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The next day the rain subsided and I realized that we had traveled far to the south, for the air was balmy and warm, and no snow lay on the ground. We were entering a country of plains and low hills and dunes, and for miles and miles the hillsides were covered with vines, tied to low wooden frames, their twisted branches bare of leaves.
“I can see that you are tired of traveling,” Étienne said, “but it will not be long now. Tomorrow, if all goes well, we will arrive at Des Cars.”
A spasm of panic gripped my throat. This would be the real test. Thanks to Étienne’s coaching, I knew almost everything I had to know; I could have drawn a map of the Château blindfolded, I could have named any of the servants, or described in detail the hangings in my—or Monique’s—old room. But there were so many little things! Family things, relationships with my—Monique’s family, things that Étienne could hardly have known. This was a fool’s errand!
But I had promised, and I must go through with it.
That night, at what I hoped was the last inn we should stay at, we had our evening meal served in my room, and Étienne started to question me again about details, then shook his head.
“No, it’s enough. More would only confuse you. If you make a mistake, don’t try to cover it up, or look upset; just say frankly that you do not remember. Now, another thing.” He paused and looked at me for a minute before saying, “I have written them that I am bringing you home, and I have made up a story which will, ostensibly, save your reputation. They will know it is not true, and they will know that I know it is not true, but it will save face all around. The story is this: that you did not run away with a lover, but rather, decided suddenly to travel alone and join me in Cannes upon my return from Italy. However, when you arrived there, the story is that you fell ill with brain fever, and were unable even to tell anyone who you were. Finally you recovered your health, and I found you there and am bringing you home.” He hesitated. “This story will also cover any slight lapse of memory you might have. Remember, however; you wrote to them soon after leaving, and you are astonished that they did not receive your letter, or that they misunderstood your leaving.”
“It sounds plausible,” I said slowly, “too much so.”
“Perhaps. But they cannot disprove it—and they will not quite dare to challenge it. Especially if I am at your side and, quite obviously, reconciled to you.”
I felt grateful to Étienne; he had made it possible for me to face them without the absolute awareness on both sides that I—or Monique—was a fallen and disgraced wife and mother. But, as he said, it was safe. If Étienne himself put forth the story which would cover his wife’s supposed misbehavior, there was no one else who had a right to give it the lie.
“I ought to tell you, Monique—” He stopped. “It is uncanny. There are times when I could almost believe that you are Monique, and you are playing this game for some damned double purpose of your own.” He stepped close, taking my shoulders between his hands in a tight grip. I saw again in him the fierce, hawk-like violence I had sensed in him that first night. He said, hoarsely, “Are you Monique? I shall go mad, never knowing, never quite sure—I shall go mad—” His voice broke. I could hardly speak past the lump in my throat; my shoulders were aching with the violence of his grip. But this could not go on. Deliberately, I spoke English to break the mood.
“You know very well that I am not, Étienne. I am simply a music-hall entertainer in your employ. I am glad you feel that I play my part so well.” The words were deliberate, cold, and I saw the light die out of his eyes as he released me. And at once I felt contrition. I should tell him, at least, who I was and how it was that I was so much like Monique.
And yet—I did not dare. Could he be acting? I remembered my dream. I read somewhere that a famous German had said that dreams are the unconscious mind working to show the conscious self what lies beneath the superficial awareness. What have you done with Monique? my dream-self had asked, showing me that whatever I might tell myself, I did not quite trust Étienne. A man capable of such a devious game might well have Monique alive and safely hidden from her family until he could lay hands on her child and her fortune. Or even—but I shied away from that thought. Étienne was no murderer; I told myself he was incapable of violence—but was I sure? Maddened with love of Monique, if he had found her unfaithful, what would he have done?
He said, “I am sorry if I frightened you. Of course you are not Monique....” But his voice still lifted with uncertainty.
I said, gently, “Monique is dead and in heaven, Étienne.”
“In heaven? After the mortal sin of taking her own life—” He broke of sharply and stared at me, his jaw dropped. He said after a long time, almost in a whisper, “God help me, I knew there was something I had forgotten. Is it possible—can it be—that you are not even a Catholic?”
“I most certainly am not,” I said with asperity.
He pressed his hands to his temples, and his face was almost comical in its chagrin. “If I were a better one, I would have remembered before this—there is a priest at the Château, and a chapel, and Monique’s family—” His voice trailed off. “Do you even know how to behave at Mass? Do you know Catholic prayers? If not—”
I shook my head. I knew nothing. Étienne’s face was a study in mixed emotions. “And as late as this,” he groaned. “Well, it’s not too late.” He turned and rummaged in his discarded traveling cloak. “Here is where we start. This is a rosary. Have you ever seen one before?”
Two hours later, I was exhausted and Étienne grimly satisfied; I knew the prayers of the rosary, and he was reasonably sure that I would not commit some incredibly gauche blunder at the services. Mentally I blessed my knowledge of Italian, which had made the Latin prayers easy for me. As for behavior at Mass, I still felt a few scruples, but I told myself that it was no worse than playing a part on the stage. I would have pretended to be a pagan, for Meyerbeer or Verdi; why should I hesitate to pretend to be a Catholic? They were, at least, Christian—though very far from the remembered, beloved Presbyterian church of my own childhood.
As for other matters—confession, communion—they would have to be gone into later. For at least a few days I could stall them off, and after that—perhaps we could make plans to leave Des Cars before it became too blatant.
Later, I was to learn, at least in part, why Étienne had carefully forgotten to inquire whether or not I was a Catholic. But for the moment he seemed content, and I banished my remaining scruples. I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb; if I were prepared to impersonate a dead woman, take over her home, her fortune, her child and her husband, why should I strain at gnats and refuse to pay lip service to her religion as well?
The next morning, beneath a damp blue sky strewn with moist flying clouds, we left the main road and began to travel along a narrow and rutted roadway, leading through low dunes, sandy and hummocky, covered with coarse salt grass. From the tops of the hills I could see a faraway, dull-gleaming surface which I knew to be the sea. There were patches of forests, and long stretches of vineyard; barefoot peasants in coarse unbleached smocks and loose breeches were working in the fields, mulching and tying the bare vines against the winter. They raised their heads and looked with dumb curiosity at the Count’s coach.
Later there were long stretches of dank looking under-growth, and Étienne touched my arm briefly and said, “Never ride here, or go into them on foot; there are acres and acres of marsh and bog, and there is quicksand—there is no telling where; if you got into the marshes you might never get out again.”
We came up to the top of a long rise, and Étienne called to the coachman to stop, and helped me to alight. From where we stood, we looked down a long hill toward the sea. He pointed out a lighthouse far down the coast, and, small and toy-like beneath me, a wide-flung stone building with towers and turrets.
“Des Cars,” he said softly.
Although he had described every room of it, over and over, I had not been prepared for such size and beauty—such incredible and ancient strangeness. It was a castle, and it was surrounded by wide parks, lawns, gardens and gates. He pointed to a few minute rust-colored flecks and murmured, “There are deer grazing in the parks.”
“I’m—overwhelmed,” I said, and studied it in silence for several minutes. I must not be overwhelmed. I must not be overwhelmed. I must accept it as my well-remembered home.
I looked at the lighthouse far to the South, on a long headland, then along the coast to the north. “Is that a lighthouse too, Étienne?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “it’s the old Norman tower—it may go back to the days of the Visigoths, for all I know. It’s been written about in some antiquarian’s books, I’m told, but I haven’t read them. It’s dangerous near there; old quarries and stone-pits, where they used to quarry for building stone; the tower is built with such stone, so the quarries must be very old, and some of them are filled with water.” He fell silent for a moment, then laughed. “And of course some of the old folk around here, the peasants, swear the tower is haunted—not to speak of the château itself. There is supposed to be a white nun, and the ghost of an ancient nobleman of Des Cars who was guillotined during the Revolution and carries his head about under his arm, or something of that sort. Monique used to laugh at these things. I hope you’re not afraid of ghosts!”
I laughed. “If I meet nothing worse than the family ghosts—!”
“It’s the living members of the family we need worry about,” Étienne said grimly, and turned me back toward the coach. “Come on, Monique. There’s no point in delaying further.”
I felt my hands turn cold as he handed me into the coach. The hour I was dreading was finally here. I hardly saw the beautiful park, the long drive toward the house. When I finally controlled my inner trembling, the coach had stopped before the main gateway of the château, and Étienne was speaking in rapid patois to a gray-haired groom who came to take the horses. He bobbed me a curtsy and gabbled something in his patois.
“He would like to know what should be done with your trunk, Monique,” Étienne said, a steadying hand on my arm.
I braced myself and said quietly, “Take it to my room, of course, and Annette will know what to do with it.
I felt my hands cold and trembling; Étienne’s firm grip closed over mine, but he did not speak, and I was glad. He could not help me now; I must play this through unaided, without his support, and by it both he and I must succeed or fail. He had done all he could. I freed my hand from his, but gently, and went up the stairs, my head held high, every step taking me further from myself and further into the part of Monique, Étienne’s wife, heiress to this château. By the time the great double doors swung open for me, it was Monique, Countess de Montigny, who entered them. Pale and proud, but Monique; Laura Monteith was gone, somewhere at the farthest back of my mind, hiding.
They say that the best actresses do not deliberately act a part, but after studying through the speeches and mannerisms of their character, put aside all thought of the work they have done, and simply become the part they are playing. Something like that happened to me, so that when the footman took my coat I said something gracious, hardly knowing what, and turned back, almost imperiously, to see if Étienne had yet joined me. Nor did I feel dwarfed or startled at the great vaulted hall rising above me, the curving marble stairs sweeping down from a railed gallery, the window of colored glass which turned Étienne’s face crimson and my hands green and blue. A door opened at the end of the hallway, and an old woman came toward me.
Far at the back of my mind, I suppose, I must have taken in each detail of her rich gray silk dress and lace widow’s cap, the rings on her shrunken and gnarled fingers, the elaborately curled and ringletted chignon which seemed too heavy for her slender neck and head. But this was no deliberate assessment of her, no careful assignment of her place among the many that Étienne had described to me. I was already running toward her, gathering up my skirts in one hand. She held out her arms and I went to them as if I had belonged there, feeling her withered cheek soft against mine, the tears cold against my face. She could hardly speak.
“Monique—my child, my dear, dear child—my darling child—”
I felt my own throat tighten with foolish tears. I kissed the wrinkled cheek and rested for a moment in her brittle embrace. “Grandmother,” I whispered.
She stood erect, releasing me, her firmness so fragile that she looked like a dried reed. She said, her voice trembling, “I was afraid—we were afraid we would not see you again, Monique—how could you—”
“I don’t know,” I said, the words coming to me from some deep place, as if a ghost spoke through my lips. “I can only say that I must have been mad not to let you know, Grandmother.”
The Dowager Countess Des Cars gave me a fleeting smile and turned to Étienne. “What can I say to you, when you have brought her back to me?”
She must have been nearing ninety; but her eyes were clear brilliant blue, dimmed not by age but only by the tears making small bright tracks down her cheeks. She kept my hand in her fragile clasp as she leaned forward and kissed Étienne’s cheek in welcome. His voice was kind as he said, “I wish everyone were as glad to see me as you, Grandmother.”
The door to the right opened, and a shrill and pettish female voice called out irritably, “Is it Étienne? Bring him in, then.”
I did not wait for Étienne to lead the way. It was as if this were my own house, as if I had learned it from my own knowledge, not from Étienne’s carefully drawn map and his more careful descriptions. I let Étienne take the arm of the Dowager Countess, as I went into the smaller drawing-room which was the family’s living-room.
The woman in the doorway was great and gross, dressed in a tight-laced dress of brilliant blue with a total unnecessary bustle. Her face was red and badly powdered, an ivory comb askew in hair which owed more to henna than most respectable women would admit; pince-nez wobbled on her lumpy nose. I felt mingled pity and laughter rise up in me, as I knew they must have risen up in Monique, as she spoke in a tight-mouthed, dainty voice.
“So you have returned, Monique?”
“You see me, Aunt Isabelle,” I said quietly, but without lowering my eyes. Étienne had warned me that they would regard me, despite his carefully constructed story, as a fallen women; but I could not, could not, bring myself to play the part of the repentant adulteress pardoned by her devoted husband. Let them think me brazen, if they wished, or proud; or perhaps it was simply the pride of a young and lovely woman toward a censorious one, so old and ugly that she could never be tempted to sin. I carried the war into the enemy’s country. “You are looking better than ever, Aunt.”
She made an indescribable sound. “Hmph! You’re looking better than I’d have expected after brain fever. I thought they’d have cut off your hair—don’t they usually?”
“I was lucky,” I said softly.
She turned and said in a shrill, hectoring voice, “Gaston, come and speak to our returned—niece.”
A man in a shabby snuff-colored suit rose from a deep chair. He had a sneer instead of a smile, but as his eyes fell on me, the sneer slid off and was replaced by a look of sheer, absolute horror. He opened his mouth and could not speak. He raised his hand and for a minute I thought he was about to cross himself; but he arrested the motion and pretended to be scratching his nose. His hand trembled and he did not offer it. He swallowed and I saw his gross Adam’s apple move in his thickly veined throat. He was bone white. Corpse white. He rubbed his eyes and looked at me again as if he had expected me to melt away into the tapestry behind me. His jowls moved again but no sound came.
Étienne’s hand touched my elbow, they gripped it with a paralyzing grip. He said in a strange voice, “Come, come, Monsieur, you have not yet greeted your niece. There is no need to treat Monique as if she had returned from the dead.” Carefully, he walked around me and looked at my face. “It is true you are pale, ma chérie, but if the trip has fatigued you so greatly that your uncle takes you for a ghost of yourself, then perhaps I am to blame for allowing such exertion. I thought only that you were eager to be home and again in the arms of your loving family.” He raised his head and looked directly into Gaston’s face, which by now was an indescribable mélange of emotions. What on earth was the matter with the man?
“I—of course—welcome home, Monique; I am glad to see you looking so well, I—”
“Tiens,” said a cheerful voice from the fireside. “Am I to be left out of the welcome, simply because I cannot run into your arms, my dear? The old devil has my feet again, and I sit here like the prince in the fairy tale, marble from the waist down.” The gray-haired man in the deep chair had round, apple-bright cheeks. His feet, elevated on a stool, were monstrously swollen; his bulky carpet slippers slit at the toes so that lumps of knit crimson sock protruded from the holes. “Damnation, girl, come here and give your old Uncle Louis a kiss.”
I went swiftly to the man in the chair. His forehead, as I touched it with my lips, felt burning hot. He grinned at Étienne, and I noticed with astonishment that he alone as yet had addressed him as tu. “And how was your trip, Étienne, in this devil’s own weather, all the way from—Cannes, was it? Damnation, but I could use a bit of that sunshine myself, instead of cold spring winds and sour faces!”
“The trip was not bad, but there was mud on the road, and one of the horses went lame,” Étienne said, and for the first time since he had left the Dowager Countess, he relaxed a little. “I am sorry to see you ill, Uncle Louis.”
“It’s age, my boy; it gets us all; it’ll get you too, sooner or later,” he said cheerfully. “Monique, your Aunt Sidonie has gone to church; she will be distressed that she was not here to welcome you. I told her there was a great deal she misses by being so pious.”
The door opened abruptly, and a cold draft of air lifted the hangings on the wall. A tall young man, fair hair swept back from a high forehead, clad carelessly in hunting clothes, strode into the room, and at his heels a dog yapped and barked; a lovely, gold spaniel. She ran at once to me, nosing at the hem of my skirt, and this snapped me, suddenly, out of the almost exalted and automatic awareness of Monique. My impulse was to fall to my knees and pet the animal; yet I remembered Monique’s loathing of dogs and backed away, my eyes going up to the young blond man. He was tall—taller than Étienne—and his fine, delicate features held a strange look of mingled curiosity and scorn. I knew this to be the young half-brother of Monique’s father, only a few years older than Monique herself. Playing my part—but now, under Philippe’s sardonic eyes, sure I was doing it badly—I tried to make my voice shrill.
“Ugh, Philippe, take that wretched creature out of here!”
“You are inconsiderate,” the Dowager Countess said in her gentle voice. “You know how our Monique dislikes dogs. And in any case, the drawing-room is no place for your hunting dogs! Take them out at once, my boy.”
“Yes,” Philippe drawled, “I know how—our Monique—dislikes dogs.” His eyes rested on my hands as I withdrew my skirt further from the muddy paws of the beautiful animal. “And I always thought that dogs disliked our Monique. But this one rushes to her as if she were—pardon my language, Isabelle—a very bitch in heat.”
Étienne stepped forward, his face darkening with rage. For a moment I thought he would strike Philippe. Aunt Isabelle gave a little scream of consternation and Philippe ducked uncontrollably, just enough so that he looked ridiculous when Étienne confronted him, unsmiling and grim.
“Tais-toi, Philippe; the manners and language of the schoolroom are far enough behind you that I can at least expect you to speak with respect of your niece—and of my wife! And if you forget yourself and speak indecently in the presence of ladies again, I will take it upon myself to teach you the manners you never learned!”
“Stop it, you young hotheads,” Uncle Louis said genially, and Uncle Gaston, his face still pale, stepped quickly between them.
“Étienne— Philippe—”
“Monsieur,” Étienne said coldly.
Philippe’s smile was mocking, turning from Étienne to me. “Come, come; such sensitivity about a carelessly chosen word—between cousins at that! And who would expect you to be so aware of good manners, Étienne? If it comes to a lesson in manners—” Ostentatiously he stepped back from Étienne, looking at him with feigned surprise. “I thought for a moment that you were about to forget yours and strike me. And whatever may be the custom where you came from, we do not act like that at Des Cars.”
Étienne said grimly, “We damn well will act like that, unless you learn manners.”
Now something deadly moved behind Philippe’s eyes, but he went on smiling. “And if you should strike me,” he murmured, “I would have no recourse except that of a gentlemen: to ask for satisfaction—”
Étienne laughed harshly. “A duel? Pistols?” he said. “Proud of your hunting? I can bring a wild duck down from the wing four times out of four, and you know it. And I am not living in the past—nor have I any wish to spend a year in prison or pay a fine I can’t afford, just to satisfy the vanity of a loud-voiced schoolboy who wants to boast of having fought a duel! Duel be damned—I’ll take down your breeches and give you the good thrashing your father should have had the sense to give you in the schoolroom! In God’s name, Philippe, act your age!”
Philippe turned a dull crimson. The silence was broken by an ugly, smothered sound; Aunt Isabelle was holding her hands to her face and snorting and snickering into them. Philippe whirled on her angrily, but the Dowager Countess made an imperative gesture, and he turned away like a schoolboy rapped over the knuckles. He looked at me, and if ever I saw murder in anyone’s eyes I saw it then; but he bent wrathfully over the dog who had been the innocent occasion of this rage. “Down, boy! Get back, you damned hound!” He dragged the dog savagely toward the door, bellowed to someone outside, and closed the door with a bang. By the time he came back to me, he was all suavity again, and I felt sure I must have dreamed or imagined that moment of savage, murderous rage.
“My apologies, Monique.” One swift, blazing glance met my eyes; then he dropped his own again and said gently, “Welcome home, Monique. We did not expect to see you again.”
“And we’re sorry to disappoint you,” Étienne said sharply, “but enough of this, in God’s name; Monique is tired from the journey. She has been ill, and you might at least allow her to recover her strength before you begin your daily clamor.”
“Yes indeed,” Uncle Louis said, jerking a bell rope at his side, and when a stout maid in an all-enveloping apron appeared, popping in the door like a jack-in-the-box, he ordered her to bring sherry and biscuits.
It was a welcome pause. I sipped the sherry, cautiously, sitting on the Louis XIV chaise-longue beside the Dowager Countess. She kept patting my hand with her frail one as if she could not have enough of me, as if she wished to keep reassuring herself again and again that I was really there. Étienne and Uncle Louis chatted about the roads while Étienne nibbled at the biscuit and Uncle Louis guzzled two huge glasses of sherry and devoured the biscuits by handfuls. Philippe lounged by the fireplace, leaning on the mantelpiece to the imminent danger of some Dresden figurines there, leaving his wine untasted and watching me with a shrewd, cold stare. Did he suspect? Had I made some ghastly blunder that only he could know? If that were so, why did he not at once denounce me as an imposter? Aunt Isabelle fingered some fancywork. Halfway through our sherry, Aunt Sidonie came in, still with the black church veil over her dark handsome curls, a large good-looking woman with a pleasant smile and a Breton accent, greeted me with an effusive hug, and began to chatter to the Dowager Countess about the robes of the choir boys at Benediction; they were absolutely rags, no matter if they called them surplices, and something should be done about it....
“Perhaps Monique will help you in your favorite charities and sew them some surplices,” Philippe drawled. I should have been warned by the glint in his eyes, but I said that I would be glad to do what I could.
“The way Monique sews, they would be no better off,” Aunt Isabelle said sharply, and I bit my lip, not knowing what I could say or do. Étienne came and put his hand on my shoulder.
“Monique, you are tired, and you should rest before time to change for dinner—”
“Well, I call that unnatural,” said Aunt Isabelle venomously, “such a short time at home and you have not even asked about the health of your own dear child.”
I felt Étienne’s hand tighten on my arm. He turned to the Dowager Countess, and said with great gentleness, “If he had not been well, Grandmother would have told us.”
The hand of the Dowager Countess was light on my arm. She rose, steadying herself by my support, and said, “I promised him to come and say good night. Perhaps you would like to come up alone and see him, Monique? If both Mama and Papa come, he will be too excited to go to bed and sleep.”
I looked pleading at Étienne, but he had turned away. I must try my wings alone some time, I supposed; but I was suddenly very weary and the almost supernatural sense of being Monique had deserted me. I braced myself and followed the Dowager Countess. But there was still one pitfall to be crossed. I had dismissed Aunt Isabelle as an ugly virago, Aunt Sidonie as a silly and harmless middle-aged dame of the sort my father had called “married old maids, wrapped up in their church and their cats instead of the children they should have had.” But it was Aunt Sidonie who put the worst stumbling block in my feet and almost exposed my game before it was well begun. She faced me, smiling her pink and foolish smile. “Oh, my dear, and your little secret you told me, though you still look so slender and pretty—but you told me before you—before you left us—that you were enceinte—”
For a moment I was struck so speechless that it must have showed on my face. I was conscious of Uncle Gaston and Philippe watching me, of Étienne’s face stopped in mid-emotion, as it were, and for an instant I felt a furious sense of embarrassment, of outrage, felt the color rising in my cheeks. But Étienne was quickly at my side, saving what seemed lost. He said, and perhaps only I knew that his anger was simulated, “I told you my wife had been ill; let her alone.”
“I’m sure I meant no harm—” Aunt Sidonie began, but Étienne brushed rudely past both and was gone. The Dowager Countess tightened her hand on my arm, in love and support, and I suddenly felt the wild desire to throw myself at her breast and sob out the truth. But I controlled it, following her up the stairs.
She leaned on my arm, and at the top I hesitated briefly, once again falling back on Étienne’s careful coaching, before taking the left passage. Carefully, I counted doors, finally pushing one open into a brightly sunlit room. A plump peasant woman in a white apron with crossed straps was kneeling on the rug, an enormous towel swathing a small wriggling body with soft pale-brown curls. The baby broke free of the towel and came running toward us, clasping his great-great-grandmother around her silken knees. I looked down, my throat suddenly aching, for it was Monique as a child who looked up at me from the boy’s face: the heart-shaped triangle of face, the great hazel eyes fringed with dark lashes, the dainty mouth and chin, far too lovely for a boy; it was Monique’s own child-self which danced, small and wriggling, on the hearth rug. “Gra’mere!”
Feeling cold and awkward, I knelt and held out my arms. I knew so little of children. The nurse broke into a scolding flow of chatter, pushing him toward me, but he hung back.
The Dowager Countess, mistaking my discomfiture, murmured, “My dear, children forget so very quickly— Come, ’Tienne, come to Mama.”
He paused, looking up at me wide-eyed.
“Mama?” he said, tentatively, then burst into tears and, wailing, flung himself at me. “Mama!”
I scooped him up in my arms, feeling the small soft body, raining kisses on his face.
Monique’s baby. Monique’s? Mine. I wept inwardly. I wept for Monique, for her motherless child—and for myself—alone, hoping against hope to know the truth.
The child in my arms, I vowed: I would know. And soon.
