The Scapegoat (35 page)

‘Tell me how to live,’ I said. ‘You’re practical and wise.’

Her eyes crinkled in a smile. ‘You wouldn’t listen to me, Monsieur Jean. You never have, not even when I put you across my knees and smacked your little bottom as a child. You made your own decisions always. If life is no good to you now, it’s because you went for what was exciting, what was amusing, what was new – never for what was lasting, what endured. It’s true, isn’t it? Since you were so high. And now you’re nearly forty, and it’s too late to change. You can’t bring back your young days any more than you can bring back poor Monsieur Duval, whose only crime was trying to preserve the
verrerie
while you were absent, for which you and your little group of patriots called him a collaborator, and shot him, and let him die there in the well.’

She looked at me with pity, as she had done before, and I realized that her words were neither accusation nor condemnation. She knew, his family knew, the whole countryside knew that Jean de Gué had killed Maurice Duval. Only I, the substitute, had not been sure.

‘Julie,’ I said, ‘where were you the night he was shot?’

‘In my lodge by the gates,’ she answered. ‘I saw nothing, I heard everything. It was not my business then, or now. It’s finished, done with, a matter for your conscience, not for mine.’

Her hand was still on my shoulder as we heard a lorry turn into the gates.

‘Julie,’ I repeated, ‘did you like Maurice Duval?’

‘We all liked him,’ she said. ‘No one could help it. He had all the qualities you lacked. That was why Monsieur le Comte your father made him master of the
verrerie
. I’m sorry, Monsieur Jean, but it’s true.’

I could hear footsteps coming now across the waste ground
towards the house, and voices too, but the jutting wall of the sheds obscured the view. Julie turned her head.

‘They got my message,’ she said. ‘Someone has come from the château. Perhaps you can carry the child to the car and back to her bed, and she will never know that she walked here to the
verrerie
in her-sleep.’

‘She didn’t walk in her sleep,’ I said. ‘She came deliberately. She wanted to climb down into the well. Everything you’ve just said goes to prove it.’

My lie to Marie-Noel about my burnt hand, my behaviour at the shoot, my evasion of the preceding night, had all combined to make her think her father penitent. She had atoned for his deed in her own way, by acting the part of the victim. Only by doing this could she bring him absolution. I felt for the letter in my pocket and read it once again. It wasn’t a scrap of paper after all: it was a testament of faith.

Someone was entering the house by the office. Footsteps were crossing the kitchen and the little hall, and passing to the nearer room. Julie went to the door, her fingers raised to her lips for silence.

‘Quietly,’ she whispered. ‘The child is still asleep.’

I thought it would be Gaston or Paul. It was neither. It was Blanche.

‘Mademoiselle?’ exclaimed Julie, and the wonder in her voice, the astonishment, the swift glance back to me and to the furniture stored against the walls betrayed some sudden emotion that she had not shown hitherto.

‘You need not have come, Mademoiselle,’ she said. ‘I told Ernest to give a message that the little one was safe. I have been watching her, and Monsieur le Comte arrived only ten minutes or so ago.’

Blanche said nothing. She went straight to Marie-Noel and knelt beside her, gently turning the blanket, and I saw that the child had on a coat over her blue frock, and thick stockings and shoes that she had not worn the night before. The clothes
were marked with lime and dust, and torn in several places, and I saw clearly each movement of the preceding night: the freeing of the dog, her walk through the rain, the dark buildings of the glass-foundry outlined against the sky, the black hollow of the empty well, and then step by step, clutching the ladder, the slow descent, her coat brushing the green lime walls, and at the bottom, amongst the glass and rubble, the small round patch of night high above her.

Blanche, still kneeling at her side, turned to Julie. ‘Where did you find her?’ she asked, her voice so low I could hardly hear the words.

Julie, for the first time strained, nonplussed, threw me a questioning glance as though in doubt for an answer.

‘It was Ernest who discovered her, Mademoiselle,’ she said, ‘here, inside the house. Didn’t he tell you?’

‘He told me inside a shed,’ she answered, ‘but the sheds are always locked at night. She has been lying amongst broken glass and lime.’

Inside the house or inside the shed, both were lies, Why did Ernest and Julie lie to Blanche? Julie had not lied to me. Blanche stared steadily at Julie, and Julie, who had been direct and frank, became another woman, lost, confused, with a sudden running babble of words about misunderstanding Ernest, she had not listened properly, she had been at the back of her lodge letting out the chickens when he had come to tell her that he had found the little one asleep in the master’s house.

‘Her pockets are full of glass,’ said Blanche. ‘Did you know that?’

Julie did not answer. Once again she looked at me as if for help, and Blanche, feeling in the child’s coat-pocket, drew out a handful of minuscule objects, a jug no larger than a thumbnail, a vase, a flacon, all miniature yet perfectly formed, and amongst them a replica of the château of St Gilles, diminutive yet unmistakable, two towers smashed.

‘These have not been made since before the war,’ said
Blanche. ‘I ought to know, since I helped design them.’

For the first time she looked about the room and away from the child – at the tables and the chairs and the bookshelves and the trunks, all of them stored there, untouched and unused. And suddenly, in a flash of comprehension, I realized that what she was looking at had once been part of her life. This empty room was as familiar to her as the chill, stark bedroom at the château, but animated, joyful, not dead as it was now. This dusty salon in the master’s house was to have been a place possessed by two people who loved each other well, both faithful to the past and to tradition, both looking to a future that might, when war was finished, prove stable and secure. But something had gone amiss, sorrow had turned inward, creation ceased, the Cross she knelt before in her bedroom was not a Saviour but her own hope crucified.

On impulse, I took the letter out of my pocket and gave it to her. As she read it, lips moving, following the words, I knew that what had happened on a dark night nearly fifteen years ago had not come about by chance, but was something planned and done deliberately by a man without heart or feeling, who saw perhaps, in the other, someone finer than himself, possessing, as Julie had told me only a few moments before, all the qualities he himself lacked.

‘The little one has blood on her hands,’ said Julie suddenly. ‘I did not notice it when I covered her with the blankets.’

Blanche gave me back the letter without a word, and together we knelt beside the child. Taking the small clenched fists, Blanche opened one hand and I the other. In the hollow of each palm was the red weal of a recent cut, but the cut now dry, not bleeding. The hands were clean – there was no dust, no glass. I said nothing; nor did Blanche. Then slowly she raised her eyes.

‘Julie,’ she said, ‘I want you to tell Jacques to telephone to Monsieur le curé and ask him to come here at once. Then look in the directory for the number of the convent of the Sacré-Coeur at Lauray, and find out if it would be possible for
the Mother Superior to speak to Mademoiselle de Gué.’

Julie, bewildered, looked from Blanche to me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No …’

The urgency in my voice roused César. He stood on guard, ready to defend the child.

‘Are you mad?’ I said to Blanche. ‘Don’t you realize she did it on purpose, that she did it for me, because I burnt my hand in the fire?’

‘Julie,’ said Blanche, ‘do what I tell you.’

I went and stood by the door, my back against it. Julie, distressed, looked from Blanche to me.

‘There is no need for Monsieur le curé,’ she said. ‘The child has not come to any harm. She has only cut herself with glass. It is full of glass at the bottom of the well.’

‘The well?’ said Blanche. ‘She climbed into the well?’

Julie realized her mistake too late. The words were spoken. ‘Why, yes, Mademoiselle,’ she said. ‘What if she did climb into the well and lie there in the depths of it all night? It has been dry for fifteen years. What if she walked here to the
verrerie
asleep or awake, for both your sakes, or for her own, poor little one, because she has too much imagination? Does it make any difference to what is past and gone? Why doesn’t someone in the château look after her properly, and love her for herself? It isn’t the stigmata on her hands you want to look for, but what will be happening to her soon, in her own body.’

Blanche turned white. Emotion, long controlled, fought for release. ‘How dare you blaspheme, how dare you?’ she said, her voice outraged, passionate. ‘I’ve watched over the child since she was born. I’ve loved her, trained her, brought her up as if she were my own, because her mother is a fool and her father a devil. I won’t let her suffer in this world as I have suffered. She was made for another world, another life. These marks on her hands are proof of it. God Himself is speaking to us, through her.’

The tenderness had gone, the pathos too. The Blanche who
had come into the master’s house so full of memories, looking for the lost child, was another woman, fanatical, bitter, seeking a victim in the one she wished to save.

‘The Seigneur does not act in that way, Mademoiselle,’ said Julie. ‘If He wants to call the child to Himself, He will do so in His own good time, and not because Monsieur le Comte killed the man you loved. The little one will suffer in this world only because of what you do to her; yes, you, and her father, and her grandmother, and everybody up at the château. You are used-up, spent, good-for-nothing, the whole lot of you. They are right, the people who say it is time we had another revolution in this country, if only to rid ourselves of the jealousy and hate you have helped to spread. Now, look … you have woken her, the damage is done.’

Yet it was Julie herself whose voice, loud and indignant, had caused César to bark and the bark to startle the child. Marie-Noel, her eyes suddenly open and alive with curiosity, stared at us from the heap of blankets. She sat up, instantly alert, staring at each one of us in turn.

‘I’ve had the most atrocious dream,’ she said.

Blanche bent over her at once, her arms round her in protection.

‘It’s all right, my
chérie,’
she said. ‘You’re safe, you’re with me. I’m going to take you where they will understand you and look after you. It will never happen again, the horror and the fear in the well.’

Marie-Noel looked at her calmly.

‘It was not horrible, nor was I frightened,’ she replied. ‘Germaine said it was haunted, but I never saw a ghost. The
verrerie
is a happy place. It’s the château that is full of ghosts.’

César, reassured by the sound of her voice, settled himself at her feet. Marie-Noel patted his head. ‘He’s hungry, and so am I. Can we go across to the cottage with Madame Yves and get some bread?’

The telephone started ringing from the office at the end of
the house. The sudden peal of it jerked us to reality. Julie moved automatically to the door. I opened it, and Blanche rose slowly to her feet. Faced with the living present, the three of us acted instinctively. Only the child looked troubled.

‘I hope that’s not the beginning of it,’ she said.

‘The beginning of what?’ I asked.

‘The beginning of my ferocious dream.’ Pushing aside the blankets she stood up, dusted her coat and put her hand in mine. ‘The Sainte Vierge is anxious about all of us,’ she said. ‘She told me Gran’mie wanted Maman to die. In the dream I wanted her to die too. So did you. We were all guilty. It was very wicked. Isn’t there something you can do to prevent it coming true?’

Jacques must have gone into the office, for the ringing ceased, and through the open door and the empty rooms beyond I heard his low voice speaking. Julie passed me without a word and went to the kitchen, and after a moment Jacques’ voice ceased, there came the murmur of them both in discussion, and then Julie reappeared through the kitchen door. She stood motionless, then beckoned. I left Marie-Noel and went to her.

‘It was Charlotte asking for Monsieur Paul,’ she said. ‘I told her you were here with Mademoiselle Blanche. She said would you both go back at once to the château. There has been an accident. She said not to take the child …’

This time intuition had not lied. Julie lowered her eyes. I looked over my shoulder to the inner room. Marie-Noel was kneeling, turning the small glass flacons out of her pocket, and arranging them, line upon line, upon the dusty floor. As she placed the château at the head, with its broken tower, she caught sight of her hands, and turning them, palms outward, called to Blanche.

‘I must have cut myself,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember how. Will the cuts fade and leave no mark, or will you have to bandage me as you did Papa?’

T
he summons which should have united brother and sister divided us still further. Blanche said never a word to me, nor I to her, as the workman called Ernest drove us back in the lorry; the evil that encompassed us both was like a cloud impossible to penetrate.

The château was deserted. Everyone was out, still searching for the child. Only Charlotte was left, blabbing and hysterical, the woman who milked the cows, screaming in my ear, and the cook, whom I had not seen before but whom I knew to be Gaston’s wife. As we entered the château she came from the kitchen premises, eyes startled, hair unpinned and falling loose, and said, ‘They brought the ambulance from Villars. I did not know where else to telephone.’ Only now did it become clear to me that Ernest, whom Julie had sent to St Gilles in the lorry because she could get no reply by telephone, had met Blanche coming from the church, and she had straightway driven back with him to the foundry without returning to the château.