The Splendour Falls by Susanna Kearsley

“He was afraid, I think, that she would hate him. I used to think it terribly romantic, as a boy—like something out of Shakespeare.”

  François smiled softly. “That is why you came to Chinon in the first place, was it not? To do what your father could not?”

  “I put it down to destiny,” said Neil.

  “Ah, yes,” said François, “destiny has played a part. It was destiny, I think, that your old friend Brigitte married Armand, that she came to live in my house, and that she invited you to visit her.”

  “Destiny, too,” Madame Chamond put in, looking from Neil to Jim to François, “that the three of you should be together, here at our hotel.”

  Jim smiled. “That’s true.”

  “Although,” Neil qualified, “if you want to be technical, that was Emily’s doing.”

  “Me?” I did look at him that time, eyes widening. “What on earth did I have to do with it?”

  “Well, you took off like a rabbit when you saw me coming, and no one knew where you had gone. Poor Thierry was beside himself.”

  Thierry looked up suspiciously from his post behind the bar. “Comment?”

  “You were concerned.”

  “Ah. Yes, I showed to Monsieur Neil the photograph, a photograph of him, I was thinking, and he asks me where it came from, and I told him—”

  “So I rang up François,” Neil went on, recapturing his narrative. “I thought you might have gone up there, to have a word with him, but of course he hadn’t seen you.”

  “And then I am worried,” François said in turn. “Because I’m told that you were most upset, and so I called someone to come and stay with Lucie, and I came down here.”

  “Where he met me,” said Jim. “So you see, Emily, it really was your doing.”

  And the rest, I knew, had happened pretty much as I had thought it would. Danielle and Harry, on arriving at the meeting place to find I wasn’t there, had marched posthaste to the police station where, from all accounts, my cousin had stirred up a minor riot. The police in turn had telephoned the hotel to check my whereabouts. Naturally, that only raised the level of confusion as, with torches waving, everyone had formed a siege force the like of which had not been seen in Chinon since medieval times.

  In all, I’d heard, some fifteen people had swarmed up the château steps to rescue me. Odd, I thought—I’d noticed only one.

  Monsieur Chamond poured out the last of the Calvados and clucked his tongue regretfully. “Another bottle gone,” he said. “Thierry, would you mind…?”

  “Not at all.” Thierry could hold his liquor rather better than the rest of us, I thought. He walked with little effort to the door behind the bar, then swore with feeling as he bumped against some unseen object in his path.

  “Be careful,” Christian warned him, craning forward, “that is fragile.”

  “So is my foot. You should give it to her…”

  “Now is not a good time, I am thinking.”

  I caught the furtive sideways glance and sensed they were discussing me again. “What should Christian give me, Thierry?”

  For an answer Thierry hoisted up a flat brown paper parcel, two feet square. “This.”

  A painting, I thought. It could only be a painting. And I knew which one it was before the paper fell away beneath my clumsy hands. Christian watched my face, uncertain. Everyone, it seemed, was watching me. My fingers hardly shook as I pushed back the torn paper so that nothing obscured my full view of the lovely painting. Painting number 88, the river steps, with Rabelais a sleeping shadow in the background.

  Christian cleared his throat. “Martine, she told me that you liked that one, so I thought…” He knew why I liked it, too—his smile showed me that. It was a tight smile, almost forced. And then he put it into words. “I should have painted Paul there, yes? On the steps.”

  I shook my head, and touched the fifth step lovingly. “No need,” I told him, honestly. “He’s there already.”

  Harry was the only one who didn’t fully understand. He frowned and looked across at me. I’ll tell you later, my eyes promised him, only please don’t ask me now. Still frowning, he reached out a hand. “Can I see it?”

  “God, it’s brilliant, Chris,” Neil breathed, looking over Harry’s shoulder. “That river really moves.”

  Jim Whitaker leaned forward, too, to look. “It’s too bad,” he said finally, “that Didier Muret was never told what really happened to the diamonds. Think of all the trouble that it might have saved.”

  François looked shocked. “You cannot mean that.”

  “Sure. If he had known she threw them in the river, he’d have never tried to find them, would he?”

  “The river?” François raised his eyebrows. “Who told you Isabelle did this?”

  Jim faltered, thinking back. “Well, she did. At least, she told my father…”

  “What did she tell him, exactly?”

  “I’m not sure, it was so long ago. I always thought…”

  “Not the river,” François said, with certainty. “She might have said ‘the water,’ but not ‘the river.’”

  His tone, his words, had finally penetrated past my fog of Calvados. I turned in my seat to stare at him. “Do you mean… you don’t mean that you know where the diamonds are?”

  “Of course.” He smiled. “I helped her, I was there. She told me they were stained with blood, those diamonds, and she knew only one way to make them pure.” He shrugged, and looked an apology at Jim. “She didn’t throw them in the river Vienne,” he said. “She gave them back to God.”

  Chapter 32

  …all the past

  Melts mist-like into this bright hour,

  The ancient door swung open with a heavy groan as Christian’s key turned creaking in the lock. A shaft of torchlight caught a pillar’s gleaming edge, then traveled up to where the grasses waved upon the ruined wall. Beneath the clouds that raced across the moon, the Chapelle of Sainte Radegonde slept still and peaceful, sacrosanct. Nothing moved.

  And then the silence blinked.

  Christian’s keys dropped jangling to the ground and at the muttered German curse my cousin swung the torch around to help. “Just there,” Harry pointed out the keys, “beside the… no, beside that clump of flowers. Right.”

  “This would be easier,” said Christian, “in the daylight.”

  Harry grinned. “Well, we’re here now, so there’s no point having second thoughts. Besides, it’s all well and good for Jim and François to put off exploring until morning—they’re old men. They’ve lost their sense of adventure. Not like us.”

  “Jim Whitaker’s not old,” I contradicted.

  “Of course he is. He must be over forty, surely.”

  “Thanks,” said Neil, behind my shoulder. “I’ll just stop here and have a nap then, shall I?”

  “I didn’t mean…”

  “I know you didn’t.” Neil’s smile forgave my cousin’s blunder. “Emily, my dear, could you just shine your torch in that direction, so Christian doesn’t trip on anything? Thanks, that’s lovely.”

  Christian walked ahead, pinned by the torchlight like a cabaret performer in a follow spot. His shadow loomed macabre on the frescoed wall behind the sturdy iron grille. Again he clanked the ring of keys, selecting one to fit the lock. “Let us hope that Sainte Radegonde does not mind to be awakened.”

  “She won’t mind.” Harry’s tone was confident. “And anyway, it’s not as if we’re doing anything we oughtn’t. We’re just having a bit of a peek, that’s all. Giving in to normal curiosity.”

  Still, I half expected the saint’s statue to be frowning at me, disapproving, as I passed between the iron gates and entered the hushed chapel proper, where the cave-like walls arched up to rest upon the ghostly row of pillars. But when I glanced at Radegonde’s stone face she looked back benignly. Evidently, I thought,
even saints could understand the pull of curiosity.

  Thierry would be terribly put out when he learned we’d come up without him, but he’d gone to bed before us—it was really his own fault. The Chamonds, too, had given in to weariness, and Jim as well, and François had gone back up to the Clos, to help with Lucie. Which had only left the four of us—Harry, Christian, Neil and me—quite pleasantly awash in Calvados and irretrievably beyond the point of being tired.

  I had, for my own part, reached that magical plane of inebriation in which time begins to float and anything seems possible, which went a long way toward explaining why, when Harry had leaned forward and said: “Listen, I’ve got an idea…” instead of running in the opposite direction as experience would warrant, I had donned my jacket and trailed after him. Completely sober, I’d have had more sense. And I would never have come up that cliff path in the dark, alone or no.

  “I’ve got it open,” Christian announced, twisting the key to the third and final gate. Harry had wandered down the aisle to stand below the Plantagenet fresco, his torchlight angled up to catch the vibrant figures of young Isabelle and John. “Well done,” he said, in absent tones. He stood a moment longer, looking up. “I was afraid it might have changed, since I last saw it.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Changed? In one week? Hardly likely.”

  “Not one week, love. It’s been at least two years since I’ve been up here, to the chapelle. Had I known my hiding place was quite so close I might have tried to sneak in another visit. One forgets how very beautiful—”

  “Hold on,” I stopped him, frowning. “You were here last week. You must have been. That’s how I knew that you were missing in the first place—you left your coin, your King John coin, there on the altar, as an offering.”

  “No chance.”

  “You did.” My chin rose stubbornly. “Or at least, if you didn’t leave it there yourself, perhaps the gypsies…”

  “Darling Emily.” My cousin strolled toward me, hand in pocket. “I’m not all that daft, you know. I mean, they’re lovely people, gypsies, but they will take things unless you’re careful. My watch is gone, and my wallet… but they haven’t taken this.” He held his hand out, with the coin upon it, to show me. “With this, I was very careful.”

  I stared. It was the King John coin, without mistake, safe in its plastic case. I opened my own wallet, just to be sure, and drew out the matching coin. Harry stabbed it with a beam of light.

  “How curious,” he said. “I wonder how on earth it got there.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Christian leaned in closer for a better look. “It is very old, yes? Somebody must have found it on the ground here, near the tombs perhaps, and put it with the other coins as tribute to Sainte Radegonde.”

  “Y-yes, I suppose that’s how it could have happened.”

  “You don’t sound terribly convinced,” said Harry, grinning. “What other explanation is there—Sainte Radegonde herself, perhaps? A helping hand from beyond? Don’t tell me that you’ve found religion, Em.”

  “Of course not.” And I meant it, only… only…

  Behind the altar, lovely pale Sainte Radegonde just went on gazing at nothing in particular, her blind, carved eyes serene and peaceful. I put the coin back in her dish of offerings, and pushed it well down, frowning. Neil moved up behind my shoulder, and his breath brushed warm on my neck. “The world would be dead boring, don’t you think, if everything were easy to explain?”

  My cousin grinned. “The true Romantic viewpoint,” he pronounced. “Come on then, are we ready? Tunnels again, Emily. You’ll have to cope. She has a tunnel thing,” he told Neil, confidingly.

  “Oh, yes?” Neil glanced my way. “I’ll have to remember that.”

  Beyond the second gate the glare of harsh electric light seemed almost an intrusion. The chapel caves cried out for candles, I thought, or the flicker of a burning torch. The hanging bulbs and switches took away much of the mystery, and it wasn’t until we’d reached the steep and crooked steps that dropped down to the holy well that I felt again the ancient and eternal sense of wonder shared by all explorers.

  Harry must have drunk more than I’d thought. By the time the rest of us had slid with caution down the steps my cousin had stripped neatly to his underpants.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded.

  “Well, you can’t see anything from here. Just pebbles, really. If I’ve come all this way to see diamonds, then I want to bloody see them, don’t I?”

  I looked down at the narrow shaft of clear blue water, plunging several meters deep into the rock. “You can’t be serious.”

  He just grinned, stepped cleanly off the ledge and dropped feet-first into the well. The spray that came up after him was cold as ice. Neil knelt beside me, one arm braced against the pale stone wall to see I didn’t accidentally topple in myself. “We’ll fish him out again,” he promised. “Never fear.” The three of us peered over the edge, to watch as Harry forced himself toward the bottom, his hands splayed out in search of the elusive diamonds. “Runs in your family, does it?” Neil asked idly. “This sort of behavior?”

  “Well, yes, it seems to.”

  “Ah.”

  I might have asked him why he wanted to know, but our situation was already intimate beyond the comfort level, and at any rate there wasn’t time. My cousin broke the surface of the water in a burst of triumph, gasping air.

  “He was right,” he called up to us. “Old François was right. Just look!” And spreading out his fingers he stretched up his hand, palm upwards, to the light. I saw the glittering before I saw the stones themselves.

  “Mein Gott,” breathed Christian.

  “Precisely.”

  And then for some few minutes we were silent, all of us. I thought of Isabelle—Jim’s mother, François’s sister—standing here that summer evening while her world fell in around her, holding diamonds stained with blood no human hand could wash away. I thought of Hans… where had he been that night, I wondered? Miles away, by then. He’d sought redemption too, in different ways. He had surrendered, left his country, changed his name. Well, it was over now, I thought. Time everyone forgot, forgave, let be. Yom Kippur might have ended with the sunset, but the message of the Jewish holiday remained. People hate too much.

  “There are some coins down there,” said Harry. “Not old ones, but…”

  Paul’s wishing coins. “Just let them lie,” I told him.

  “Yes, Mum.” He grinned. “And these as well, I think.” He tipped his hand to let the diamonds tumble back into the turquoise water. “Bad luck to steal things from a holy well. Sainte Radegonde would have my head.”

  I watched the flashing glitter of the gems descending. They vanished at the bottom, amid a scattering of what looked like pebbles. How many diamonds had there been? I didn’t want to know. After all, they were nothing more than stones, small bits of stone that someone thought were pretty, and in that illusion lay their value. In the greater scheme of life, I thought, they didn’t matter a damn. Maybe all that mattered was the tangible, however fleeting—friends and family, feelings…

  “Oh, sod it,” Harry bit out. “Damn, I think I broke my finger.” He’d made his way to the sheer wall of the well and had begun to climb up, using the row of footholds gouged by the well-diggers centuries earlier. He pulled his hand free, flexing it.

  He was still several feet below us, and I had to lean to look. “It doesn’t look broken.”

  “Well, maybe not, but it might have been. There’s something jammed in here—a block of wood, it feels like.” Far more gingerly now, he placed his injured fingers back within the recessed foothold just above the surface of the water. “Hang on,” he said, “it isn’t wood at all. In fact it feels like… I’ll be damned.”

  “What is it?” Christian leaned down, curious, as Harry finally tugged the object free. I
only saw a small dark square the size of Harry’s hand. He passed it up to Christian. “You tell me.”

  It was filthy dirty, for one thing. My cousin’s hand left black marks on the stone as he swung himself up the few remaining feet to join us on the narrow ledge above the well. Christian had turned the packet over, sniffing. “Oil,” he pronounced. “It has been oiled.”

  “Waxed as well.” Harry pointed to the great untidy splotch of black that held the packet closed. “Somebody didn’t want this getting wet.” He was dripping water himself, but that didn’t seem to bother him. He slicked his hair back, glanced at me. “Emily, love, would you toss me my trousers? Thanks.” He rummaged for his pocket knife and prized the battered blade open. It was rather tricky, since the packet seemed to crumble when he touched it, but at length he’d sliced the wax seal through and gently, oh so gently, coaxed the stiffened edges apart.

  The squares of parchment had been folded up so tightly for so long that they were nearly solid lumps, and Harry didn’t try to force them open. He knew better. There were specialists who did that sort of thing. But he did forget his training long enough to turn the parchment in his still-damp fingers, searching for a scrap of writing, anything. “Oh, my God,” he said.

  I looked at him, and caught some measure of his own excitement. “What?”

  “You ought to know that signature,” he told me, stretching out his hand toward me. I looked. I blinked, a long blink, looked again. And then I raised my head to stare at him.

  I couldn’t even speak.

  Neil slid his gaze from me to Harry. “What are they?”

  “Letters.” My cousin’s voice had roughened slightly, as it always did when he became emotional. It echoed back from the still water of the well. “Love letters, I expect. Written by a king eight hundred years ago.”

  Christian stroked a corner of the crumbling oiled packet. “Eight hundred years? Incredible.”

  My cousin looked at me. “‘A treasure beyond price,’” he quoted, and his eyes grew moist. “That’s what the chronicle said Queen Isabelle hid, here at Chinon. Only it wasn’t jewels, or money. Damn, who would have known…?” He shook his head, his dreamy gaze returning to the crudely-chiseled footholds in the soft, unspeaking stone. And then, as if he’d suddenly remembered Neil and Christian wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what he was talking about, which meant that they were fair game for a classic lecture, Henry Yates Braden, PhD, promptly cleared his throat. “You see,” he began, “there was another Isabelle…”