‘From across the centuries she cries out to us to see that her heart was broken, that the one who loved her had failed to come to her rescue.’
‘I thought the husband, the de Sinéty family and her own had been forced into ruin?’
‘But would she have been aware of this? A prisoner in the Palais? She hoped and prayed her husband would come, but secretly dreaded he wouldn’t and wove that premonition into the brocade.’
‘Only to then find herself before the court.’
‘Just as our Mireille was before her judges, and in the same Palais, Hermann, the same Grand Tinel.’
‘Dédou hadn’t shown up but she couldn’t have known he’d been arrested. Instead, she must have felt he would weaken and stay away.’
‘And having copied exactly the clothing of this earlier Mireille, had woven that premonition into the brocade she herself would wear.’
‘An accabussade,’ breathed Kohler sadly as he slid the gear lever into first. ‘Hey, mon vieux, I think I can find us one, or at least take us to where it was used and not so long ago.’
They stood alone, the two of them, on either side of the little car, near the flood-damaged northern end of the Îie de la Barthelasse. Hermann had pulled up his coat collar and yanked down the brim of his fedora. His breath billowed in the frozen air through which, and all around them it seemed, came the sound of the river.
‘A gristmill, Louis. Built to receive grain that had been brought downriver by barge during the height of the Babylonian Captivity.’
He sounded sickened by thoughts of what they might find. The mill was, of course, not nearly so old.
There were boulders of several sizes, uprooted trees, pavements of pebbles, washouts, heaps of sand. But among all this debris, the building stood serenely, its two storeys of soft grey-buff stone and steeply pitched, four-cornered roof with attic dormers catching the winter’s light. At the innermost, eastern corner there was a round tower whose spiral staircase would access all floors. Well behind them was the farm, with peach, pear and apricot orchards and fields for artichokes, garlic and melons. There had been severe flood damage there as well, but still …‘Our singing master and his associates have an eye for value, Hermann. A real money-earner and a perfect hunting and fishing lodge.’
‘Don’t get sentimental. I’ve heard it all before from you.’ Louis was always going on about his retirement. Merde! What retirement?
Three rooks took flight and for a moment they watched them. ‘Is it a sign, I wonder?’ mused St-Cyr. ‘Are their shadows passing over the mill to give warning to us?’
‘Verdammt, idiot, things are too quiet and you know it! Christ, we could be right back in the fourteenth century.’
The weathered shutters were all closed. There’d been no answer at the mas, no tenant farmer-cum-custodian in residence; a worry, to be sure.
‘Did they get here before us, Louis? Are they waiting?’
The Hooded Ones.
Beyond the broken forest of poplar, linden and willow, Simondi had laid out a spacious garden through whose grey and vine-tangled broken arbours they had to make their way.
‘A regular trysting place, if ever there was one,’ snorted Hermann, having read and seen right through his partner’s thoughts.
The tower rose straight up beside him from stone steps that led to the door.
‘It won’t be locked, dummkopf.’
‘Then let the Sûreté go first, eh? Stay out here and have another cigarette. You still have one, don’t you?’
‘You took the last of them. Hey, I’d better come with you, just in case.’
Dished and worn, the stone stairs went up and around to small square windows below the heavily timbered roof, but now there was no longer the sound of the river, now, deep from below them, came a constant sucking noise.
‘The sluicegates withstood the flood and were fortunately closed before it,’ offered the Sûreté.
‘End of travelogue, eh?’ Hermann had his pistol in hand.
‘I’m only trying to ease your mind.’
‘Then tell me what that other noise is, mein brillanter französischer Oberdetektiv.’
They hesitated. They listened hard. Against the sucking noise something was seesawing gently back and forth. A door, a shutter …‘Ah, merde alors, Louis!’
‘Don’t throw up! Tell yourself you’re not going to. Not this time.’
‘I’m going to. Sorry.’
‘Go outside! See what you can find but leave this to me!’
Louis was moving now. He wasn’t hesitating. At the top of the stairs a door gave into the attic, and all too soon he had disappeared from view.
Kohler could hear him muttering, ‘Aïoli, the sauce, the mayonnaise of Provence. Marinated green beans with sliced sweet red peppers, pickled artichoke hearts à la grecque, a chèvre de crottin the mice have all but devoured, some black olives, a handful of truffles, good ones, too, and a bottle of grappa … The postcards.’
He became very quiet, and Kohler knew his partner must be looking out over the water through the attic portal and down past the hoist beam to where the grain sacks had once been lifted into the loft.
Busying himself, he went below, and when he found the millrace, he found the accabussade.
9
The doorway at the base of the mill had all but been choked by cobbles and sand. Beneath its stone arch someone before Hermann had crawled in and had broken through the flood-splintered door but had then carefully replaced the boards.
Immediately inside the cellar there was a drop of about a metre, a crawl space since the flood. Blackened tin lanterns hung from hooks in the worm-eaten timbers. Some of these lanterns were so perforated, they reminded one of vegetable graters, thought St-Cyr. Others were more baroque with many fleurs-de-lis openings.
Gutted of its water wheel years ago, the stone sluice had all but been silted up by the flood. There was barely room to manoeuvre, Hermann’s terse, ‘It’s over there,’ revealing he was imagining the screams Adrienne de Langlade must have given, her cries for mercy and gasps for air. An accident … would Simondi and the others now try to claim this?
Jammed into the corner and all but buried by sand and silt, the rusty flat iron bars and rectangular, open weave of a man-sized oval cage barely protruded. Dried reeds, moss, algae, bits of twigs and leaves were everywhere, as was the stench of rotting fish.
Kohler took down one of the lanterns and, cleaning it of silt, lit the candle. Immediately a much-dappled light fell over the cage to join shafts of daylight that leaked in from around the foundation. Louis crawled into the corner and, after deliberately fingering the bars, quickly thrust an arm in through the weave to recover something.
‘Dried lavender,’ he said. ‘A small bouquet left as a memorial to what our Mireille had discovered.’
‘She took one hell of a chance coming out here!’
‘Technically this is not an accabussade, Hermann. Those were made of wood.’
Verdammt! Another lecture. ‘Then what the hell is it, Hen Professor?’
‘The cage in which those who had offended the Papal Court and had remained unrepentant were left until the sun, the wind, the rooks and starvation or thirst had finally finished them. During the Babylonian Captivity this cage would have been suspended from the end of a long pole or tripod that had been mounted atop the Bell Tower of the Palais.’
‘In full view of the citizenry,’ muttered Kohler sadly. ‘Instead, as a consolation, they took it down and used it from the Pont Saint-Bénézet with that first Mireille.’
‘But as a threat and a reminder of what was to come should she fail to recant and publicly confess to the harlotry they had accused her of.’