know more about crime and murder than any small-town lawyer ever would. He’s made a thorough study of them. And,” she looked straight at Marie, trumping her at last, “you must know that by now he is one of the most influential men in France.”

T
HE WORDS OF
S
IBYLLINE
B
EAUREGARD
droned over Martin. He was exhausted. He could not even call up the strength to drive away the fly that had landed on his hand. At this hour, in this heat, he was grateful that most of the habitués of the Vernet salon were still out of town. Mlle Beauregard was the fourth and last useless interrogation of the day. At least all that effort had yielded one positive result. As the day wore on, he was worrying less and less about Merckx. No gendarme had appeared with him in tow. No reports from Franc of a deserter in the jurisdiction. Merckx, whom he had spirited out of the house at dawn, must be far away by now.

Martin ached for his bed, which he had ceded to Merckx the night before. He longed for a good meal. He would have preferred to be almost anywhere but here, with his head pounding, listening to a detailed account of the Life and Work of Sibylline Beauregard. Martin flicked his wrist and sent the fly on his way. He tugged at his damp beard, willing himself to stay alert. Twenty more minutes of concentrated effort, and he could finally go. He gave what he hoped was an encouraging nod to assure the witness that he was still paying attention.

Martin had been observing Mlle Beauregard for well over an hour. It was obvious that she made a career of her singularity. The yachting dress, cravat, and boater were distressingly à la mode, but at least they matched. The tightly coiled black curls that fringed her round little face harkened back to a more romantic era, as did the three long white feathers that hung quite incongruously from her straw hat. The feathers bobbed in rhythm to the torrent that issued from her mouth, a mobile organ lined in red, offset by a sharply pointed nose and close-set, piercing black eyes.

Mlle Beauregard’s greatest claim to being thoroughly modern was the cigarette she held between two fingers of her ungloved, paint-stained right hand. When she paused to think, she took long draws from its holder. If she was making a point, she waved it about like a torch. Under other circumstances, Martin could well imagine her using it as a beacon of female emancipation, the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen 1885. Today, knowingly or not, she had declared something quite different: her love for Charles Westerbury.

She described Westerbury as a brilliant orator whose words had thrilled all the ladies who attended his lectures. Even she had sat in rapt silence as the Englishman unveiled the true history of the earth. In the salon, reserved for the favored few, he was different. He stood behind the circle of chairs, letting Solange elicit the opinions of her guests, only to come forward when it was necessary to correct some intellectual error or add depth to the debate between science and religion, which, of course, he insisted should never have been a debate at all. Science and religion were not opposites, but complements, a sign of the advance of humankind and the benevolence of the Creator of All Things.

When Martin probed Mlle Beauregard’s opinion of the victim, she described Solange Vernet as uneducated but intelligent; gracious, beautiful, and charming. Despite this, Martin noted, the witness did not show that much dismay about Solange Vernet’s death. Did she hope to become Westerbury’s next mistress? Or had Westerbury already taken advantage of her all-too-obvious affections? Martin doubted that.

His big mistake of the afternoon had been to ask the witness about Cézanne. The question evoked a bitter diatribe. Paul Cézanne had come late to the circle, very late, having attended only two or three sessions, and had brought with him all the advantages of his sex. Trained in art institutes, heir to a fortune, connections in Paris. How could she, the daughter of a poor widowed literature professor—who had, by the way, had the foresight to name his only child after the ancient prophetesses, the Sibyls—how could she compete for the right to make an artistic contribution to Westerbury’s great work? How could she even speak when Cézanne glowered at her so? Who would take her seriously as the “artist of the Aix landscape” when a man, the scion of a wealthy family, laid claim to the same title?

Solange Vernet and Westerbury had been the sun and moon of a shining new world, the only place Sibylline Beauregard felt welcomed and accepted. Cézanne had threatened that world. Did she think him capable of destroying it?

“Mlle Beauregard,” Martin jumped in while she took a long pull from her cigarette, “were you aware that Solange Vernet and Paul Cézanne were lovers?”

The impossible happened. Sibylline Beauregard was speechless. The silence was broken by a familiar sound, the movement of Old Joseph’s chair as he turned to survey the scene. Would Martin have to order his greffier not to look around every time he asked that question?

The noise did not disturb the witness, who sat across from Martin, holding her cigarette aloft between two fingers. “No,” she roused herself, “no, how is that possible?”

What was going through her head? That she had missed the opportunity to console Westerbury?

“No,” she shook her head again. “No, it is just not possible.”

“Why not?”

“He was a beast. So uncivilized, despite all that education, all that travel. A beast.”

“Was he violent?”

“I don’t know. But he was rude. Very. He could only talk in outbursts.”

“But how did he act toward Solange Vernet?”

She sucked on the holder, and blew out a long stream of smoke.

“Now that you bring it up, he was extremely polite to her—and to the maid. He seemed afraid of the men. Or angry with them, I couldn’t tell. And with me, of course. Because I was a rival. Now that you bring it up,” she repeated slowly, “I really never knew why he was there.”

Martin waited. He had given her the reason. But when she spoke again, it was not about Solange Vernet or Cézanne, but about Westerbury.

“Oh, poor Charles, poor, poor Charles. Did he know? What he must be going through! Do you know where he is? I must go to him. What he must be suffering.”

“Are there any indications that he knew what was going on?”

“How would I know? Oh, Charles, he couldn’t have—”

“What? Killed her?”

“I didn’t say that!” Sibylline Beauregard cried in indignation. “Never say I said that!”

“Certainly jealousy is a motive for murder.”

“No! No! It can’t be. He would give his life for her! Because of her weakness!”

Surely the witness had gotten it backward. It was quite likely that Solange Vernet had given her life for Westerbury. Because of
his
weakness. And his rage.

“What about his work, his great work?” Mlle Beauregard pleaded, “No! He must finish it.”

“Very well.” Martin rose. He had had enough. “You’ve been very helpful. Thank you. I think you can go now.”