I wished I possessed Julie's common sense, her tenderness, her perception. I wished I had the knowledge of Ernest, who lived next door and had three daughters. Lecturing on Joan of Arc was no preparation for a pere de famille, and I was not even a pere de famille, I was someone acting a part in a masquerade.
'I don't know what to tell her,' I said. 'I don't know what to do.'
Julie stared at me in pity. 'These things are never difficult for us,' she said, 'but for you people at the chateau life is full of complications. Sometimes I wonder how you live at all. Nothing is natural.'
The child stirred in her sleep but did not wake. The blankets, rough and hairy, brushed her chin. It would be simpler after all if she could stay there, poised in time, without the turmoil of the years to come. To Julie she was a seedling requiring sun; to me, something of my own self lost. In the dark the two combined together in a single point of pain.
'It's odd,' I said to Julie. 'When they told me at the chateau she had disappeared, I kept thinking of her drowned.'
'Drowned?' she said, puzzled. 'There is nowhere here to drown.' She paused and looked over my shoulder to the window. 'You know there has been no water in the well for fifteen years.'
She turned and met my eyes, and I said, feeling suddenly that I could keep the truth to myself no longer, 'I didn't know. I don't know anything. I'm a stranger here.'
Surely she must understand? Her honesty would not be fooled: she must recognize me for what I was, an intruder and a fraud.
'Monsieur le Comte was always a stranger at the verrerie,' she said. 'That was the trouble, wasn't it? You neglected your inheritance and your family, and allowed another man to take your place and bear your responsibilities.'
She patted my shoulder, and I knew that she was speaking of the past and I the present. We were two people in two different worlds.
'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 Gue 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 chateau. 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 chateau 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 chateau, 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 cure and ask him to come here at once. Then look in the directory for the number of the convent of the Sacre-Coeur at Lauray, and find out if it would be possible for the Mother Superior to speak to Mademoiselle de Gue.'
Julie, bewildered, looked from Blanche to me.
'No,' I said. 'No ...'
The urgency in my voice roused Cesar. 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 cure,' 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 chateau 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 chateau. 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 Cesar 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 cherie,' 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 chateau that is full of ghosts.'
Cesar, 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 chateau. 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 chateau 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?'
20
The 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 chateau 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 chateau 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 chateau.
All sense of time was lost. I did not know how long I had walked in the woods. The day, disjointed from that first moment when Francoise had hammered on the dressing-room door to tell me the child was missing, had been one without minutes, without hours; and now, looking up at that gaping bedroom window and down to the trampled grass of the moat below, it might have been mid-day or afternoon. Marie-Noel asleep beneath the blankets belonged to an era past and gone. Noth
ing was certain but that disaster, swift and sudden, had come upon the chateau when it was empty.
The crooked finger of the woman who milked the cows stabbed at the patch of grass as she turned first to me and then to Blanche, and her voice, unintelligible and shrill, repeated again and again the only words I understood, 'I saw her fall ... I saw her fall ...' The jabbing finger, the upturned eyes, the sudden sweeping gesture of her hand as she mimed the falling body, was terrible and vivid, the drama of a witch, and Charlotte, plucking at Blanche's sleeve and babbling, 'She was still breathing, Mademoiselle, I put a mirror to her lips,' became her partner in the dreadful play.
The nightmare ride began again. Out of the drive, through the gateway, up the avenue and on to the road to Villars, in the wake of the ambulance that could only have preceded us by some twenty-five minutes. And still, despite the premonition that had now turned to certainty, Ernest, driving us in the lorry, was the only link between us.
'I was in church,' said Blanche, 'I was in church, praying, when it happened.'
'I saw no ambulance, Mademoiselle,' said Ernest. 'You must have come out of the church and met me with the lorry before the ambulance came.'
'I should have gone back to the chateau,' said Blanche. 'I should have gone back and told them that the child was safe. I might have been in time.'
And a few minutes later, as always after disaster, the hopeless recapitulation of events to find how tragedy could have been avoided. 'There was no need for everyone to join in the search. Some of us should have stayed. If one of us had stayed it would not have happened.'
And lastly, 'The hospital in Villars may not be prepared for emergencies. They should have taken her to Le Mans.'
To the right, to the left, to the right, then straight ahead - the road that led to Villars was now so much part of my life that I felt I knew every twist and every turn. Here was the corner where yesterday evening Gaston had skidded. There was the puddle that early this morning had shone like gold. Villars, new-washed and radiant at six, was full of dust and noise now. Men were drilling a side-road, cars were parked one behind the other, and the hospital building, which I had not noticed when Marie-Noel and I had walked the market-place, now seemed prominent and large and ugly because of my own fears. It was Blanche who entered first, Blanche who spoke rapidly to someone white-coated, young, standing in the passage, and Blanche who pushed me into the bare impersonal waiting-room while she disappeared after him through a further door beyond. The sister who returned with her was calm, impassive, trained like all her colleagues the world over to meet emotion, and her language was a universal language; it might have been taken from a phrase-book of any country.