The Eden Inheritance (4 page)

Was it possible now that fate had presented him with Otto von Rheinhardt on a plate? In the silent dark he seemed to hear his grandfather's voice, deep, resonant, cultured French, relating as he so often did the horror and the atrocities and sufferings his countrymen had endured at the hands of the German oppressors.

‘They were devils,
mon petit
,' he would say, and Guy, curled up at his grandfather's feet, would listen with a breathlessness that was part fascination, part revulsion. He didn't like the stories, they gave him nightmares, but in some strange way they brought the father he had never known a little closer.

Guy had been only three years old when his father had died, and Kathryn, his English mother, had always been curiously reluctant to talk about him. She had told him of course that Charles had died a hero and explained that she had allowed Guillaume, his father, to keep the Croix de Guerre which he had been awarded posthumously because she knew how much it would mean to him. Even as a very small boy Guy had realised instinctively that remembering caused her pain, and because he loved her he had not pressed her, though sometimes his curiosity and the need to know had been almost more than he could bear.

In the pretty cottage where they lived on the edge of the New Forest there was not one picture of his father, not one single memento of the years in France before Guy's birth and the early part of his life, though the photographs and keepsakes that marked his growing up in England abounded.

Guy had thought it very odd and once he had asked her about it.

‘I couldn't bring anything with me,' she had said, her voice, in contrast to her usual vivaciousness, flat and curiously emotionless. ‘I left in a great hurry.'

‘Too much of a hurry to bring
anything
?'

‘Yes. I'm afraid so. It was wartime, Guy. The Germans were everywhere. One didn't have time to worry about possessions. I brought you. That was all that mattered.'

‘What about Papa? Why didn't he come too?'

‘He couldn't. There wasn't room in the plane. And in any case he wouldn't have wanted to leave Savigny.'

‘Not even to be with us?'

‘Your father loved you very much. But he had a duty to stay at Savigny to try to look after it and all the people who depended on him. Your father always believed Savigny to be … well, a sacred trust. You'll understand that one day.'

‘Does it have to be a sacred trust for me too?' Guy already knew that one day he would be the next Baron.

‘It will be whatever you choose to make it, Guy, though I hope you won't do so at the expense of your happiness.'

He hadn't known then what she meant and even now, with the insight of a grown man, he was not that much the wiser, though he could guess.

‘Well, if you couldn't bring your things with you then, couldn't you have gone back for them after the Germans had gone?' he had asked with the reasonableness of a seven-year-old. ‘I would have if I'd left things like … well, my toy cars and my petrol pumps and things.' Guy had a collection of tin vehicles, Belisha beacons and other road signs, which he added to obsessively whenever his pocket money allowed.

Kathryn had smiled briefly before her face had grown serious again.

‘There was really nothing I wanted that much,' she had said. ‘And even if there had been I doubt any of it would have been left after the Germans had finished with the château.'

Guy's small olive-skinned brow had furrowed.

‘But there
are
photographs at the château. I know. I've seen them.'

‘That's all right then. You can look at them when you're there, can't you? Grandpapa will let you have one if you ask him, I expect.'

And he had to be content with that. But it still bothered him that Kathryn had never been back, wouldn't go, though she packed him off religiously every summer for at least six weeks.

‘Why don't you come with me, Mummy?' he had asked once – he missed her dreadfully, though he always had a wonderful time in Charente, with his French grandparents, his Aunt Celestine and Uncle Henri and all the servants and estate workers making a great fuss of him.

‘I wouldn't be welcome, Guy,' was all she would say, and he felt, yet again, that he was banging his head against a brick wall.

So every summer he allowed himself to be put in the care of an air hostess and flown to Bordeaux, where one of the members of his French family would be waiting with the car to meet him, a small boy exchanging one world for another, completely, utterly different.

Whenever he arrived in Savigny the château seemed vast, with its enormous vaulted rooms and echoing passageways; when he returned to the New Forest the cottage, two up, two down, appeared even more tiny and cramped than he remembered it. Everything in Savigny was on a grand scale – the château, the grounds, the cars, even the dining table, yards long, around which the whole family gathered for meals – whilst the cottage with its small sunny kitchen, tiny cluttered living room and his bedroom under the eaves, which looked out on a garden bright with roses and delphiniums and bounded by laurel hedges, reminded him a little of his cousin Lise's dolls' house. Except that Lise's dolls' house was much grander and more elaborate.

The way of life was different too. There were servants at Savigny, cooks and maids and gardeners and a chauffeur, not to mention all the workers on the estate, whilst at home in England his mother did everything herself, with the single exception of the laundry, which was done by a woman in the village whose son collected it each Monday and brought it back, clean and neatly ironed, on a Wednesday – or maybe a Thursday if the weather was too wet for easy drying. There were three cars at Savigny, big cars with foreign names, whilst at home his mother had only her little Austin. Extended meals, several courses of elaborate dishes, pungent with garlic and rich with cream, took the place of the more familiar chops and rissoles and milk puddings, and the days were longer and sunnier, though Guy wondered if that was simply because he was always there in July and August when the English summer, too, was at its height.

But the best difference of all was that he could talk about his father. Here there was no reticence, no anxiety to change the subject. Guy was always given the room that had been his father's when
he
had been a boy, and looking out of the window at the fountains playing in the courtyard and the rooks nesting in the tall poplars that hid the château from the world outside he liked to imagine his father doing just the same.

‘Tell me about when you and my father were children,' he would press his Aunt Celestine and she would relate to him the familiar favourite stories of picnics in the woods and swimming parties in the lake, of pony rides and parties, of Monsieur Lacroix, the fussy tutor, and Anne-Marie, the cook, who had allowed them to lick out the bowls when she had finished making her delicious cakes. These were the stories he loved best, painting a picture of a happy time, long ago, before all their lives had been darkened by me shadow of the Nazi invasion.

But he was ready, too, to hear about that, since it went some way to explaining the mystery of what had happened to his father. The story was incomplete, he knew, there were things his grandfather left out just as his mother did because they were too painful, but as he grew older he was able to piece together what his grandfather told him with history as it was written and make at least some sense of the mystery. His father and his Uncle Christian had been engaged in Resistance activities and as a result of this they had been arrested, tortured and shot. Of the three de Savigny children only his Tante Celestine had survived the war, which was why Guy was now heir to the Baronage de Savigny. Knowing that his father had been a hero of the Resistance made Guy glow with pride; he could not understand why his mother was so reluctant to talk about it.

That same childish passion that made his delight in the heroism of his father, even if it had cost his life, also made him burn with fervent hatred of the Nazis. Not only had they robbed him of his father, leaving him with only the fuzziest of memories and the faded photographs which Grandpapa gave him when he asked for them, but they had also stolen a good part of his inheritance, treasures that had graced the château for generations.

‘
Cochons
! We should never have trusted their word, even for a moment. They weren't satisfied with the lifeblood of our noble Frenchmen. They had to steal from us too,' Grandpapa would say. ‘That pig von Rheinhardt always liked the château, being an animal didn't stop him from having an eye for what is beautiful and he wanted it for himself. He turned us out after your father and uncle were arrested and moved his staff in. And if that wasn't bad enough when he saw Germany was losing the war he spirited out all the most precious and priceless pieces. God knows how be did it or where they went, he must have had a route planned, perhaps to Switzerland, I don't know. He shouldn't have done it, of course. Anything of value would have become the property of the Third Reich if Germany had won the war. But von Rheinhardt wasn't going to let something like that worry him. He was an arrogant swine – and he was the officer commanding. In the absence of higher authority he did as he liked. And then of course when he realised it was all over and there was no way Hitler was going to end up ruling the whole of the western world as he had planned, von Rheinhardt went the same way as the treasures. By the time the Allies arrived he had long gone. He wasn't going to stay and risk arrest and trial for the terrible things he had done, oh no, not him. He was too clever and too lacking in scruples for that. I expect now he is living somewhere enjoying being surrounded by our heirlooms – the heirlooms that belong in the Château de Savigny, the heirlooms that should, by rights, be yours one day,
mon petit
.'

‘What were the heirlooms, Grandpapa?' Guy had asked solemnly.

And Grandpapa had told him – silverware, paintings, cut from their frames, porcelain, miniatures, a bronze statuette of Ceres – and a triptych.

‘What is a triptych?' Guy asked. He had never heard the word before.

Grandpapa explained.

‘A picture in three parts, Guy. That's why it is called a triptych, from the Greek for threefold, do you understand? The tablets are hinged, like the shutters on the windows. Originally they were used as altar pieces so they depict religious scenes in glowing colours and gold flake. This particular triptych was very special – it showed scenes from the life of the Maid of Orleans. Now I suppose it is giving pleasure to von Reinhardt, wherever he may be. Well, all I can say is I hope it brings him ill-fortune. I'd like to think it was the death of him.'

‘How could that be, Grandpapa?'

‘There is a story about our triptych that my father used to tell. It had been blessed with holy water by the Pope himself and consecrated for the use of the de Savignys in the private chapel. Twice it was stolen, twice the perpetrators of the crime met a violent end and the triptych was returned to us. The first time it was stolen by a vagrant who had been given shelter; he was found two days later in the woods where he had fallen into a trap set for the animals. The second was at the time of the Revolution. A band of marauding peasants stole it, trying, no doubt, to emulate what was going on in Paris. But they were overcome by troops loyal to the Baron. They were all killed. The man who actually had the triptych in his possession had his throat cut, and the triptych was returned to the château. So you see I'd like to think that history might repeat itself and the triptych bring down a curse on the man who stole it just as it did twice before.' He had smiled sadly. ‘ I'm just a fanciful old man. I expect that's what you think, isn't it, Guy?'

‘No, sir.' Guy had shaken his head, his thick dark hair bouncing around his narrow olive face. ‘I think … I think …'

‘Yes?'

‘I think it's a wonderful story.'

And that was no more than the truth; the romance of what his grandfather had told him had excited his imagination; it ran through his veins like prickling fire and that night when he was alone in his room, tucked up beheath the soft feather eiderdown, he had thought about it again. A triptych that belonged on the altar in the de Savigny private chapel and which could bring down a curse on whoever possessed it unlawfully; a triptych which would, one day, find its way back to the château where it belonged.

After a while, of course, the magic and excitement of the story had worn off. The triptych did not return to the château and although Grandpapa still told his gruesome stories and bemoaned the loss of both his sons and his heirlooms – the one just as much as the other, Guy thought – he never again mentioned the curse.

Guy had not given it a thought now for years. Von Reinhardt had disappeared and the treasures with him, that was all there was to it. Occasionally, when a bounty-hunter claimed to have found yet another Nazi war criminal in some remote part of the world, Guy thought of von Reinhardt and wondered if he too would one day be tracked down, but for the most part he allowed the war, the Nazi occupation and all it had meant for his family, to slip to the back of his mind.

Now, however, lying sleepless and staring at that little patch of neon light on the ceiling of his bedroom, he found himself thinking of it once more.

Was there a possibility that the German Bill had met might be von Reinhardt, living under an assumed name? Could the triptych he had described be the very one looted with the other treasures from the Château de Savigny?

Perhaps because he was light-headed from tiredness, perhaps because of two large whiskies on an empty stomach, Guy was half inclined to think that it might just be.

K
ATHRYN DE SAVIGNY
looked at her son, sitting in her favourite winged Parker Knoll on the opposite side of her fireplace, and found herself wondering yet again why he had come to see her today.