"I know what," Ray said, flushed with wine and enthusiasm, and looking very boyish with his freckles and his bowtie. "Let’s walk out into the bay and have a look at the Mont from there. Assuming," he added quickly, "that the tide is still out, of course."
Sophie put down her coffee. "Are you out of your mind, Raymond?"
"Why?" he responded with a startled blink. "Oh, I see. But what happened to Guillaume was a freak accident; everyone knows that. It’s just that I’ve always wanted to walk out into Mont St. Michel Bay and see the abbey soaring behind me in the mist, like a prow of a ship, the way Henry Adams described it."
"Oh, I think it’s a wonderful idea, Raymond," Claire said warmly.
"But isn’t it dangerous?" asked Sophie. "After all-"
"No, no, Aunt Sophie, when I was a little girl in Avranches my friend and I used to play in the sands all day. If you simply pay attention to the tide, and know what the quicksands look like, and keep an eye out for the mist, and don’t go off by yourself, it’s perfectly safe."
"Those are a great many qualifications," Sophie said severely.
"No," Ben laughed, "I think Claire’s right. It’s no secret Guillaume was getting a little, well, forgetful, and the fact is, he never should have been out there alone. Not that I know who was going to stop him." He drained his coffee with a smile. "But in any case, I’m afraid it’s all moot, kids. Sorry to be a spoilsport, but I’m afraid we ought to be driving back. Sophie’s coming down with a cold, and I want her to put her feet up and have a good long nap this afternoon."
"I have an idea," Gideon said. "Why don’t you two go ahead and take Guillaume’s car back? We can drop off Claire and Ray later on. To tell you the truth, I’d enjoy wandering around the bay myself, especially with a guide who knows something about it."
Beside him, John stirred restlessly. Gideon half-expected a thud against his own shin, but none came; merely a grumbled "I thought you wanted to tour the abbey," just to let Gideon know he wasn’t getting by with anything.
"That’s a wonderful idea, Gideon," Ray said. "Claire, how can we find out about the tide?"
"There’s a tourist office in the Old Guard Room near the entrance down below. They have tidetables there."
"You don’t have to go all the way down there," Ben said. "I’ve got one here somewhere…" He tapped the pockets of his jacket and trousers unsuccessfully, and finally located it in a coat he’d left on the rack near the door. He came back to the table thumbing through a small booklet. "Annuaire des Marees," Gideon read on the blue cover, "des Baies de Saint-Malo et Mont Saint-Michel. 1987."
"Let’s see," Ben said. "March, um, twenty-third, right?" He ran his finger carefully along a line. "Right, here it is. High tide was at 10:21 this morning, and low tide isn’t until… 5:15." He closed the booklet and looked at his watch. "You’re in good shape. It’s only a little after two, so you have three hours before it even begins to rise."
"More than that," Claire said. "It will be-What do you call it, dead water?-for a least an hour after low tide." She smiled at Sophie. "But I promise we won’t stay out anywhere near so long."
"Good," Sophie said querulously. "But I still think it’s a rotten idea."
TO go down they had to go up. The path to the sands began at the Abbey Gardens on a shelf near the top of the rock, and there they stood for a few minutes looking out over the misty enormity of the Bay of Saint-Michael-inPeril-from-the-Sea. The low rain clouds that had been hovering over the Mont had moved westward so that to their left the wooded coastline was shrouded in fog. To their right they could see a wide expanse of what looked like desert scrub brush-the famous salt pastures, Claire explained, originally planted centuries ago in a futile effort to stabilize the sands-and beyond them the distant low roofs of Avranches.
In front of them was the bay itself, featureless except for a few narrow streams that wandered through it in great, lazy curves. Everything was veiled in a thin mist shot through with watery, pink-tinged sunlight, so that sand and sky blended into a bland, disorienting world of pale, diffused mauve. No, not quite blended. There, on the horizon, ten miles off or more, Gideon could just make out the gray, gleaming ribbon that was the receding tide. He watched it for a while, trying to tell if he could see it change-it was, after all, the fastest-moving tide in Europe-but it remained the same: a flat pewter strip separating a smooth and formless earth from a smooth and formless sky.
"What do you call that dog," John asked dreamily, "with the gray fur? Big dog, short hair-"
"A Weimaraner?"
"Right. That’s what this sand reminds me of; what a Weimaraner must look like to a flea coming in for a landing."
Gideon laughed. "Amazing. I’ve never known you to be moved to poetic fancy before."
"No kidding, Doc, is that what that was?"
"You’re in good company, John," Ray said. "You’ll be happy to know that du Guesclin himself used the same metaphor in-1390, I believe it was. Well, not quite the same, but close enough."
"That would have been difficult," Claire said. "Du Guesclin died in 1380."
Her eyes darted hesitantly at each of the men. She wasn’t used to making jokes, Gideon could see, and she was trying to gauge whether she’d gone too far.
Ray’s burst of laughter set her at ease. "Is this," he said with mock austerity, "what I have to look forward to? A lifetime of caviling fault-finding over trivial arcana?"
"Yes!" she said, bubbling over with too much intensity, like a child learning to play. "Oh, yes!" Then she giggled; a girlish, appealing tinkle of pleasure that made her look almost pretty. "Whatever it means-what you said." She was certainly coming out of her shell.
Ray squeezed her hand, looking flustered and pleased. "Perhaps we ought to go down now," he said primly. "We want to be sure to be back within three hours."
At the base of the Mont they had to clamber over algae-slimed granite boulders, then slog through fifty feet of black mud. Claire, wearing tennis shoes she’d carried with her for walking, led the way, moving with confidence. When they reached the sand she said: "Before we go any further, I think it would be good for you to know what quicksand looks like. Would you like me to show you?"
She went to the top of a hummock-the tidal plain, seemingly so featureless and smooth from above, was actually full of furrows, humps, and depressions-and looked around her, leaning into the misty glare and shielding her eyes with her hand like a Gilbert and Sullivan sailor. "There!" she said. "Come!"
They went to a roughly circular patch of sand perhaps ten feet in diameter. Unlike the flat-toned, uneven surface everywhere else it was glossy and smooth, brown rather than mauve. And not in the least dangerous-looking.
She pointed to smaller patches nearby. "As you see, there’s a fair amount of it. In the summer, when the tourists come, the sands are more stable, thank God. But in winter you must watch where you go. Gideon, is something wrong?"
"Claire, if it’s this obvious, how could Guillaume not have seen it?"
"Yes, that’s a good question," Ray said.
"But how could he see it?" Claire asked. "Under even an inch of water it’s invisible. The tide was rising, and he must have stepped into it through the water-" She frowned curiously at him. "Isn’t that what happened?"
"I suppose it is," Gideon said, and he supposed it was. Wherever he looked there was a logical explanation for the accidental drowning of the man he’d known as Guillaume. Reasonable explanations all; doubted by no one, even John. And still…
They walked out into the bay for about twenty minutes, never looking back. (This was Ray’s suggestion for heightening the dramatic impact when they finally did turn.) When they came to a sand dune six or seven feet high they climbed it and found a craterlike top in which they could all sprawl comfortably, leaning against the sides of the hollow, looking back at the Mont.