"And what did Dr. Loti want with you?" she demanded before he had removed his hand from the telephone.
He hadn’t meant to engage her. Better to let Joly handle it. But when he floundered, searching for a reply, she prodded him.
"It was about Guillaume, wasn’t it?" Her fluty voice sliced through the chitchat. Conversations were suspended; heads turned in their direction.
"Yes, it was." Obviously, there wasn’t much point in denying it.
"What did he tell you?"
"I think it’d be better if we talked somewhere more private, Mathilde."
Gideon heard René’s imploring whisper behind him. "What is it? What the devil is he talking about? What’s the—?"
"Sh!" someone said imperiously, and the
seigneur du manoir
subsided.
"I am not afraid to talk in my own house, in front of my own family," Mathilde said firmly. She stood with her stocky legs planted, her deep, square prow of a bosom thrust aggressively forward. "I believe I have every right to know what you discussed."
Well, Joly wasn’t going to like it, but Mathilde was clearly determined to have it out right then, and Gideon wasn’t in the mood to play games putting her off. It had been a long day.
"Mathilde," he said, "I know Guillaume du Rocher was killed in 1942. And I know Alain
wasn’t
killed in 1942, but was alive until a week ago, playing Guillaume’s part."
There was a collective gasp and a few exclamations of consternation. René laughed disbelievingly. Then, abruptly, utter quiet, thick with expectancy and confusion. Stunned faces stared at Gideon. A lazy, disinterested tick of the golden clock on the mantel looped through the silence.
"And I know you know it too," he concluded flatly.
Under a layer of powder Mathilde’s face reddened momentarily. Then, like someone putting down at last a burden she’d carried too long, she exhaled a long breath. "Yes," she said, her voice perfectly steady. "You’re quite right."
Now there was an explosion of questions and ejaculations. People shouted at each other, at Mathilde, at Gideon. Mathilde waited for the noise to die down. "I think I should like to sit," she announced, and set herself bolt-upright on one of the crushed velvet chairs, hands clasped one on the other in her lap.
"And a glass of vermouth, I think." She drank briefly from the fluted tumbler that Marcel brought to her and opened her mouth to speak.
"Mother," Jules said, "you really don’t have to—"
"Oh, be quiet, Jules. What’s the difference now? It’s out. I knew he’d find out." Jules shrugged and withdrew, and Mathilde continued, not speaking to anyone in particular. "What Dr. Oliver says is true. Guillaume has been dead for forty-five years. The man who died last week was Alain du Rocher."
"Impossible!" Sophie said. "You think I wouldn’t know Alain? My own brother?"
"Well, you didn’t," Mathilde said proudly. "It was Alain here in the manoir all these years, and none of you guessed." She looked disdainfully from face to face, challenging them, then took a measured sip of vermouth. "Alain was not executed by the Nazis. They let him go."
"But—but—" Ray stammered.
Ben was more terse. "Why?"
Mathilde’s hand went to the strand of pearls that lay against her black sweater. "Well, I’m not really—"
"They let him go for informing on the others, didn’t they?" Gideon asked.
There was a shocked hubbub of denial, but Mathilde closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them and nodded. "Yes," she said, looking straight ahead. "They tortured him with electrical prods." She looked sharply up at him. "How could you possibly know that?"
He hadn’t known; he’d guessed. Joly had told him that Alain had been picked up at dawn, the others five or six hours later. He’d wondered about it at the time, and now he’d simply put two and two together. He didn’t answer Mathilde’s question. The more she thought he already knew, the more she’d tell.
"We all thought they’d killed him," she went on without emotion, "but he came here to the manoir the next night, a little before eleven. I’d been here for two days. We were all trying to comfort each other the best we could, waiting to hear something definite. Guillaume, René, me.You too, Sophie."
"Yes, I remember," Sophie said softly.
"Guillaume and I were the only ones still awake. When he opened the door and saw Alain standing there he was furious."
"Furious?" Ray asked. "Why should he be furious?"
"He grasped what had happened right away. He made Alain admit it. To him, Alain was a traitor, a coward. Don’t forget, Guillaume had already killed that SS pig a few hours before, in revenge for his death. His supposed death." She glanced up irritably at the ring of rapt faces. "Will you all sit down, for heaven’s sake? I feel like a—I don’t know what. And don’t look so ludicrously glum. This happened forty-five years ago."
They dropped obediently into chairs, pulling them around to face her. Gideon leaned against one end of a marble-topped side table, John against the other. Only Marcel and Beatrice, next to invisible, remained standing at the edge of the room.
"I had to pull Guillaume from Alain’s throat," Mathilde said. "I was so shocked and happy to see him alive I barely knew what I was doing. He was terribly weak from what they’d done to him. I took him to the kitchen to see if there was some brandy and something to eat. He tried to explain to Guillaume that he’d tried with all his strength to hold out, but Guillaume was beside himself, screaming with rage."
"No," Sophie said, almost to herself, "how could that be? I was here. If there was shouting in the kitchen I would have heard it from my room."
"No, my dear, you’re forgetting. You were hysterical. Guillaume made you take a sleeping pill at dinnertime. You were only ten, you know."
"Was I only ten? Yes, that’s right," Sophie said slowly, remembering. "But René?" She looked at him. "You didn’t hear?"
"I can sleep through anything," he said. "I always could."
"Go on, Mathilde," Ben said.
Mathilde sipped minutely at the vermouth. "Guillaume came into the kitchen after us. He threw Alain against the wall, he knocked him down, he—I truly believe he would have killed him if Alain hadn’t…" For the first time she faltered.
"…stabbed him with one of the kitchen knives," Gideon said.
"Oh, no," Claire said, her fingers at her mouth. There were more gasps.
"Yes," Mathilde said. "Guillaume had raised a fist over his head like some patriarch in the Bible—he was using it like a club—and Alain, to save himself, snatched up a huge knife from the counter and stabbed him. Once only, before I could move." Her lids flickered momentarily. "Guillaume looked so terribly surprised."
Gideon caught John’s eye and nodded. It jibed perfectly with what they’d learned from the skeleton: the upraised arm, the heavy kitchen knife, the single thrust.
"And that’s the story," Mathilde said with a shrug. "Guillaume was dead, and Alain ran off, half out of his mind with remorse. I had no idea what to do. I told everyone Guillaume had gone to join the Resistance. I didn’t mention Alain at all."
"You said Alain ran off?" Sophie said dazedly. "Where?"
"He
did
join the Resistance; in the north. He was very brave," Mathilde said defiantly. "He wasn’t a coward, and he was no traitor." She had finished the vermouth and Marcel stepped forward with another. Mathilde shook her head and handed him the empty glass. "The next time I saw him he was in the hospital in Saint Servan. I walked into a room and there in the bed, all—all
crumpled,
like a—"
And suddenly the whole starchy edifice came tumbling down. Her lips trembled, her fingers jerked on the pearls, and a single, hoarse, manlike sob was wrenched painfully out of her.
And no wonder, Gideon thought. What must it have been like when it dawned on that nineteen-year-old girl with skin like rose petals that the maimed, twisted horror lying in a crushed heap on the bed was her handsome, athletic lover?
René stood up, his arms outstretched. "My dear Mathilde—"
She sent him back into his chair with a peremptory wave. From somewhere she produced a little handkerchief and dabbed at her nose. The red splotches that had sprung out on her cheeks were already almost gone. The entire emotional outburst had consisted of the one tearless sob.
"Alain had no idea that Guillaume’s death was still a secret," she said, the handkerchief disappearing into wherever it had come from. "We decided the best thing was for him to pretend to be Guillaume. He didn’t think he could carry it off, but I knew he could. They were so similar in physique to begin with, and with his body so broken, who could say for sure that he wasn’t Guillaume?" She stared coolly around her, completely in control of herself again. "And of course he did carry it off. For forty-five years."
"But
why?
" Ray asked. "Everyone believed Guillaume was off fighting. Couldn’t you have let it go at that and just let people assume he’d been killed somewhere?"
"Yes," Ben said. "Why the pretense?"
"Well." Mathilde fingered her pearls and pursed her lips. It was a critical question, and Gideon could feel a fabrication in the making.
So did John. He made his first contribution, and it showed that he was doing fine. "Because you knew that under Guillaume’s old will Claude Fougeray would inherit everything."
Leona Fougeray, whose grasp of English was not as good as some of the others’, sat up at her husband’s name and shot a series of staccato questions at her daughter in French.
Mathilde waited until Claire’s brief, embarrassed explanations were done, then answered John. "Yes, you’re quite right. It was Alain’s idea, actually."
Leona snorted her disbelief.
"No, really, it was. It was important to him that the domaine stay with the du Rochers. The thought that it might go to Claude was horrible to him. I agreed with him." She looked at Claire. "I’m sorry, my dear. I’m sure you understand."
Claire didn’t look as if she understood, but Leona did. "Sure you agreed," she said in her Italian-accented French, her voice rising shrilly. "You knew everything would come to you one day!"
"That," Mathilde scoffed unconvincingly, "is patently ridiculous."
In the thoughtful, evaluative quiet that followed this, René leaned toward Jules, who sat alone on a plump little sofa beginning on his third martini, served to him with three stuffed olives on a toothpick, as he had trained Marcel to do.
"Did you know all this?" René asked him.
Jules seemed about to deny it, then lifted his shoulder in a nonchalant shrug. "Yes, I knew."
"
I
didn’t know it," René said without rancor.
Jules looked pityingly at him and sucked the first of the olives from the toothpick.
"Let’s go back a little, Mathilde," Ben said. "You buried Guillaume in the cellar? That’s his skeleton they found?"
"Yes, of course," Mathilde said crossly. "How many skeletons do you suppose are down there?"
Ray stared at her, his face gray. "But it was—it was
dismembered
!"
"Yes," Mathilde said after a pause. "That’s right. Marcel, I would like another vermouth after all." When it was brought she swallowed some, drew herself more erect, and set her gaze on the middle distance. "We didn’t know what to do with him," she said expressionlessly, as if reading
from a script in a language she didn’t understand. "With the body. We couldn’t believe it had really happened. We put him in the big stone sink in the kitchen and I helped Alain to—to begin dismembering him. Do you know the cleaver is still there? I was looking at it a few days ago."
The hand that lifted the glass to her mouth wavered slightly; not enough to spill the vermouth. "Beatrice used it for the
carbonnade flamande,
I believe."
"Oh, sweet Jesus Christ," Ben breathed, the only sound in an otherwise electrified silence.
"We were going to burn him, you see, and we knew he wouldn’t all burn at once," Mathilde went grimly on, determined to finish. "We made a fire in the kitchen fireplace. But when we—" A tic jerked in the flesh below her eye and was brought firmly under control. "—placed a hand in the fire, there was a terrible smell, and it would hardly burn, and it—it
sizzled,
you see."
"Mathilde, please stop," Sophie said unsteadily. "It’s enough."
But Mathilde plowed ahead, eyes fixed stonily on nothing. "I said we should boil the—the pieces first to get rid of the fat, but Alain simply couldn’t face it; he was at the end of his strength. So we wrapped them—the pieces—in packages we could lift, and took them down to the cellar…"
She was winding down, beginning to sag, a millimeter at a time, against the back of the chair. "And then we buried the packages under the stones," she said, winding down. "It took us until dawn. Then Alain ran off and I went home."
John had slid along the table to join Gideon while Mathilde had been talking. "Where the hell is Joly? She’s ready to admit everything."
Gideon nodded doubtfully. True, the mystery of the bones in the cellar was satisfactorily wrapped up, but he wasn’t so sure how much progress had been made on what had been going on this past week: Alain’s belated death in the bay, Claude’s poisoning, his own near-murder. But a few ideas about those were beginning to work their way to the surface too. That lumber in the courtyard had set him thinking. Had he been barking up the wrong tree? Or the wrong branch of the right tree? He looked thoughtfully around the room.
Beatrice and Marcel, their English almost non-existent, were watching Mathilde impassively. Most of the others stared at her, half-fascinated, half-horrified, the way people at a zoo peer through the glass at a monstrous snake.
"Madame…" Claire said in her gentle voice. "Aunt Mathilde… did you kill my father?" Not an easy thing to say inoffensively, but from Claire it was not so much an accusation as a timid inquiry.
It was, however, enough to straighten up Mathilde’s spine. She looked condescendingly at Claire. "My dear child, what an extraordinary idea!"
"Oh, yeah?" Leona said, this time resorting to her coarse and shaky English. Gideon’s well-trained ear told him she had learned it in Naples; probably the streets of Naples. "Maybe you was afraid of what he would find out—Claude." She was quite matter-of-fact now, he noticed. The idea that Mathilde might have murdered her husband didn’t seem to bother her nearly as much as the thought that she might have bilked him (and by extension, her) out of the Domaine de Rochebonne. If anything, her estimation of Mathilde appeared to have increased.