Day of the Arrow Read online

  Tante Estelle said, ‘The sins of omission, the sins of omission.’

  Lindsay, appalled by what he had triggered off, said, ‘Please. Let me help you? A little cognac . . . ?’

  She evaded the hand he put out to assist her, as if his intention had been murder; then she turned and practically ran across the room to the stairs.

  This behavior had naturally provoked a good deal of interest. A dozen pairs of eyes followed her wavering passage up the magnificent staircase; and when she finally vanished from view a dozen pairs of eyes swiveled round to look at Lindsay.

  Françoise said, ‘Lunch then, everybody—if you’re ready.’

  She came over to Lindsay, eyes wide. ‘James, for heaven’s sake . . . !’

  ‘I’m sorry. I mean, it was only a shot in the dark.’

  ‘What did you say to her?’

  He looked round at her other guests, who were somewhat unwillingly allowing themselves to be ushered into the dining room. ‘What I said’s too complicated for now; the important thing is that you’re right—Philippe is in danger. What’s more, the old girl knows what it is.’

  Françoise bit her lip. ‘She knows?’

  ‘I think so. She said a lot of very odd things; I hope to God I can remember them.’

  Whether it was a conscious and kindly action to assist the functioning of his mental processes Lindsay never knew, but Françoise sat him between herself and the talkative Herr Kautzmann. She was entirely occupied with keeping her guests in order while the young German, discovering that Lindsay was British, embarked on a long, muddled and totally dishonest condemnation of the Nazis, who had apparently been so secretive about their evil deeds that the entire German nation had been hoodwinked into thinking them quite decent fellows; imagine their surprise and horror, et cetera, et cetera.

  Lindsay gave himself up entirely to a study of the apocalyptic words of Tante Estelle. Twice she had said, ‘It’s not possible.’ This had meant, ‘Dear God, I have always known that this might happen, but I had managed to convince myself that the possibility was remote—to lull myself into a false security. Now, what can I do?’

  He nodded to himself over his melon. Yes, it had meant that. In the context, and repeated twice, it could mean nothing else.

  Then she had said, ‘The child!’ And she had looked towards the stairs. She had not said, ‘The children!’ The implication could only be that she had meant the small boy—they had been speaking of the odd deaths of the Montfaucon males. Therefore the boy, Gilles, was in some way involved in his father’s fear of death. How?

  Over his trout he remembered that Tante Estelle had also said, ‘He wasn’t even born.’ Who wasn’t even born? The boy, Gilles? Or perhaps Philippe himself? What had happened before either one or the other had been born which now had a direct bearing on the possible death of Philippe de Montfaucon?

  This multiple problem kept him occupied through a dish of stuffed veal, a coffee mousse, a piece of Camembert and halfway through a peach. At this point he remembered that she had seemed to stare over his shoulder and had said, ‘No,’ twice (indeed, the second time she had shouted it) and he, turning, had seen only the wall of the great room. Only the wall! But what had been hanging on the wall?

  He must have let out some exclamation, for several people looked at him, and Herr Kautzmann, who had been wondering for the hundredth time how the British could be so stupid and survive, was startled out of his train of thought.

  Françoise looked rather anxiously at him. The eyes that he turned on her were very bright, almost feverish. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘You know the wall between the door to the library and the door to the little dining room where we lunched yesterday?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Isn’t there a picture hanging on it? A portrait?’

  ‘Yes, there is.’

  He was sure of this now—sure that the half-demented look she had aimed over his shoulder was directed at a portrait. And she had shouted, ‘No. No.’ His heart pounding, he said, ‘Françoise, who is that portrait of?’ But he knew the answer even before she gave it.

  ‘Philippe’s grandfather. James, what’s the matter?’

  ‘Philippe’s grandfather,’ he said. ‘Tante Estelle’s father. The one who was so mysteriously killed out hunting.’

  Edouard de Montfaucon had been painted in something like his thirty-fifth year. Gazing at the portrait, Lindsay understood the meaning of that rather evasive expression, in his prime. Grandfather Edouard, at thirty-five or so, had certainly been in his prime; he was a little like the young Henry the Eighth, but without that ferrety Tudor look, about which Lindsay had never been able to come to a decision: was it indeed a family failing, or merely the result of a fashion in painting?

  He stood against a slightly romanticized (the picture was dated 1895) background of the chateau—deer grazed beside the lake; storm clouds were gathering beyond the distant mountains. The man himself was big, bursting with vitality and self-confidence. He was dressed for a day’s shooting, a double-barreled sporting gun resting over his arm. The proud head was held well up, and there seemed to be a faintly amused expression about the mouth—recognizably Philippe’s mouth—nestling between a luxuriant mustache and a neatly trimmed beard; he seemed to be regarding the man who had painted him with amused impatience. The hair and beard were reddish brown. He looked a formidable character, and it was not easy to imagine him being ‘accidentally shot while out hunting.’ He did not give an impression of being the kind of man who would allow such a thing to happen. If only Tante Estelle . . .

  Lindsay sighed. Where Tante Estelle was concerned if only was a forlorn hope. Immediately after luncheon he and Françoise had gone straight to the wing of the castle in which the old lady had her apartment; they had found the door—and a massive door it was too—bolted against them. Repeated knocking, which Françoise had assured him would be useless, eventually produced a grinding of locks and a crashing of bolts, and, finally, a red, square countenance which belonged to Marianne, Tante Estelle’s personal maid. Lindsay had felt that it was only the presence of the marquise which had prevented Marianne from throwing him bodily downstairs—she looked perfectly capable of it.

  Her lady, she had said, was suffering from a migraine; had retired to bed with a tisane and a sleeping pill, and was now fast asleep, poor soul. This last with a venomous glance at Lindsay—Marianne had probably elicited from her mistress the immediate cause of her condition.

  Françoise assured him that the migraine might well last for a week; she had then left him to his rage of impatience and had herself taken the children to see the dentist in Dennat.

  Lindsay grew tired of the sardonic gaze of Edouard de Montfaucon. He turned away across the vast hall, his footsteps echoing up to the vaulted ceiling, and went out into the sunshine.

  Where his fellow guests were he had no idea. The chateau had seemed utterly deserted by the time he returned from his vigil outside Tante Estelle’s door; he had waited there for another hour after Françoise had gone, in the hope that the old lady might care to see him alone, without her nephew’s wife. It was now half past five, and the sun was already low in the sky; he thought that French aristocratic hours of eating seemed to be designed in order to lose the afternoon altogether. Since so many of them spent the afternoon asleep in any case this was probably not a bad idea.

  He was strolling down towards the lake, nursing his resentment against Tante Estelle, when his eye was caught by the squat tower of the village church. It struck him suddenly that where there was a church there would be a graveyard, a living (if one could apply that word to it) adjunct of history.

  The church was very old—thick and stolid, its massive walls pierced here and there by the most primitive lancet windows. It stood, moreover, on a little knoll, surrounded by glooming yew trees. Clearly it had been built at a time when the river and the lake were less reliable than they were now.

  The first thing that caught his eye was that the path to the door was pav
ed in three places with tombstones; to his amazement he saw that this was not a new, if rather sacrilegious way to use old granite, nor was it in any part due to chance. Three ancients—and he was unsurprised to discover that they were all members of the Montfaucon family—had chosen to be laid to rest where the feet of future worshippers would be forever shuffling over them. They had not, however, wanted their identities to be worn away by those feet and had directed, before turning themselves into a pavement, that the details of their mortal struggle should be engraved on an upright headstone beside the path. Two of these headstones had clearly been restored—probably in the nineteenth century—but they were all products of considerable charm and beauty. Alain, Luc and Gregoire de Montfaucon, who had died in 1376, 1530 and 1663 respectively, were the men who had chosen this unusual resting place. Thoughtfully he went into the dim interior of the church.

  It was very simple and well used. There was no stained glass; because of the trees that grew so close to it a gentle, subaqueous light played over the rough stone and the plain wood, polished by centuries of use. The altar was the plainest and the most eloquent that he had ever seen, decorated only by a heavy silver crucifix with the figure of Christ hanging from it; a glance told him that it was mediaeval, and absolutely undamaged. There are very few works of man that have survived intact, without later ‘improvement,’ from those passionate centuries of belief, and they are all tremendous in their impact. The unfumbling certainty of the man who had fashioned this crucifix of Bellac, a man who had been dust for six hundred years, spoke across the centuries with absolute clarity. Lindsay had come to the church to spy; he stood there now, moved to the roots of his being.

  He turned sharply and found the priest, Father Dominique, watching him. The priest nodded, as if knowing that the crucifix had done its work. ‘You are an artist yourself,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Yes. I . . . I wonder you leave the church open; it must be of incalculable value.’

  The priest nodded again, his kind face very placid. ‘Indeed, yes; so is the Mona Lisa.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realize.’

  ‘Ah no, our crucifix is not as well known as she is; but it is too well known for any thief ever to be able to dispose of it.’

  ‘It’s curious,’ said Lindsay, looking closer. ‘The figure of Christ isn’t actually nailed to the Cross at all.’

  ‘He rules from the Cross,’ said the priest, his blue, quick eyes on the young man’s face. ‘Is the Cross itself so important?’

  Lindsay did not grasp until much later the full strangeness of this remark because his attention had been caught by a forest of candles in the little north transept of the church. He moved towards them, Father Dominique following.

  As he expected, the candles were burning before an effigy of the Holy Virgin—a rather dull statuette. But their light revealed something far from dull on the wall to her left; it was a monument, perhaps even a tomb, and the date was 1422. A figure in bas-relief stood, with head raised, under a tree; the figure was that of a man, a soldier, but his sword lay at his feet and both his hands were clasped round what looked like a goblet. Lindsay was not very expert at deciphering Latin inscriptions, and it was a moment before he realized that he was looking at Gils de Montfaucon, poor Gils who had met so unlikely an end when a tree had fallen upon him. And there indeed was the tree, and there was Gils, surprised apparently in drinking a glass of wine.

  Lindsay turned to the priest. ‘I suppose it is a goblet,’ he said.

  ‘One imagines so. They are curious, these old tombs.’

  ‘What is the legend? Had he paused for lunch at the time the tree fell on him?’

  ‘It certainly looks like it.’

  Lindsay looked more closely at the stylized, yet oddly immediate carving. It was hard to tell exactly what Gils was holding because in the passing of time the stone had become rubbed, defaced. And then he noticed a strange thing: the object in the man’s hands was the only part of the carving to be so worn away. Immediately Lindsay thought of the toe of the statue of St. Peter in his great church in Rome—worn by a million kissing lips. He turned, startled, to the priest; the blue uncanny eyes were fixed on him. He remembered how, at their first meeting, he had thought that it was only the kindliness of the man’s face that redeemed the eyes from being a little frightening. In the dim, underwater light of his church, timeless on its mound, he was not at all sure how kind that face really was—or rather what exactly was the measure of its kindliness. The question he had been going to ask never reached his lips. As he turned away from the tomb of Gils, he was aware of his heart beating faster than usual.

  Father Dominique went with him towards the door; ‘escorted him’ might have been the better description. At the idea that he was perhaps being seen off the premises, Lindsay’s Highland ancestry rose within him. He turned, looking at the priest with interest; the lean, brown face was withdrawn, the remarkable eyes hidden. Lindsay said, ‘I was rather hoping to see the tomb of Edouard de Montfaucon—the marquis’s grandfather.’

  For a moment Father Dominique said nothing; then, ‘How curious that you should ask that.’

  ‘Why? Coming of a purely bourgeois family myself, I have to confess that the aristocracy fascinates me—the continuity of it!’

  ‘Curious,’ said the priest, ‘because somehow I felt you would already know that he is not buried here at all.’

  ‘Really! How should I know?’

  ‘You show such . . . interest in these things.’

  Now wait a minute, Lindsay thought. What is this? There seemed to be some sort of publicity about his movements—even about his thoughts.

  He was excited suddenly, and when he was excited he was not always tactful. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘where is he buried?’

  ‘Where he died. It was his wish. He was eccentric in many ways—as you have doubtless heard.’

  Lindsay had heard no such thing, but he was extremely interested by the gratuitous piece of information. He looked at his watch—half past six.

  ‘Let me see,’ he said. ‘Where did he die? Oh yes, there was some sort of hunting accident, wasn’t there? In the forest, I suppose.’

  ‘Precisely. It is some distance away.’

  ‘I’ve plenty of time.’

  ‘You are indefatigable, monsieur. Let me see then, which is the best way? Round the edge of the lake, I think. You will see a sluice gate; after it the path divides—take the one to the right. There will be men working there; if you are confused, ask them. I warn you—there is nothing to see.’

  ‘It will pass a pleasant hour, Father. Thank you.’

  The priest stood in the door of the church, watching him as he walked away.

  The one thing which James Lindsay could never afterwards deny was that the whole disastrous incident was entirely his own fault. The only excuse that he could later find was that hounds on the scent have been known, so great their pre­occupation, to run slap-bang into stone walls.

  Even when he met the old woman he was too occupied in his own thoughts to evaluate what happened. And what happened was, by any standards, extraordinary enough. What happened was that she spat at him.

  Lindsay, who had greeted her politely, was, it is true, a little taken aback; but then the vagaries of very ancient peasant women in foreign lands had always struck him as unusual. This particular old harridan with her dirty sack would probably have thought nothing of relieving herself on the grass verge beside an arterial road, and he therefore saw no reason why she should not, following some devious argument of her own, find his presence objectionable and spit at him to make the fact known. He thought it unfriendly, no more; he was far too interested in the idea that at one time, probably some centuries ago admittedly, the fate of poor Gils de Montfaucon, squashed by a tree, had seemed saintly. He wondered why. The figure on the tomb had been that of a soldier; there had been a cross on his surcoat; the whole thing was probably something to do with the Crusades.

  A mile beyond the sluice gate he
still had not come to the division of the path of which Father Dominique had spoken. There, however, were the men working whom he had also mentioned: three of them, engaged in clearing the stream that fed the lake: three mahogany-brown figures like wooden carvings of the shepherds from an ancient crib. As he approached them, his mind full of mediaeval imaginings, he thought that if poor Gils himself were to return he would find little changed about the faces or indeed the garb of these men, their trousers tied with string, their shapeless hats on the back of their heads.

  ‘I was looking,’ he said, ‘for the tomb in the wood—the tomb of the Marquis Edouard.’

  The oldest of the three crossed himself. The youngest said to the middle-aged one, ‘It’s the stranger.’

  Now, Lindsay did think this remark rather curious since there were by now so many strangers wandering about Bellac; at that precise moment, however, he was more interested in the old man who had crossed himself.

  ‘Can you tell me the way?’

  The middle-aged one said, ‘The way is easy.’ He made it sound faintly Biblical; later Lindsay was to wonder how intentional this was. He did not intend to be put off by roundabout word play in any case—he had had enough of prevarication, in the person of Tante Estelle, for one day.

  ‘Your priest,’ he added, ‘told me that I would find a place where the path divided.’

  The young man said, ‘Père Dominique.’

  Lindsay was getting impatient.

  ‘He was buried,’ the old man announced, ‘on the very spot where he fell. But they carried him first.’