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“The château closes to the public at this hour,” he said, with an uncaring shrug. “But it’s no problem. The workers stay on for a while yet, to finish up the closing, and they know me well. We’re neighbors.” He stepped aside to let me go ahead across the short bridge spanning the dry moat that split the grounds. Directly in front of me, the ruined Moulin Tower rose like a sentinel at the château’s westernmost edge, its jagged, roofless silhouette a foil for the brilliant wash of color on the billowed clouds behind.
It looked as though the very sky was burning.
“It will be still more splendid in a moment.” I heard the click of Armand’s cigarette lighter and smelled the drifting smoke as he moved up to join me. “I hope you found your cousin well?”
My mouth went dry as dust. “What?”
“You have,” he said, “a most revealing face.”
Some distance off a set of ancient hinges creaked a protest that was silenced by a final-sounding thud. They were closing the gates to the château.
“It was bound to happen, I suppose,” Armand went on, lifting one hand to gently touch my hair, “but I’m still sorry he had to tell you.”
Chapter 30
It needs must be for honor if at all:
I felt the change in my own eyes. He dropped his hand.
“You are afraid of me,” he said. “I didn’t want that. I didn’t want…” The dark eyes angled downwards, shutting me out, and he pulled sharply at his cigarette.
My heartbeat lurched arhythmically and for a second time I steadied it. Don’t panic, I thought, just stay calm. Surely Harry would by now have reached the meeting place, the place where the steps started down to the fountain square, and he would not wait long before deciding something must have happened to me. Unlike Harry, I was never late.
No, I reassured myself, he’d realize something had gone wrong and he’d go straight to the police, as he’d intended. And then the police would telephone the château where, somewhere, a handful of straggling staff members were still working through their closing duties, and the police would ask if anyone had noticed me upon the road, and then someone was bound to tell them… Yes, I thought, trying desperately to convince myself, that’s how it would happen. If I only kept my head and kept Armand in conversation, then everything would be all right. It was only a matter of time before someone came for me.
He will come… The promise, in a voice not quite my own, flowed, through my mind and over me and filled me with an oddly quiet calmness. I cleared my throat. “May I please have a cigarette?”
I was breaking faith with Paul, I knew. Nothing for pleasure, that’s what Thierry had said was the rule of Yom Kippur. No food, no drink, and certainly no cigarettes. And yet my request was not for pleasure, it was purposeful. It bought me time. If Armand found it odd that someone shut into a deserted ruin with a murderer would think of smoking, he didn’t let on. His face remained impassive as he handed me the packet and the lighter.
The wind rose wilder up the tower walls. It took me several tries to light the cigarette, the flame kept blowing out.
Armand stood watching me. “I wouldn’t have hurt you,” he said.
Past tense, I noticed. Lovely. My own voice, to my surprise, was nearly normal. “So what happens now?”
“I don’t know.” He looked suddenly an old man, very tired. “It’s… difficult, this business. And so much, I think, depends on you.”
“On me?”
“What you decide.”
“I see.” I felt a fleeting stab of warmth upon my cheek from the dying sun. “Well, I don’t see how I can decide anything. I haven’t heard your side of things.”
“And do you want to hear?”
“Of course.”
He looked at me a long moment. “I don’t believe you.”
“Believe what you like.”
“No, you’re only saying this because you’re frightened…”
“Well, of course I’m bloody frightened!” I shot back, against my best intentions. “You’ve killed two people that I know of—maybe you killed your wife too, I don’t know. My God, Armand, I’d be a fool not to be frightened!” I broke off suddenly, horrified by my outburst. Never antagonize your attacker, that’s what all the advice columns said, and never let him see your fear. My heart sank miserably as I waited for Armand’s reaction.
He was watching his own cigarette glow crimson in the angry wind. He flicked the end and loosed a swirl of sparks that quickly died. “I didn’t, as it happens, kill my wife.” His smile was very tight, and brief. “I thought about it, off and on. She was most… irritating, sometimes, and there were days she pushed me almost to my limit, but in the end she died quite naturally—her heart…” He raised his eyes then, looked away. The hand that held the cigarette was very steady. “Then Didier, my loving brother-in-law, he came to me and asked me if I knew about the will. Brigitte’s will. Not the one she’d made when we were married, but the one she’d written out herself the week before her death. Didier, he was a clerk for Brigitte’s lawyer, then—he’d seen the envelope addressed by her one morning in the office post, and being curious he opened it. It was a legal will, he told me, signed and witnessed, everything. Brigitte,” he said, “had left me every cent she owned, on the condition that I turn my house, my land, into an institute for her damned artists. God!” The word came out with all the bitterness that lingered still within him. “Without her money, I was lost—I had so little of my own. And yet, to get the money she would make me give up all I did own. She would have robbed her daughter of the legacy we Valcourts have been born to since before the Revolution. No,” he said, his voice low and determined, “the money, it was Brigitte’s, but the land… the land is mine. It will be Lucie’s land when I am gone
, and no one has a right to steal that from her. No one,” he repeated. I glimpsed a violence in the deep black eyes, a quiet violence, carefully contained, but even as his gaze swung round to lock with mine it vanished like a thing imagined. “Didier, he knew how I would feel. He’d counted on it. He had kept the will locked in his desk; the lawyer hadn’t seen it. A little bit of money to destroy it, that’s what he’d been after, and when Brigitte died, well… he knew he could ask for any price, and I would pay it.”
