Day of the Arrow Page 7

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘Yes, very much “Ah!” I assure you.’

  ‘Then what’s Philippe up to with her?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I’ll guess. Philippe thinks he is going to die—don’t ask me how or why or when or anything else about it. It doesn’t even matter whether it’s true at the moment. The fact is that he thinks it. He wouldn’t be the first frightened man to . . . to fall back on old superstitions, would he?’

  ‘You think she’s his oracle.’

  ‘The oracle merely foretold. I wouldn’t put it past Mlle. Odile to have a try at altering the general course of things.’

  Lindsay shook his head bemusedly. ‘Françoise, this is the twentieth century.’

  ‘Is it?’ She looked beyond him out of the window. The enclosed valley, gray-green under rain clouds, stretched away to the mountain walls that encircled it. He could see what she meant. ‘More than that,’ she said. ‘Is our century so robust—is our way of life so secure—are we so contented, James, that we have no need of . . . reassurance—reassurance about the things of the spirit?’

  ‘I see what you mean. But Philippe . . .’

  ‘Philippe is a frightened man.’

  Yes, Lindsay was thinking, by God he is. He remembered that moment—only this morning—as they had ridden up from the village towards the chateau: how he had glanced at the man beside him and found him suddenly pale, suddenly crumpled, as if he barely had the strength to stay in his saddle. Yes, that could well have been fear. He had, at the time, taken it for sickness of the body, but how little different is sickness of the mind.

  Françoise was watching him carefully now, probably recognizing in him the realizations which must have dawned so slowly and so painfully in her own brain.

  ‘James,’ she said, ‘when you knew Philippe, did he ever go to Church?’

  ‘No, never. Don’t you remember that awful anticlerical thing he had? Practically a mania.’

  ‘Oh yes, I remember. Supposing I told you that except for our wedding and the children’s christening I’ve never known him to set foot in a church for three years—would you be surprised?’

  ‘Not a bit.’

  ‘Good. Come with me. I want to show you something.’

  He could not question her further because she had already turned away. He followed her to the door and said, ‘What . . . ?’ But she silenced him, finger to her lips.

  They went out into the corridor and along it to a narrow, arched door hidden behind a heavy curtain. Françoise took a thick, ancient key from her pocket and unlocked it; beyond was a dark stone passage, lit only by slits set in deep embrasures. Lindsay realized that they were inside the thickness of the castle walls; here, in the distant past, archers had stood to fire on an advancing enemy.

  At the end of the passage was another door. Françoise stopped in front of it and turned to him. ‘Now really,’ she whispered, ‘not a sound, James. This key is supposed to be lost.’ She inserted it into the lock of the door, turned it with infinite caution and grimaced as the mechanism clicked into place. She waited then for a full minute before opening the door very slightly; she looked through the aperture, a mere two inches, nodded, and stepped back out of his way.

  Lindsay was surprised to find himself gazing, from a forest of organ pipes, down the length of a very beautiful chapel—a very old chapel, too, for the arches were rounded and therefore Norman, or possibly even Roman.

  Because his eye was led, as the eye always is, directly to the altar, he did not immediately see Philippe de Montfaucon—the huddled, motionless figure on its knees in the transept directly opposite the door through which he was peering.

  He turned and looked at Françoise. She nodded, closed the door as gently as she had opened it, turned the key in the lock, and, without another word, led him back along the passage.

  Neither of them spoke until they stood once more in the blue-and-gold elegance of her little sitting room.

  ‘You knew,’ Lindsay burst out. ‘You were sure that he’d be there.’

  ‘Yes.’ The implications of this did not need to be spoken.

  Lindsay shook his head bemusedly. ‘Every day?’

  ‘Every day.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘An hour, two hours; the longest I ever knew was twelve.’

  ‘Twelve!’

  Her eyes were full of a kind of pain now. ‘All night.’

  They stared at each other, their minds trying to find a hold upon the enormous, glassy cliff of this knowledge.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Lindsay suddenly cried out, ‘what’s going on in this place?’

  Françoise, never taking her deep eyes off him, said, ‘That, James, is what I hope we’re going to find out.’

  6

  The Fourteen Deaths

  It is an unfortunate fact that a bite administered by human teeth never looks like anything but a bite administered by human teeth. There are very few ways of explaining how such a mark could have appeared on one’s lip—particularly to the sort of company then assembled at Bellac. And so Lindsay lay on his bed, watching the gray day die outside the window, listening to the silence.

  He realized that he was caught, held hand and foot by this castle and the mystery that it contained. The problems and the contradictions boiled inside his brain. Every now and again he would get up, prowl a few times round the room, and come to rest at the window, gazing out at the bruised purple of the mountains, the low clouds billowing in from the west, the livid crescent of the lake, reflecting suddenly a last pale relic of dead sunlight.

  What particularly taunted him about the whole conundrum was a lurking suspicion at the back of his mind that he did, in fact, know the answer to it—or, more exactly, that he knew an answer which would in its turn release all the others, like the first log that moves with the thaw in a frozen river. And this answer, he was sure, lay in the character of Philippe de Montfaucon—the man who had turned suddenly from his wife, who spent his days, so it seemed, closeted with either a child witch or Tante Estelle’s ‘black, wicked boy,’ or else by himself in prayer or meditation; the man who was young, strong and healthy but who was afraid of death.

  Françoise had said, ‘He isn’t just living at Bellac, he is Bellac.’ Very well, the answer lay in these stones.

  Lindsay pressed his hand against the cold wall of the room as if bidding it to communicate to him what it knew. Then, once more, he began to prowl; and, once again, he came to the bed and fell onto it.

  Presently however he thought, Yes, I’m right: the answer lies here in the stones of Bellac. But what do I know of them? Nothing.

  He began to think of the library, that magnificent but intimidating room next to the little salon in which they had lunched. Since the story of his headache had doubtless already been put about, he did not particularly want to meet any of his fellow guests face to face on the stairs; did not in any case want to give them the chance to read the evidence of his lower lip. He estimated, however, that at a certain time before dinner—say three-quarters of an hour—they would all certainly be in their rooms, dressing. At a quarter to eight, therefore, he left his bedroom and went along the passage that led to the staircase. There was no one in sight. That thick, blank silence carpeted the place. He went quickly downstairs, across the immense shadowy hall, in which a huge log fire burned even in summer, and into the library.

  It took him quite a long time to find the light switches, cunningly hidden behind a piece of paneling. He was then faced with tier upon tier of books; he reasoned that there must, somewhere, be a catalogue. There were, in fact, no less than five.

  Half an hour later he regained his room, having been seen by no one but a manservant and a Great Dane. He spread the spoils of the expedition on the desk in the window, switched on a reading light, and sat down. He had found Bellac—the Unspoiled Land by Pierre Basse, The Castle of Bellac—Its Foundation and History by Professor Puget, Mediaeval Days and Ways—a Reconstruction in Four Volumes Based on th
e Bellac Manuscripts now in the National Library, Montfaucon—a History by G. H. Latour, and Montfaucon—a Record of Thirteen Centuries by Gervaise de Montfaucon; he had not chosen some twenty others.

  The servant who brought the patient’s dinner found the latter absorbed in an immense tome. Lindsay, lost in the past, hardly noticed the succulent meal, did not even glance up when the tray was removed, and was still sitting there in a pool of light when Françoise came up to see how he was some three hours later. By this time Montfaucon—a Record of Thirteen Centuries was marked in a dozen places by slips of paper. The eye that Lindsay lifted to regard her was steely with excitement.

  ‘What a family you married into,’ he said.

  Françoise looked at the spine of the book. ‘Interesting, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’ve read it?’

  ‘Some of it.’

  ‘It strikes me,’ Lindsay said, ‘that your husband might well be afraid of sudden death on the basis of statistics alone. Good God, it practically runs in the family!’

  ‘They seem to have been an unreliable collection, don’t they?’

  ‘Unreliable? Their wives could practically count on being widows before they were forty.’ He picked up a piece of notepaper from the desk, the falcon crest flamboyant at the top of it, and began to read from the penciled notes he had made. ‘Jehan, killed in battle, the year 960, aged thirty; Gillaume le Blanc—Why “the white,” do you suppose?—murdered on the road in the year 1009. Philippe ditto in the year 1057; he was only twenty. Blaise, ditto but in battle. Alain, the year 1220, died while out hunting; it doesn’t say how . . .’

  Françoise said, ‘Those were violent days, James; and remember it’s rare to have a record of one family in such detail.’

  Lindsay gave a sarcastic snort of mirth. ‘It always has been violent days as far as these boys are concerned. Heavens above, what about your husband’s grandfather? He got shot while out hunting too. If I were Philippe I’d leave blood sports strictly alone.’ He stood up and began once more to pace about the room.

  Françoise leaned against the door watching him. ‘You think . . . You really think,’ she said at length, ‘that it has something to do with Philippe’s fear of dying?’

  ‘I’m damn sure it has; it’s too tidy to be just coincidence. My dear Françoise, listen: there’s a record here of thirty-five male Montfaucons in the past ten centuries, thirty-five heads of the family, and that’s a hell of a lot in any case—and hardly any of them reigned to a ripe old age. Now, of those thirty-five we’ll count out nine who died in battles of various kinds; that leaves twenty-six, doesn’t it? Of those twenty-six, fourteen—more than half, Françoise—came to grief in what I can only call suspicious circumstances.’ He glared at his list again as if accusing it of homicide. ‘My dear girl, look at Gils here, 1422; a tree fell on him! I ask you!’

  Françoise came into the room and sat on the edge of the bed, deep in thought.

  Lindsay laughed again; he was a little drunk with excitement. ‘Has he ever said anything to you about this bloodstain on the family tree?’

  She shook her head. ‘He’s joked about it once or twice.’

  ‘Joked! There’s no accounting for tastes, is there?’ He consulted his notes again, frowning. ‘I suppose you could say that his father at least chose a new way of disposing of himself: but isn’t drowning a bit odd? Where did he drown, to begin with? Not in the lake out there?’

  ‘No, at Antibes. Nobody quite knows how it happened.’

  Lindsay heaved a deep sigh and echoed her. ‘Nobody quite knows how it happened. I bet the women of this family have been saying that, in just that tone of voice, all the way down the centuries. You don’t suppose there’s some crazy blood feud, do you? Vendetta, and all that? No, of course there isn’t.’

  Françoise said, ‘Do you know it’s past midnight? And have you been putting that stuff on your lip?’

  He stood patiently while she dealt with the bruise; then, when she was turning away, he caught her hand and restrained her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘about this afternoon.’

  For answer she reached up and kissed his cheek. ‘I’m not,’ was all she said. ‘Good night. You don’t look as though you’ll go to bed for hours.’

  He did not find any difficulty in going to bed, but sleep was another matter. After an hour of tossing and turning he gave up the struggle, switched on the light and reached for Montfaucon—a History by G. H. Latour. He was interested to find that this nineteenth-century publication seemed to make a point of not explaining anything at all about the deaths of the male Montfaucons, though it was true that M. Latour gave a few details about those who had actually been killed in battle—most of them fighting against whoever at that moment was generally accepted to be King of France—and he had been unable to resist the sad tale of Gils, upon whom the tree had fallen. All the others, without exception, were simply said to have died; the date was given, but no details. And in Volume Four of the Bellac Manuscripts there was a full version of the family tree, with notes; again, the Montfaucons who had died in battle were given special mention, but those who, according to Montfaucon—a Record of Thirteen Centuries, had been ‘murdered upon the road,’ or ‘killed while out hunting,’ or ‘set upon whilst returning from the Pilgrimage’ were tacitly ignored; even poor Gils, it was implied, had simply expired in bed.

  This seemed to Lindsay a rather curious state of affairs, almost as if the family were being a little coy about their death rate. He lay back in the bed and gave himself up to speculation: now, supposing this were true, supposing there was some sort of conspiracy of silence—even the Record of Thirteen Centuries was far from explicit—what in the name of heaven could be the reason? It could only mean that the Montfaucon honor or pride or good name would suffer if the absolute truth were known. This surely implied something like insanity; perhaps suicide had figured a little too blatantly in those mysterious causes of death; and if indeed Philippe had suddenly turned homosexual in his twenty-ninth year after a youth spent in almost continuous pursuit of various beautiful women . . . Insanity, sexual inversion, suicide: they all had been known to run in families . . . What about Grandfather Edouard, another one killed out hunting? Indeed what about Alain, Philippe’s own father, drowned while taking a swim at Cap d’Antibes? And that, in view of the family history, was a likely story . . . And what about . . . ?

  He awoke with a start. Someone, holding a knife, was leaning on his chest; the dark shape of him reared up and seemed to fall on him, blotting out the ceiling of the room.

  He rolled over, sweating, and turned on the light. The weight on his chest was, of course, M. Latour’s fat history; the dark shape was the canopy of the fourposter. He was flooded with that warm relief which comes with the knowledge that it was all a nightmare; then, suddenly, he sat bolt upright in the bed, staring. But he had been reading when he fell asleep; he had been reading, and the light had been on!

  He turned and stared at the bedside lamp. Somebody then had been in the room while he slept; yes, the first thing an interloper would do would be to turn out the light. He looked round, searching the shadows; he lifted up the lamp and shone it into the darker corners, revealing his shirt thrown over a chair, his painting things neatly arranged by a maidservant, his shoes in the middle of the floor.

  Or had he turned the light out himself? He couldn’t remember doing it, but, equally, he couldn’t remember leaving his shoes in the middle of the floor; it would be impossible to deny that his mind had definitely not been on mundane objects like shoes and lights. Yes, come to think of it he had probably switched it off himself.

  He was just relaxing again—just getting used to this comforting explanation—when he caught sight of the book still lying open across his body. A little frisson of fear ran down his spine.

  For the book was not M. Latour’s Montfaucon—a History; it was The Collected Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault.

  7

  The Yellow-eyed Girl

  Lindsay s
at in the sun, drawing. He did not feel in the mood for it, and he did not like the particular wing of the chateau which he was committing to paper, but at all times it soothed him to hold a pencil, and on this particular morning it afforded him the best possible excuse for sitting and watching. In spite of an almost totally sleepless night he felt very much alert.

  So he had been warned. ‘Fairy tales,’ he had been told, ‘are a better occupation for ignorant little boys than prying into matters which do not concern them.’

  At first he had been sure that only Françoise knew that he had taken those books to his room; then he remembered the anonymous someone—it had been a man—who had brought up his dinner tray and later removed it. And the maddening thing was that he, in his total absorption, had not even looked up at the fellow’s face; he felt that it would, to say the least, have been helpful to recognize him again. In the meantime he had to wait until Françoise emerged from her boudoir, which was never, as far as he could see, before midday; he knew that her children joined her there for breakfast; he also knew something of her addiction to long, hot baths—between the two, he imagined, her morning was completely occupied.

  And so he sat, drawing but not thinking of drawing; he was, in fact, wondering what would happen next.

  What happened next was that the boy, Christian, appeared on the terrace, saw him, and moved towards him. Lindsay was pleased; there is a sort of person who cannot resist a man with a pencil in his hand—often, but not always, they are people possessed of a certain physical beauty.

  Christian smiled his good morning, leaned against the low stone wall that edged the terrace, and gazed at the chateau. ‘Do you really like it?’ he asked with, Lindsay thought, quite genuine astonishment. ‘I think it’s grisly.’

  ‘It is rather.’ He looked up at the arrogant young face with interest. It had all the bounding vigor of extreme youth—the sunlight seemed to glow out of the brown skin rather than into it; the smooth planes were unblemished, faultless; the thick, black hair, so closely cut, was as glossy as the fur of a young animal.