The Splendour Falls (31 page)

‘I’m not sure, it was so long ago. I always thought …’

‘
Not
the river,’ François said, with certainty. ‘She might have said “the water”, but not “the river”.’

His tone, his words, had finally penetrated past my fog of Calvados. I turned in my seat to stare at him. ‘Do you mean … you don’t mean that you
know
where the diamonds are?’

‘Of course.’ He smiled. ‘I helped her, I was there. She
told me they were stained with blood, those diamonds, and she knew only one way to make them pure.’ He shrugged, and looked an apology at Jim. ‘She didn’t throw them in the river Vienne,’ he said. ‘She gave them back to God.’

The ancient door swung open with a heavy groan as Christian’s key turned creaking in the lock. A shaft of torchlight caught a pillar’s gleaming edge, then travelled up to where the grasses waved upon the ruined wall. Beneath the clouds that raced across the moon, the Chapelle of Sainte Radegonde slept still and peaceful, sacrosanct. Nothing moved.

And then the silence blinked.

Christian’s keys dropped jangling to the ground and at the muttered German curse my cousin swung the torch around to help. ‘Just there,’ Harry pointed out the keys, ‘beside the … no, beside that clump of flowers. Right.’

‘This would be easier,’ said Christian, ‘in the daylight.’

Harry grinned. ‘Well, we’re here now, so there’s no point having second thoughts. Besides, it’s all well and good for Jim and François to put off exploring until morning –
they’re old men. They’ve lost their sense of adventure. Not like us.’

‘Jim Whitaker’s not old,’ I contradicted.

‘Of course he is. He must be over forty, surely.’

‘Thanks,’ said Neil, behind my shoulder. ‘I’ll just stop here and have a nap then, shall I?’

‘I didn’t mean …’

‘I know you didn’t.’ Neil’s smile forgave my cousin’s blunder. ‘Emily, my dear, could you just shine your torch in that direction, so Christian doesn’t trip on anything? Thanks, that’s lovely.’

Christian walked ahead, pinned by the torchlight like a cabaret performer in a follow spot. His shadow loomed macabre on the frescoed wall behind the sturdy iron grille. Again he clanked the ring of keys, selecting one to fit the lock. ‘Let us hope that Sainte Radegonde does not mind to be awakened.’

‘She won’t mind.’ Harry’s tone was confident. ‘And anyway, it’s not as if we’re doing anything we oughtn’t. We’re just having a bit of a peek, that’s all. Giving in to normal curiosity.’

Still, I half expected the saint’s statue to be frowning at me, disapproving, as I passed between the iron gates and entered the hushed chapel proper, where the cave-like walls arched up to rest upon the ghostly row of pillars. But when I glanced at Radegonde’s stone face she looked back benignly. Evidently, I thought, even saints could understand the pull of curiosity.

Thierry would be terribly put out when he learned we’d come up without him, but he’d gone to bed before us – it
was really his own fault. The Chamonds, too, had given in to weariness, and Jim as well, and François had gone back up to the
Clos
, to help with Lucie. Which had only left the four of us – Harry, Christian, Neil and me – quite pleasantly awash in Calvados and irretrievably beyond the point of being tired.

I had, for my own part, reached that magical plane of inebriation in which time begins to float and anything seems possible, which went a long way towards explaining why, when Harry had leaned forward and said: ‘Listen,
I’ve
got an idea …’ instead of running in the opposite direction as experience would warrant, I had donned my jacket and trailed after him. Completely sober, I’d have had more sense. And I would never have come up that cliff path in the dark, alone or no.

‘I’ve got it open,’ Christian announced, twisting the key to the third and final gate. Harry’d wandered down the aisle to stand below the Plantagenet fresco, his torchlight angled up to catch the vibrant figures of young Isabelle and John. ‘Well done,’ he said, in absent tones. He stood a moment longer, looking up. ‘I was afraid it might have changed, since I last saw it.’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘Changed? In one week? Hardly likely.’

‘Not one week, love. It’s been at least two years since I’ve been up here, to the chapelle. Had I known my hiding place was quite so close I might have tried to sneak in another visit. One forgets how very beautiful—’

‘Hold on,’ I stopped him, frowning. ‘You were here last week. You must have been. That’s how I knew that you
were missing in the first place – you left your coin, your King John coin, there on the altar, as an offering.’

‘No chance.’

‘You did.’ My chin rose stubbornly. ‘Or at least, if you didn’t leave it there yourself, perhaps the gypsies …’

‘Darling Emily.’ My cousin strolled towards me, hand in pocket. ‘I’m not all that daft, you know. I mean, they’re lovely people, gypsies, but they will take things unless you’re careful. My watch is gone, and my wallet … but they haven’t taken this.’ He held his hand out, with the coin upon it, to show me. ‘With this, I was very careful.’

I stared. It was the King John coin, without mistake, safe in its plastic case. I opened my own wallet, just to be sure, and drew out the matching coin. Harry stabbed it with a beam of light.

‘How curious,’ he said. ‘I wonder how on earth it got there.’

‘I don’t know.’

Christian leaned in closer for a better look. ‘It is very old, yes? Somebody must have found it on the ground here, near the tombs perhaps, and put it with the other coins as tribute to Sainte Radegonde.’

‘Y-yes, I suppose that’s how it could have happened.’

‘You don’t sound terribly convinced,’ said Harry, grinning. ‘What other explanation is there – Sainte Radegonde herself, perhaps? A helping hand from beyond? Don’t tell me that you’ve found religion, Em.’

‘Of course not.’ And I meant it, only … only …

Behind the altar, lovely pale Sainte Radegonde just went on gazing at nothing in particular, her blind, carved
eyes serene and peaceful. I put the coin back in her dish of offerings, and pushed it well down, frowning. Neil moved up behind my shoulder, and his breath brushed warm on my neck. ‘The world would be dead boring, don’t you think, if everything were easy to explain?’

My cousin grinned. ‘The true Romantic viewpoint,’ he pronounced. ‘Come on then, are we ready? Tunnels again, Emily. You’ll have to cope. She has a tunnel thing,’ he told Neil, confidingly.

‘Oh, yes?’ Neil glanced my way. ‘I’ll have to remember that.’

Beyond the second gate the glare of harsh electric light seemed almost an intrusion. The chapel caves cried out for candles, I thought, or the flicker of a burning torch. The hanging bulbs and switches took away much of the mystery, and it wasn’t until we’d reached the steep and crooked steps that dropped down to the holy well that I felt again the ancient and eternal sense of wonder shared by all explorers.

Harry must have drunk more than I’d thought. By the time the rest of us had slid with caution down the steps my cousin had stripped neatly to his underpants.

‘What
are
you doing?’ I demanded.

‘Well, you can’t see anything from here. Just pebbles, really. If I’ve come all this way to see diamonds, then I want to bloody see them, don’t I?’

I looked down at the narrow shaft of clear blue water, plunging several metres deep into the rock. ‘You can’t be serious.’

He just grinned, stepped cleanly off the ledge and dropped feet-first into the well. The spray that came
up after him was cold as ice. Neil knelt beside me, one arm braced against the pale stone wall to see I didn’t accidentally topple in myself. ‘We’ll fish him out again,’ he promised. ‘Never fear.’ The three of us peered over the edge, to watch as Harry forced himself towards the bottom, his hands splayed out in search of the elusive diamonds. ‘Runs in your family, does it?’ Neil asked idly. ‘This sort of behaviour?’

‘Well, yes, it seems to.’

‘Ah.’

I might have asked him why he wanted to know, but our situation was already intimate beyond the comfort level, and at any rate there wasn’t time. My cousin broke the surface of the water in a burst of triumph, gasping air.

‘He was right,’ he called up to us. ‘Old François was right. Just look!’ And spreading out his fingers he stretched up his hand, palm upwards, to the light. I saw the glittering before I saw the stones themselves.

‘
Mein Gott
,’ breathed Christian.

‘Precisely.’

And then for some few minutes we were silent, all of us. I thought of Isabelle – Jim’s mother, François’s sister – standing here that summer evening while her world fell in around her, holding diamonds stained with blood no human hand could wash away. I thought of Hans … where had he been that night, I wondered? Miles away, by then. He’d sought redemption too, in different ways. He had surrendered, left his country, changed his name. Well, it was over now, I thought. Time everyone forgot, forgave, let be. Yom Kippur might have ended with the sunset, but the message of the
Jewish holiday remained.
People hate too much
.

‘There are some coins down there,’ said Harry. ‘Not old ones, but …’

Paul’s wishing coins. ‘Just let them lie,’ I told him.

‘Yes, Mum.’ He grinned. ‘And these as well, I think.’ He tipped his hand to let the diamonds tumble back into the turquoise water. ‘Bad luck to steal things from a holy well. Sainte Radegonde would have my head.’

I watched the flashing glitter of the gems descending. They vanished at the bottom, amid a scattering of what looked like pebbles. How many diamonds had there been? I didn’t want to know. After all, they were nothing more than stones, small bits of stone that someone thought were pretty, and in that illusion lay their value. In the greater scheme of life, I thought, they didn’t matter a damn. Maybe all that mattered was the tangible, however fleeting – friends and family, feelings …

‘Oh, sod it,’ Harry bit out. ‘Damn, I think I broke my finger.’ He’d made his way to the sheer wall of the well and had begun to climb up, using the row of footholds gouged by the well-diggers centuries earlier. He pulled his hand free, flexing it.

He was still several feet below us, and I had to lean to look. ‘It doesn’t look broken.’

‘Well, maybe not, but it might have been. There’s something jammed in here – a block of wood, it feels like.’ Far more gingerly now, he placed his injured fingers back within the recessed foothold just above the surface of the water. ‘Hang on,’ he said, ‘it isn’t wood at all. In fact it feels like … I’ll be damned.’

‘What is it?’ Christian leant down, curious, as Harry finally tugged the object free. I only saw a small dark square the size of Harry’s hand. He passed it up to Christian. ‘You tell me.’

It was filthy dirty, for one thing. My cousin’s hand left black marks on the stone as he swung himself up the few remaining feet to join us on the narrow ledge above the well. Christian had turned the packet over, sniffing. ‘Oil,’ he pronounced. ‘It has been oiled.’

‘Waxed as well.’ Harry pointed to the great untidy splotch of black that held the packet closed. ‘Somebody didn’t want this getting wet.’ He was dripping water himself, but that didn’t seem to bother him. He slicked his hair back, glanced at me. ‘Emily, love, would you toss me my trousers? Thanks.’ He rummaged for his pocket knife and prised the battered blade open. It was rather tricky, since the packet seemed to crumble when he touched it, but at length he’d sliced the wax seal through and gently, oh so gently, coaxed the stiffened edges apart.

The squares of parchment had been folded up so tightly for so long that they were nearly solid lumps, and Harry didn’t try to force them open. He knew better. There were specialists who did that sort of thing. But he did forget his training long enough to turn the parchment in his
still-damp
fingers, searching for a scrap of writing, anything. ‘Oh, my God,’ he said.

I looked at him, and caught some measure of his own excitement. ‘What?’

‘You ought to know that signature,’ he told me, stretching out his hand towards me. I looked. I blinked, a long blink,
looked again. And then I raised my head to stare at him.

I couldn’t even speak.

Neil slid his gaze from me to Harry. ‘What are they?’

‘Letters.’ My cousin’s voice had roughened slightly, as it always did when he became emotional. It echoed back from the still water of the well. ‘Love letters, I expect. Written by a king eight hundred years ago.’

Christian stroked a corner of the crumbling oiled packet. ‘Eight hundred years? Incredible.’

My cousin looked at me. ‘“A treasure beyond price,”’ he quoted, and his eyes grew moist. ‘That’s what the chronicle said Queen Isabelle hid, here at Chinon. Only it wasn’t jewels, or money. Damn, who would have known …?’ He shook his head, his dreamy gaze returning to the
crudely-chiselled
footholds in the soft, unspeaking stone. And then, as if he’d suddenly remembered Neil and Christian wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what he was talking about, which meant that they were fair game for a classic lecture, Henry Yates Braden, PhD, promptly cleared his throat. ‘You see,’ he began, ‘there was another Isabelle …’

‘What, no lectures?’ Harry asked me, as we paused before the altar. Christian swung the iron gate shut and the sound disturbed my thoughts. I turned unfocused eyes towards my cousin.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘About how I shouldn’t steal things from historic sites,’ he clarified. ‘You’re rather puritan about the subject, as I recall. You read me the Riot Act that day I nicked a pebble from Tintagel.’

‘That wasn’t a pebble, it was a building stone, and if everybody did that there wouldn’t be a castle left to …’ I saw his smile forming and broke off with a heavy sigh. ‘Anyhow, I suppose I can’t talk, can I? I stole a coin from an offering plate, for heaven’s sake.’

‘You brought it back.’

‘And you said yourself you’re going to give the letters to the University of Paris.’

‘Right. Just as soon as I have a chance to look at them.’

My gaze narrowed. ‘Harry …’

‘Well, have a heart! You can’t expect me to just turn the damn things over without looking at them first. Christ, I’m not a saint, you know.’ His eyes flicked sideways to where Radegonde’s calm statue stood behind the altar, as if he half expected to be flattened by a lightning bolt. ‘Besides,’ he went on, in a lower voice, ‘since no one else even knows that the letters exist, it stands to reason that no one will miss them for a few days, will they?’

‘A few days?’

‘Well, a month maybe.’

‘And then you’ll send them on to Paris?’

‘On my honour.’ He swore the oath with hand upraised.

Past redemption, I thought – that’s what Harry was. On his honour indeed. I smiled and looked away, out past the iron grille to where the gentle fingers of the breaking dawn touched softly on the bay tree standing sentinel beside the chapelle’s door.

‘Cold?’ Harry asked me.

‘No.’

‘Then why the shiver?’ And then he followed the direction of my gaze, and said quite simply: ‘Ah.’

I turned around. ‘What do you mean, “Ah”?’

‘Just “Ah”.’

He saw things rather more clearly than I liked, I thought. More clearly, sometimes, than I myself could see. I felt the colour stain my cheeks and turned my head away again, looking back towards the bay tree and the man who sat beneath it.

He was sitting comfortably stretched out against the outer wall, one leg drawn up on which to rest his injured hand. The hand hung stiffly, as though it hurt him, and I remembered Harry telling me how Neil had climbed the château walls to get inside. Actually climbed the walls. They must have been a good twenty feet high, even at their lowest point around the gates. Less than that on the inside, naturally, where the ground level was higher, but even so. He simply hadn’t wanted to wait, so Harry said, for the main gates to be unlocked. It must have been a different Neil Grantham, I decided, who’d shown such a lack of patience.

It could not have been this quiet man, lost in a serenity so deep he scarcely seemed to breathe, with the faint light trickling through the bay leaves turning his hair a pale and softly radiant gold. He might have been Christ contemplating the sunrise over Gethsemene. All else was darkness compared to him, and though he neither moved nor spoke his very stillness drew the eye more effectively than motion – drew it and held it until I felt myself being pulled into the glowing centre of its reverent, breathless peace.

Harry watched me, eyebrows raised. ‘I like him, if it matters.’

I faced him with a flat expression. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Right.’ My cousin turned to Christian, with a smile. ‘Sorry to have kept you from your bed, but I really am grateful for this. And for these.’ He patted the lumpy parcel wrapped with care inside his jacket.

Christian shrugged. ‘It is no trouble. And now,’ he announced, brushing his forehead with one hand, ‘I will make for everyone some coffee, yes? So much excitement in one night, it makes the head ache.’

‘Coffee,’ Neil agreed, ‘sounds wonderful.’ He rolled his head against the stone wall to smile at us, and moved to stand up, wincing a little. ‘It isn’t so much the excitement,’ he explained, ‘as the drink. Bloody Calvados. I feel like there’s a herd of horses dancing on my skull.’

My cousin laughed. ‘That’s age for you. You ready, Em?’

No, I thought, I wasn’t ready. That was the whole problem, wasn’t it? I trailed along the cliff path after them, too busy with my own confusing thoughts to join the conversation. I had some vague memory of passing by the house where Harry had kept hidden, and of brushing through the fragrant clutch of pine, and then of starting our descent into the town, but I was still surprised to find myself upon the pavement outside Christian’s house, with all the houses round still shuttered tight against the pale and spreading light of day.

I looked at Harry, and at Neil, and suddenly I felt a little stifled. ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I don’t feel much like coffee. I’d rather get some sleep.’

Harry’s eyes were gently sceptical. ‘Oh, yes?’

‘Yes. I think I’ll just go back to the hotel.’

Neil smiled at me, faintly, seeing too much, as he always did. I tried my best to make a graceful exit, but in truth it took all my effort not to break into a run as I wound my way through the narrow sleeping streets. Each window seemed to stare at me, accusing me of cowardice, and even
when I reached the fountain square the elegantly entwined Graces looked less than approving. I wrapped my arms around myself defensively, moving across to stand at the fountain’s edge.

Splendour, Joy and bloody Beauty – they looked as stern as ever, those three faces. Unless … was that a quirk I saw, just there? I squinted through the tumbling rain of water droplets, glistening like diamonds in the slant of morning sun. No, I decided, it was nothing. And yet, I had the feeling that the statues were trying to tell me something.

‘It would never work,’ I answered them aloud. I wanted to tell them that the fairy tales were lies, all lies, but it was difficult to say the words when above me Château Chinon rose resplendent in the sunshine, looking every inch the castle of a fairy tale. Difficult, too, to deny the existence of Prince Charmings when one had just last night come charging to my rescue. Damn, I thought. And happy endings? A sweet wind whispered through the leaves of the acacias, and I thought I heard Jim Whitaker’s voice asking me a second time, ‘Is happiness a thing we choose, I wonder?’

I wondered, too, and found no answer.

My hands were cold. I rummaged in my handbag for a pair of gloves and saw a flashing glimmer at the bottom, in amongst the jumbled clutter. Gloves forgotten, I reached in deeper, and closed my fingers round the two-toned coin. Not a French coin, but an Italian one – five hundred lire, to be exact. I seemed to see Neil’s eyes before me, watching me, quietly urging me to make a wish.
Whenever you’re ready
, he’d told me.
Whenever you’re ready
.

It had been years since I’d performed the tiny ritual, yet in the end it came so naturally. I took a deep breath, kissed the coin, and sent it tumbling with a wish into the icy water of the fountain.

I was so intent on watching it fall that I didn’t notice the cat, at first. The little creature had rubbed past my legs twice before I surfaced from my thoughts and looked down. The cat blinked up at me. It came into my arms without hesitation when I bent to pick it up, and nestled underneath my chin, purring like a motor-boat.

Behind me, Neil’s voice warned: ‘You’ll get fleas.’

I stiffened, then relaxed, not looking back. ‘I don’t care.’ How long he had been standing there, I didn’t know – I hadn’t heard his footsteps. But I heard them now, crisp and even on the pavement as he came across the square to join me at the fountain’s edge. I went on looking at the water, and my hands upon the cat were almost steady. Almost.

Neil glanced into the water, too, then turned his quiet gaze on me. ‘I see you’ve used your coin,’ he commented.

‘Yes.’

‘You didn’t wish for the cat to find a home, did you?’

I looked at him then, and saw that his eyes weren’t quiet at all. They were alive, intense with some unnamed emotion, and a question lurked within their midnight depths. Slowly, I shook my head.

The question vanished and he smiled. ‘Thank God for that,’ he said. ‘I thought you might have wasted it.’ And then he raised a hand to touch my face, a touch of promise, warm and sure, and as I struggled to smile back at him he
kissed me. It felt so very right, so beautiful; tears pricked behind my lashes as life flowed through all my hollow limbs, and I lost all sense of place and time. It might have been a minute or an hour later when he moved, slanting a thoughtful look down at the black-and-white bundle of fur in my arms. The cat stared back at him, a trifle smugly.

‘I suppose,’ said Neil, ‘that this beast will have to come with us?’

Just like that. I stared up at him. ‘I thought you said your landlady hated cats?’

‘Yes, well, she doesn’t much like other women, either, but I fancy she’ll get used to both of you. Even Austrian landladies,’ he informed me, ‘recognise the hand of destiny at work.’ His own hand felt very warm as he smoothed my hair back. ‘Still, we’d better see to it the little fleabag gets his injections. Have you named him yet?’

I hadn’t really thought about it, but quite suddenly I knew there was just one name that would fit. ‘Ulysses,’ I told Neil. ‘His name’s Ulysses.’

A flash of understanding passed between us, and his dark eyes smiled down at me. ‘Right. Put Ulysses down, then, will you?’

‘Why?’

‘Just put him down.’

The cat yawned grumpily as I lowered him to the pavement. A stiff breeze scattered the fountain’s spray around the three bronze Graces, and the cat leapt safely out of range, moving to resume his nap beneath the nearest bench. The fountain’s spray struck me as well, as cold as ice, but I didn’t really mind it. Neil’s eyes, his smile, his
touch, were warmth enough. Maybe he was right, I thought – it might not be so difficult, believing. I lifted my own hand to touch his face, his hair, to bring his head lower. And in the moment just before he kissed me, I could have sworn that, past his shoulder, Splendour smiled.