As for my own unsettling experiences here, there are some I can explain, and some I cannot.
I am fairly sure that it was Sabine who set the lantern on the path. She has never admitted it, but a few months ago, Dom and I were invited to her family house. It was a sultry night and we all sat outside under a vine canopy. On a stone wall was the lantern. I hadn’t seen it since before we left for Cassis. It was in such a prominent position, and the curlicue of a handle was so pretty and distinctive that I am certain it was the same one. I chose to interpret it as a message, an unspoken apology and reassurance that it would not appear at Les Genévriers again.
Or was that all my imagination, a creation of my craving for security? Who knows?
What Sabine did admit was that she had been shocked and disappointed when the house was sold and the proceeds donated, according to Bénédicte’s wishes, to further ophthalmological research at the university. For a decade previously, apparently, the property was the subject of a will that would have bequeathed it to Arielle and her family, in recognition of all the support they had given. Sabine had planned to renovate the farm and run it as a modern version of the holiday rental business that Bénédicte and Marthe had started. When she found out that it would not be coming to her, as she had always believed, she worked hard to raise the money to buy it anyway. But that took years, and she was ultimately outbid by Dom.
So was it spite? Did she think that we might not stay if we felt uncomfortable, that we might sell up quickly? I may ask her one day, but not yet.
As for the rest of the odd manifestations, I have no easy explanation. I know what I saw on the moonlit path below the terrace; there was no mistaking the outline of a small female figure, and she was not Sabine. If I go out there on a warm night, even now my instincts are to look steadily up into the constellations. Then, half-afraid of what I might see on the path, I quickly glance below. I have not seen her again.
Inside the house, especially in the kitchen, I still sense that we are not alone. When I stand cooking at the island, with my back to the hearth, I often turn to check behind me. A feeling, no more, no less. It makes the atmosphere no less radiant; in fact, it may even be its origin.
There has been only one unnerving incident in the kitchen. I had left some books on the table. One of these was the old children’s book I found hidden in the hayloft, the Provençal tales. I was standing by the kettle, waiting for it to boil, when I heard a crackle behind me. I turned to see the book open like a fan and its pages flip over. Now, the back door was ajar, so it was just possible that a stray wind could send a few breaths across an open book and riffle the pages. But the book had not been open. I know with absolute certainty it had been closed, because a minute before I got up to make tea, I had it in my hands. I ran my palm over the pretty design of the cover and felt the pleasure any child would have had to possess such a volume. Then I placed it carefully back on the table.
I watched as the pages turned, not too fast, not too regularly, as if a fastidious and learned current of air were flipping through them. Then it stopped. The pages stood up in an arc but with no more animation. All was still. The merest hint of smoky church incense hung in the air like a blessing.
An incident as meaningful as the imagination wants to make it. Perhaps it was a matter of physics. Perhaps it was a sudden draft from the chimney. Perhaps I fell asleep and dreamed for a minute. Or perhaps it really was the spirit of Bénédicte leaping up from her place by the hearth to seize the book I now know she lost all those years ago. Just because Bénédicte’s ghost visitors were not what she feared, does not mean that all can be explained away
Throughout the autumn, the police have worked doggedly on the cases of the girl students. At one time, I even wondered if Pierre Lincel might have had a hand in them, but it seems that he, too, died, a decade or so out of reach of Severan’s men. They found him in an urn at the crematorium at Orange that no one had come forward to collect. It seems his messenger lied to Bénédicte about his death in a fruit-packing plant when he handed over her brother’s supposed last effects. Just one more lie that now surprised no one.
The first girl, Marine, was found alive, well, and protesting in Cassis, shortly after we left. She had, indeed, worked as Francis Tully’s model, then joined a squat full of other young people who moved south and neglected to leave explanations.
In November, a jealous ex-boyfriend, a computer technician from Le Thor, was charged with the murder of the girl found close to Oppedette by the truffle hound. The third girl, the one who disappeared near Castellet, was the victim of a hit-and-run driver, who eventually came forward after suffering months of remorse and posttraumatic stress. The fourth had dyed her hair and joined a religious sect.
All of which goes to show how dangerous it is to assume connections where there are none, to link events that have no link, to want tidy storytelling when real life is not like that, to draw too much on the imagination when it is so often misleading.
So we stay, Dom and I, as another winter approaches. The hornets are gone, the spicy black figs long finished. Walnuts drop from the trees like fat, brown tears.
We have to sweep up the vine leaves out from the terrace, but the grapes are dark purple and seemingly everlasting. They hang in straggly triangles, oozing floral muscat essence over the table where we can still eat lunch if the sun shines. It can shine any day of the year here, and often does.
Dom calls me, and he uses my real name. I walk over to where he has found some new beauty in the garden and we stand together, his hand proud on the swell of my belly.
A late bud has opened on the white rose I planted by the arch on the grassy terrace below the main house. Its perfume is exquisite: musky honey and spun-sugar and orange blossom, and its petals in bloom have the soft luster of baby skin. It has taken well to this spot, where I’ve pinned a bough to the lintel of what seems to be a blocked-up store. I think it must be the vault where Bénédicte buried her baby. I hope so. This is for her.
The atmosphere around the house has lifted, and our spirits with it; we live easily again with the past and the histories here, as we add our own to the stones. Our love story is a good one, deeper and stronger by the day.
Even as winter comes, mornings are crisp, and the big, blue sky seems to hang newly washed over the sea of hills.