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I HOPPED ONTO A ROUGH bench strewn with chisels and white dust from some recent repair. "Didn't Marsford's wife have plenty to say about his suicide idea?" I asked.
Tom leaned against a nearby post and stuffed his hands in his pockets. "Marie’s grandmother told her Claudine thought he gave up on that when they married, and that he appeared to be happy."
"But?"
Tom sighed heavily. "But I think he loved her enough to go through with it."
"No!”
Tom held his ground. “At first they must have been pretty compatible, but as time went on, Marsford had to know he was becoming a less desirable partner. I think he tried to ensure Claudine’s fidelity by promising to take himself out of the picture at sixty. Unfortunately, it didn't work. Marie’s grandmother saw her in the village with another man. If Marsford knew, vanity kept him quiet.”
I had to ask. "Are you sure he stuck to his plan? Marie hinted at a discrepancy."
"Marie referred to the dates. Hugh’s big bow-out was planned for November 10, 1951. Claudine was seriously ill with pneumonia when that day arrived, and the possibility of her death changed everything. Hugh stayed at her side, and she actually died on November fifteenth.”
"So why go through with the suicide?"
"Because he was still faced with growing old, a phobia he’d had ever since he lost his first wife. Losing another must have been intolerable. He coped for a while but gave up trying on May twenty-ninth, 1952.”
“How exactly?”
“Just as he’d always planned, an overdose of sleeping pills...”
“...in his parents’ bed,” I finished for him. Remembering the unpleasant feeling I experienced viewing the bed, I muttered, “crazy” loud enough for Tom to hear.
"Yup," he agreed. "Hugh was a crazy old bastard, but if he wasn’t, there wouldn’t be this.” He spread his arm to encompass the vast quantity of sculptures in various stages of completion. They filled the tables and walls full of shelves, busts mostly, each one capturing someone’s character like a specimen insect skewered with a pin. Marsford had been very, very good at what he did.
"Prolific, wasn't he," I remarked.
"About average,” Tom replied. "I imagine you'd be up to your ears in paintings if you never sold one."
"Quite right. I often am."
My mind slipped out of focus, nagged by something amiss.
It was probably my lingering repulsion over Marsford's suicide. I wanted to understand him. Touching a figure he had carved, I felt the beginning of a rapport, as if we were both sympathetic students of human nature. Yet to my mind someone who perpetuates life with art would never snuff out his own. More to it than that, I supposed.
Tom thought I was paying attention. "He wanted to establish a new trend in three-dimensional art," he said. "To be free of every restriction, he never bothered with rules, just hammered away until he liked what he saw." His smug smile bated me, and I bit like I always did.
"But he loved details just as much as I do. See the fly on the nose of this spinster?" I framed a plaster bust of a thin-faced woman with my hands. Cross-eyed and pinched-lipped, the comical caricature was also cruel, a harsh sentence for the woman’s cold and nasty personality.
A tactful knock interrupted what might have been a daylong debate. Tom excused himself to talk with Henri, the gardener. As they spoke, the man assessed me through piercing, hostile eyes. He had the proud, but suspicious, quality of a person long entrenched in the same menial job. His worn overalls were clean and pressed. The sparse brown hair neatly combed across the top of his head revealed as much vanity as skin underneath. Even the unshaven face held an earthy dignity while the dark eyes leveled at mine conveyed a potent resentment.
Henri needed instructions about a ditch the plumbers would be digging to fix the fountain in the courtyard. Tom answered his questions before introducing me. I nodded as cordially as possible under the gardener's unfriendly glare. Tom finally perceived the tension between us, put his arm around the Frenchman, and guided him outside with assurances–in French–that I would not interfere with his work.
After Henri had gone, Tom explained, "He's afraid you'll be the dominating American he expects you to be. Your French might have helped there. Sorry. But you will hardly be bumping into each other unless you sit on his geraniums."
Or if his hobby is pulling down stone walls, I thought to myself.
While Tom was thinking like a curator, I asked about my own duties. "Who might I be bumping into?"
"Yes, we keep forgetting I have a plane to catch." He began walking toward stairs at the right side of the main building.
"Tours have been shut down," he said, "so you won't have any problems there. And I'm putting a sign on the front gate stating that we're closed for repairs–which we are. Some masons are coming to fix three areas the vandal hit, and in a few days the plumbers will be working on the fountain, the kitchen drain, and the public restrooms in the garden. Another pair of brothers from town will be repairing a small patio above the water where a tourist slipped recently and bruised her leg.
"The main building where the most valuable items are kept will remain locked. Of course, you have free access to anything and everything. In fact I hope you’ll take a pretty comprehensive tour of the place once or twice a day, even with the vandalism problem solved."
"Naturally," I agreed.
I had followed Tom up the stairs onto the small expanse of lower roof where I had noticed a clothesline outside Lily’s bedroom. Ruffled brown curtains at the knee-high window confirmed my assessment of her room’s accessibility. It surprised me to realize I still wondered if a vandal had caused the old woman’s death. I could understand how Marie’s doubts about the accident had weakened Tom’s faith in his own conclusions. Fears are more infectious than the flu.
We proceeded to climb up an iron ladder leading to the top of the chateau, a flat, walled roof with chimney pipes sticking out of it. Toward the sea the tall round tower rose front and center. It was entered through a weathered wooden door arched on top to complement the stonework on the underside of the tower’s crown. What should have been a simple iron thumb latch, the artistic owner had designed into a face with its tongue sticking out. Tom opened the door and ducked into a small lighted landing. Slippery stone stairs curved away down to our left and an inside door faced us, but Tom began to climb upward to our right. I followed cautiously, and twenty steps later we emerged into the crown of the tower.
It was possible to see out through the archer's window-like x's in the rim, but the real sightseeing started when we climbed four more steps to an iron walkway encircling the wall like the burner on an electric stove. There the edge of the stone wall was at my ribs and the world at my feet.
"Spectacular!" I exclaimed. "Why aren't you up to your eyeballs in tourists?"
"They're all down on the beach," he answered seriously. "I wish more would stop in. Couldn't bring them up here though. The insurance company would scream, especially since the easier entrance from inside the chateau needs repair. We keep that locked."
"Too bad. This is a real thrill." Spread before me was the fabulous blue Mediterranean that murderous pirates had roamed and before them, Romans and Moors. I could easily picture Jason's Argonaut slipping into the port that was presently speckled with sporty white sailboats. Dark thoughts of murder or suicide faded away under the brilliant glare. The lush hills and clean white beaches refused to tolerate anything sinister. Even the keyhole-shaped gun turret withdrew into its proper perspective from this height, for the Cote d'Azure, the famous Riviera, looked like a sunny place to play.
It became easy to understand how the climate directed the lifestyle, young and sensuous and natural. Nowhere else had I ever seen the crisp bright colors of southern France. I itched to bring out pure, fluid water colors and loads of white paper and forget the thick, drab London scenes I had been wrestling with all year.
"Seen enough?" Tom asked.
"For now," I answered.
We wound our way back to the landing at the roof, and Tom unlocked the inner door of a completely round room. Two pairs of clear leaded windows in a diamond pattern overlooked the sea and the yacht basin. The room's furniture was much plainer than anywhere else in the chateau, reminiscent of an ordinary farmhouse. A simple, large desk sat between the windows, a chifforobe with poorly fitted doors was to my right; and a rustic canopy bed with a faded cotton cover was on the left. The most unusual piece, which I supposed Marsford designed, was an earthenware washstand of dark red clay. To me it looked like a large barrel-shaped crock with a bowl on top, yet somehow it belonged in its place at the foot of the bed.
"Now that's the kind of bed I would expect to come from Wales," I said.
"It probably did," Tom replied. “Lily said Hugh used the desk to plan his artwork every afternoon from one to four. There's a decent view from the windows and usually a breeze..."
I wasn’t listening. Seeing the rough canopied bed in the tower had stirred the unsettling notion that troubled me all morning. Marsford's deathbed never should have had a Chinese silk headboard. A Welsh farmer simply would not have owned such a valuable antique, and Marsford's father was still a farmer when his only child was conceived. Later, when he became a successful merchant, he and his wife would have had plenty of money for luxuries, but if Hugh Marsford wanted to die in the bed in which he had been conceived, I felt certain he died in the wrong one.
Macabre thoughts clicked through my mind like the tumblers of a complicated lock. Marie's emotional statement, "I don't think he intended to go through with it!” Claudine's premature death that "changed everything," especially if Tom was right and Marsford planned his suicide to set her free by the only method he could accept. Without her Marsford's supreme sacrifice lost all purpose.
Also, I had privately questioned Marsford's male-ego/old-age phobia when Tom first mentioned it. Sixty is by many standards relatively young. To someone in an earlier stage of life it might be regarded as old, but never to someone who has reached that age himself. Considering the comforts Marsford enjoyed and the pleasure he derived from his work, at sixty there was much to be said for continuing his life. Even without his wife’s companionship I doubted a man with Marsford’s imagination would ever find life empty enough for suicide.
Yet by planning so meticulously for death, Marsford had created an unnatural situation. The spoiled children, who had grown into financially dependent adults, were led to expect the distribution of his wealth soon after November 10, 1951, rather than at some undetermined later date. Not a good recipe for family harmony, especially if the offspring were already estranged.
Furthermore, if grief over Claudine's death prompted Marsford's final decision, why had it taken several months for him to act? By then his depression should have lessened rather than intensified. To me it didn’t make sense.
Yet what troubled me most about the artist's death was Marsford himself. He was a genius, a man sensitive beyond ordinary standards. Small things other people took for granted, like thumb latches on doors, were capable of both pleasing or displeasing him. He was organized and methodical, a person who stuck to a schedule. I felt certain no one as painstaking as Hugh Marsford would have altered a plan he dwelled upon for years by the slightest detail. He would never have died in a different bed. The only reasonable explanation was that he had unwittingly orchestrated his own murder.
It distressed me no end that nothing could or would ever be done about the eccentric sculptor’s death. After what I saw in Viet Nam, perhaps I was desperate to punish those who kill. Or maybe a lonely artist dying unmourned and unavenged was too close to home.
I took a deep breath and gazed out of the tower window. Since all the principals were either quite elderly or already dead, it could be argued that Marsford's murder no longer mattered. Still my gut ached over the injustice, even as my rational self decided to keep my theory private, at least until I learned the end of the story. Perhaps Lily's scrapbook would help.
Lily. The only person who thought Marsford's death was murder, dead now herself by a freakish accident...
I turned to find Tom no longer in the room.
"Richard!"
His voice echoed sharply up the tower stairwell from the room below. I rushed to the doorway and looked down at Tom. He was wringing his hands.
"The storeroom door was wide open," he complained, as if I were the only person on earth who could do something about it.