All havoc broke loose in March.
It began, innocuously enough, with a visit from my contractor.
When I’d first purchased the chateau, his name was given to me by the real estate agent as an expert in historical renovation. The chateau had been vacant for years before I purchased it, and the last “renovation” had been done in the 1920s. It had taken weeks to get an appointment with him, but as soon as he stepped in the front door, I knew he’d been worth the wait. He spent the entire day crawling over the chateau and the grounds, tapping at windows, knocking on wood, chipping at masonry, and scribbling comments in his notebook. At the end of the day, dust and cobwebs obscured his thinning blond hair, and dirt was caked into the wrinkles of his fifty-year-old face, but his blue eyes were twinkling, and his head nodding in an ever-more-confident cadence. He told me he’d be back the next weekend with some plans and an estimate.
I drove back to Paris right after he left and waited that next week with trepidation, having no idea the cost of such an undertaking.
The next week, we met again at the chateau. Thankfully, M. Mailly was convinced the chateau was structurally sound. His main concerns were updating the wiring and the plumbing. Fortunately, the former owners hadn’t done much besides install “modern” bathrooms and a kitchen, phone lines, and electricity. At least I would not have to undo anything they had done. We talked, at the time, about the stable. He commented that at a minimum, it needed reroofing, and to convert it into any sort of living quarters would require doing everything. I had decided to use it as a garage while I pondered what should be done with it. M. Mailly had many ideas: a restaurant, groundskeeper’s quarters, a conference hall, an interpretive center, luxury suite accommodations. I was hesitant to pour more money into the estate than was absolutely needed… especially when I wasn’t sure how business would be.
There was no doubt in my mind, however, about letting him manage the renovation of the chateau. I was even able to convince him to let me be the on-site supervisor. After that meeting, I returned to Paris, put in my notice with my landlord, and packed up and moved into a small room in the chateau.
It had been fascinating to watch M. Mailly’s subcontractors dismantel centuries-old walls and ceilings, perform their work, and then erase the evidence of their tampering. As the work came to an end, I agreed to call M. Mailly when I was ready to work on the stable and talk about creating a formal garden out in front.
Considering the number of guests I turned away, I decided that moment had arrived. My flow of revenue could only increase. And Cranwell was right, I needed to join the land of the living.
M. Mailly appeared exactly at 9:00 a.m. that morning. I’d just had time to change out of my working clothes and into slim black pants and a cadet blue spread-collar long-sleeved shirt. I tied a colorful scarf around my neck and drew on a short-waisted tailored black blazer. If we spent any time outside, as I expected, I wanted to be warm.
I met the contractor at the door and offered him an espresso.
He looked as if he was going to turn me down, but then he surprised me by accepting. After installing him on the settee in the reception hall, I went downstairs to fix a tray.
Cranwell and Lucy were there, just back from a stroll. He had already peeled off his barn jacket.
“Anything I can do to help you?”
“No. Thanks. I have a meeting with my contractor.”
“For what?”
It was on the tip of my tongue to say, “Contracting,” but then I thought better of it. “I’d like him to begin work on the stable.”
By that time, I’d started the espresso-maker, so I began putting together a tray of sugar and spoons. When I turned my attention back to the espresso, Cranwell and Lucy had gone.
Upon entering the reception hall, I found M. Mailly investigating one of the fireplaces, mumbling.
“Quelque chose qui ne va pas?”
“Non. Du tout. C’est superbe ce travail.”
Thank goodness! I was afraid that he’d discovered some flaw in the mantel. A mantel I’d paid 7,000 euros to have restored.
We stood at the dressoir, sipping espresso and looking at M. Mailly’s previous recommendations for the stable. I was especially interested in how it might be turned into a private suite. Cranwell’s stay had made me realize the value in having quarters that would accommodate a long-term visitor more privately. The contractor had also brought plans for a garden. Though I wasn’t interested in landscaping yet, it cost nothing for me to listen to his enthusiastic sales pitch. At the end of his spiel, I shrugged and suggested we take a look at the stable.
When we approached, I was surprised to find Cranwell and Lucy waiting for us.
“I thought you just took a walk.”
“We did.” Cranwell refused to elaborate on the subject and didn’t appear as if he were leaving anytime soon, so I introduced him to M. Mailly. Never having had the need to speak with the contractor in English, I was surprised at his fluency when Cranwell engaged him in conversation. Apparently, Cranwell’s profession wouldn’t allow him to pass up the opportunity to consult an expert on historical buildings. I didn’t mind sharing my contacts, of course, but I did get impatient when, after half an hour, we were no nearer the topic of my plans for the stable.
“Excusez-moi de vous deranger…” I interrupted the men as politely as I could, and then I took M. Mailly by the arm and steered him inside. My relationship with the contractor had been established in French, and despite Cranwell’s presence, it seemed somehow artificial to me to conduct our business in English.
M. Mailly wanted to reinspect the building. To think of a French stable as a barn would be incorrect. The two buildings have always served very different purposes. This stable was not original to the estate, but dated from the late 1600s. As such, it displayed the characteristics of the period; of stone construction, the one-story building had a rather large entry area, for storing conveyances, and one long, wide central hall, lined on both sides with stables. Each stable had a door on the wall that opened to the outside. The floor was pieced of stone cobbles which could be easily cleaned with a wash of water. It still smelled musty from generations of straw and excrement that had been ground between the stones.
Cranwell and Lucy accompanied M. Mailly and me on our investigation. Several times, I saw the contractor frown as he tapped on a wooden door or glanced up to see light filter through the roof. At last he finished his prowling and we stepped outside to talk.
“Le problème est que c’est une écurie.” He glanced at Cranwell as he said this and stopped to repeat it in English. “The problem is that this is a stable. One has gaps in the stones. One has holes in the roofs. One has doors which do not fit correctly.”
“Mais c’est peut-être… it is perhaps less difficult to convert because one must tear down for that we can build up. And this is easy to tear down.”
M. Mailly and I spent a good hour talking about the feasibility of my plans. And all that time, Cranwell refused to leave. I finally ignored him and tried to help M. Mailly do the same by keeping the conversation in French. It would have taken twice as long to translate every phrase into English. And besides, Cranwell had no stake in the matter.
It was decided that M. Mailly would contract an architect to draw plans for splitting the stable into a garage and a residence. He thought that the beamed ceilings could stay and that the stone pavers could be removed, the ground cleaned and leveled and the pavers replaced in a concrete foundation. He warned that the walls would need insulation and more windows would need to be added-at least in the residence area. I agreed with all of those suggestions. I did, however, want to keep as many of the doors as possible.
The contractor asked if he could check the attic in the chateau. I remembered that during renovations, he was concerned that there might be leakage in the roof if work was not properly done in the varied angles around the towers. Although we’d blocked access to the attic in my bathroom, we’d decided to install a door in Sévérine’s bathroom that would allow direct inlet to the area which had most concerned M. Mailly.
As we walked back to the chateau, I recalled that Sévérine was in Rennes, working at the University. I grabbed the master key and led M. Mailly up the central stairs to her bedroom. I had misgivings about going into her apartment without her knowledge, but I decided I could let her know later that evening. It wasn’t as if we were being deliberately nosy.
Walking into the apartment felt like walking into another world. I had decorated my chateau in period furnishings from different eras in French history. Sévérine had decorated her space much as I imagine it would have looked in Alix’s time. There were several oriental rugs hung on the walls, there was a fur on the floor in front of the fireplace. She’d hung blueberry-colored drapes around her bed to match the duvet. The only thing marring the illusion was her study area. It was barricaded by piles of books, most of which looked to be about the legend of King Arthur. Fixed to the walls were charts, maps, and drawings in a handful of different languages. Some were on gemstones, others seemed as if they detailed foreign alphabets. Another was a map of the Forêt de Paimpont, punctured with a scattering of map pins. I’d thought she was researching Alix. King Arthur, if he’d ever lived at all, had died centuries before. While I was extremely impressed with the depth of her research, I decided not to mention our foray into her room.
M. Mailly crawled around in the attic for a quarter of an hour before reporting that he was satisfied with the condition of the roof.
He left around 1:00 p.m. Just in time for Cranwell and I to have lunch. I made it easy on myself and served croque-monsieur sandwiches and a tossed salad with mustard vinaigrette.
After discussing the latest draft of Cranwell’s manuscript, he asked me about M. Mailly. “He seemed very competent.”
“He’s the best. At least in this part of France.”
“So what did he say?”
“He’s going to have an architect draw plans for making part of the stable a residence and leaving part of it as a garage.”
“Practical.”
“I think so. The next time someone like you comes, they can have the whole place to themselves.”
“Do I bother you that much?”
“No! It’s just that I was thinking you-or someone like you-could get more work done if you had your own space.”
Cranwell shrugged and picked up his croque-monsieur. “I’ve never seen you speak French before. You’re fluent.”
“I’ve had lots of lessons. And my grandmother was French.”
“You become a different person when you speak it. You hold yourself differently, your tone is different. Even your lips move differently.”
“Different how?”
“More confident. More secure.”
“It was business. And the French use muscles differently when they talk. If you look at older French women, they have a lot of wrinkles between their nose and their lips. American women wrinkle more toward the corners of the mouth.” I had noticed myself doing this a lot lately: contributing my observations to Cranwell’s pool of general knowledge.
We ate in silence for a minute before Cranwell spoke again. “Maybe you should make that stable into a manager’s apartment.”
“Why? I like my room just fine.”
“Not for you. For a professional hotel manager. You could hire someone to run this for you. It would give you freedom. I’m sure it would get you more business.”
“But then what would I do?”
“Whatever you wanted.”
At that point, the chateau was my life. I couldn’t imagine what I would do without cooking, without keeping it for guests, even when I didn’t especially want them. Some people dream of a life of leisure. I was not one of them. The prospect of a calendar filled with long blank days filled me with dread.
They were what I had left Paris to escape.
The beginning of the end came the following Wednesday. The weather was nasty. We had news of an unusually strong wind that would blow a storm in from the sea that night. It was one of Sévérine’s days at the University and as I thought, that afternoon, of her long drive back to the chateau, I began to worry about her. The road from Rennes wound through the countryside, and while not normally dangerous, it could easily become treacherous in a strong wind and driving rain.
The only thing I could do was to call her and tell her to stay in Rennes, but first, I had to find her number.
After having spoken to at least four unhelpful phone operators, I was finally transferred to the University switchboard, at which point I was passed to the Department of Celtic Studies.
When I asked for Sévérine, there was a long silence from the woman on the end of the line.
She transferred me to the head of the department.
“M. Dubois à l’appareil. Je peux vous aider?”
“Bonjour, Monsieur Dubois. Ici Mme Farmer. Je cherche Sévérine Dupont.” M. Dubois and I had met when I had given Alix’s books and journals to the University. He was a scholarly gentleman of about seventy years and had held his place on the faculty for at least half of his life.
“Ça fait longtemps qu’on n’a pas parlé. Et vous cherchez Mlle Dupont. Pour quel raison?”
I explained about the coming storm and how I just wanted to tell her to stay put.
“Mais, elle ne travail plus ici depuis six mois.”
It sounded as if he had said she hadn’t worked there for at least six months. That would have been shortly after she started living with me.
“Exactement, madame.”
After hanging up the phone, I felt rather unsettled. Sévérine had been working on her PhD, but her behavior had become erratic and she had been asked to leave. About six months previously. If she was not working on research, then why was she still living with me? From the looks of her bedroom, she was obviously still hard at work on something. And according to M. Dubois, it wasn’t on Alix.
There were a thousand questions I would have asked M. Dubois if only I hadn’t hung up the phone.
I sat for a long while, marshalling the facts I knew about Sévérine. They were actually very few in number. I culled my mind for memories of my interactions with her. Generally she was a sincere, honest person. Except for the time when she lied about the butter. Usually she was very dependable. Except when she disappeared in a hurry the week that I hosted the conference. And she seemed lucid except when she’d told me about her father and when she’d been so strange the night of the wedding feast. Those daggers in her eyes still gave me the shivers, though I hadn’t seen any more of them.
And that got me to thinking about sharp pointy objects. Like dinner knives, and whatever had dug into the mortar in my bathroom. And the long object that Sévérine had concealed behind her back the night of the first frost. What had she been doing outside that night? Lucy had barked as if there had been an intruder in the woods.
For that matter, Lucy had never liked Sévérine.
There was a stirring on the staircase and I jumped. My eyes searched the darkness of the stairwell and came to rest on a familiar figure. Lucy. And behind her, Cranwell.
Cranwell, who had been sleeping with Sévérine. Cranwell, who always seemed to be watching me. Cranwell, who had the ability to appear noiselessly at my side. What exactly was Cranwell doing with Sévérine? Were they working together on some… scheme?
“What do you know about Sévérine?”
He shrugged. “Not much more than you do.”
“Why did you come here?”
“To write my book. Freddie, what is this about?”
“What is your relationship with Sévérine? If you don’t tell me, I’m calling the gêndarmes.” I put a hand on the phone.
“Freddie, the first time I met Sévérine was the day I came here. You know that. What’s wrong?”
Outside, thunder cracked and bushes strained to rake the windows. I felt like I was trapped in a B-grade horror movie.
“Cranwell, I’m only going to ask you this one more time. What is your relationship with Sévérine?”
“I don’t have one other than our interest in the journals.”
I knew for a fact that wasn’t true. “You’ve been watching me.”
“Of course I’ve been watching you. I find you incredibly attractive.”
“Then why have I seen Sévérine come out of your room in the morning?”
Suddenly, he didn’t seem so composed. “Sévérine? How did-? I swear to you, Freddie, it was not the way it looked. I swear it. Can you tell me what’s going on?”
At that moment, the lights flickered once and then were gone. The power was out.
“Cranwell, if you move, so help me…”
“I’m not coming anywhere near you. Trust me, Freddie.”
Lucy sighed in the darkness. I felt a sudden pang of guilt, knowing that it was her dinner time.
Lightning flashed, illuminating Cranwell’s face. True to his word, he hadn’t moved any closer. He had found the last step and sat on it. There was nothing of a monster in his face, just an easily read confusion.
So I made a decision.