Sacred Ends Read online

  PRAISE FOR PARIS REQUIEM

  ‘This richly atmospheric piece of Jamesian fiction revolves around the perpetually fascinating image of the American in Europe, the Old World and the New. Innocence and suspicion, mystery and exploitation, interweave into a complex narrative … A huge amount of solid historical research must have gone into the making of this novel. But it is lightly worn, never intruding on the reader’s consciousness in the compelling portrait of a city at a momentous point in history’ Independent

  ‘Appignanesi’s knowledge of the politics and culture of the era shines. Scenes set in the Salpêtrière Hospital, where Olympe’s mentally ill sister is confined, are especially vivid’ Publishers Weekly

  ‘As a novelist, her examination of human psychology has a forensic intensity, but her most astringent work is to be found in her dark psychological thrillers, such as Paris Requiem’ Barry Forshaw, CrimeTime

  ‘Paris Requiem by Lisa Appignanesi is a thrilling and intoxicating blend of history, psychology, politics, social caste, art, sex, madness and murder. Stirred by a lesser hand those ingredients too often don’t blend’ Texasbooklover.com

  ‘Paris Requiem by Lisa Appignanesi, set in Paris, is a song for the belle époque. It is lyrical, emotive and wild all at the same time. It tastes of love and loss, smells of passion and betrayal, sounds like ingenuity and remembrance, and looks like roses and cobbled streets’ TripFiction

  ‘A brilliant psychological thriller … an incredible book’ M’s Bookshelf

  ‘An exciting and atmospheric read, with Paris of 1899 being as much a character in the story as the people’ Curiousbookfans.co.uk

  ‘A 5-star award would be a disservice. This is so much more – the writing is rich, eloquent and descriptive … the language modern but believable and the conclusion exquisitely drawn’ Janine Cobain

  ‘This masterpiece from Lisa Appignanesi is full of murderous twists and turns … a complex read with a startling denouement’ From Silverdale with Love

  ‘The novel is a thriller concoction with a generous helping of intrigue, a measure of political scandal, a sprinkling of dubious characters, mixed up with grimy Paris streets, asylum horrors and one man’s quest to find out the truth’ TheBookTrail

  ‘There is something remarkable about the way in which author Lisa Appignanesi transports her readers back to Paris, 1899, and throws them into a world of crime, corruption, and mystery … Appignanesi’s use of historical fact, intertwined with her own remarkable fiction, is breathtaking at times, and it soon becomes remarkable to observe how the two elements easily blend into each other as the text progresses’ Madhatterreviews.co.uk

  Sacred Ends

  Part 2 of the Belle Époque trilogy

  Contents

  Title Page

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE: HOME GROUND

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  PART TWO: DEAD WOMAN RUNNING

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  PART THREE: SUBTERRANEAN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  PART FOUR: UNHOLY LOVES

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  About the Author

  Other Books by Lisa Appignanesi

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  The baby only knew about vulnerability.

  It didn’t know that it was January 1900 and a new century had just begun.

  It didn’t know about sex or sin or about corrupt shenaningans in the Parisian political class, or about provincial murders.

  It didn’t really know who was mother or father, priest or pauper, bishop or bawd, or about cheating brothers and estranged sisters and the value of money and power.

  Nor did it know that Emile Durand was a chief inspector in the Paris police or that the beautiful Marguerite de Landois had a country home between two rushing rivers and several churches.

  It didn’t even know that faith was required of it in order to live or that it needed an official stamp of legitimacy to flourish.

  The baby simply trusted whatever arms it was cast into.

  It could do little else. It had a strong instinct for life.

  PART ONE

  HOME GROUND

  ONE

  Under a sullen sky of unbroken grey, the train chugged and hooted its way through the last of Paris. Marguerite de Landois adjusted her hat and her spirits and sat back with a sigh into upholstered seats. They emitted a slight odour of damp wool.

  A maze of ramshackle streets and dilapidated houses gave way to rubble-strewn fields, to huts with roofs of card and rag, to abandoned coaches converted into hovels. The gleaming express engine built to race into the new twentieth century picked up pace and sped through the wasteland where the city’s most recent and poorest inhabitants had set up the rickety shelters they were forced to call home. A lone, hunched child in a threadbare jacket watched the train’s steaming passage and lifted a hand in a desultory wave. Wishing the world otherwise, Marguerite waved back.

  The city merged into flat countryside, the mud brown of ploughed winter fields broken only by lines of poplars. They were travelling southwest across the plain that moved towards the centre of France, the rustic Black Valley the great George Sand had urged her stallion through, the fertile banks of the Loire and its neighbouring rivers, amongst them the little Loir, on whose banks Marguerite had roamed.

  Snow started to fall. A dense flurry of flakes to mark the new year. They thickened air into a swirling whiteness, coated earth in soft dazzle. Trees donned fresh cloaks as light as rabbit fur only to shed them once more when snow fizzled into rain.

  The pastoral idyll of la douce France was all around them. Valleys of vine, orchards and meadows of what in summer would be plenty bordered a river that meandered between willows and plane trees. Cattle grazed, cocks crowed, white peasant houses grew out of the gentle roll of limestone fields. Here and there a graceful tower reached for the sky or tumbled amidst medieval ruins.

  Past the ancient glove-making town of Vendôme, past the dome of the massive abbey that housed Christ’s tear, an old horse trudged along the road beside the track. He dragged a rickety farm cart slowly behind him. A cluster of walled buildings appeared, turned in on themselves. A cloister. An elaborately wimpled woman, book of hours in hand, appeared on a path, then merged with the wall to disappear for ever into some secret interior.

  It became increasingly difficult to remember that Paris existed. Paris with its glitter and bustle. Paris – one vast construction site, a banner to speed and modernity and progress. Paris with its giant girders, new underground trains and great miraculous tunnels boring through earth and under water. Paris with its noise and engineering miracles and new bridges. Its soon-to-be-opened Universal Exhibition – an array of soaring, extravagant, national structures all to be connected by the miracle of an electrically propelled pavement to the future. Paris with its anarchists and rowdy demonstrators demanding a just republic or fomenting a return to a Catholic nation where the army was strong and outsiders ousted. Paris with its stark contrasts and contradictions. Paris, capital of dazzle and elegance and misery.

  And here, in this countryside, tucked into
its winter sleep, there seemed to be nothing at all except a cloister and an old horse pulling a rickety cart along a dirt road. And two hatted men huddled on a seat, oblivious to the passing train and the changing times.

  Plus, she reminded herself, one husband, who had called her to his side for inexplicable reasons.

  Marguerite de Landois felt the crinkle of the letter she had placed in her pocket this morning in the library of her house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. She pulled it out to make sure yesterday’s reading hadn’t been imagined.

  She was a woman of a certain age, to use the phrase a generation of novelists had coined gently to imply that a woman was past her prime. She rather liked to apply it to herself. It made her all of thirty-three. She was tall and a little too slender for these buxom times and she moved with great agility, even when she was seated. She had light hair of a golden sheen, pulled back with a number of combs and piled high, though now hidden by her wide-brimmed hat with its trim of fur. Her cheekbones were evident, her mouth generous enough to diminish the hauteur of nose and brow. Her wide, yellow-flecked eyes looked out at the world with a passionate directness and a not always fashionable intelligence tinged with spirited humour. An envious world fought for entry to her celebrated salon where the great, the good and the not so very good mingled with politicians, writers and artists. Those who saw her more than once usually thought her beautiful and grew enamoured of her understated elegance.

  This expressed itself today in the long, unbroken line of her checked skirt, the fine lace frill of her high-collared blouse, the perfect cut and ingenious darts at shoulder, sleeve and waist of her soft woollen jacket.

  As Marguerite reread the letter from her husband, there was a bemused expression on her face. No, there was no turning back. Incomprehensible it might be, but Olivier had definitely ordered her to the château, which, these days, he largely inhabited without her.

  Her travelling companion met her eyes and gave her the ghost of a smile before returning her whole attention to some invisible point on the other side of the rain-spattered windows. In her blue sailor suit with its midi collar and the toque of a hat that did nothing to hide the pale aureole of hair, Martine Branquart looked younger than seventeen, a mere wisp of a girl still startled by the harsh realities of a world she had been flung into too suddenly. Marguerite’s heart went out to her.

  For the first time she was glad of Olivier’s summons. Being in the Loir region would allow her to help the girl more directly. She was pleased that she had managed to persuade the girl’s employers to give her some time off so she could come along.

  Martine had first come to see her at home about two weeks ago, just before Christmas. She had been brought by Marguerite’s great aunt, Madame de Verney, a redoubtable woman whose face had begun to resemble a whalebone corset, the eyes bulging out above the lines of sunken cheeks. The old woman’s stories had a way of meandering and leaping sideways into tangents, so that it took some time for Marguerite to discover that Martine was an orphan linked to Madame de Verney by a long-dead grandmother who had acted as her dressmaker years back when she still lived in the country. And that Martine, who had been in service in Paris for some eighteen months, though she had been educated to better things, had remembered the connection and cleverly come to Madame de Verney to seek help.

  Her sister, Yvette, who had been in service with a family called Tellier in the village of Troo on the banks of the Loir, had disappeared. Initially a fear of Martine’s, the disappearance had taken on the heft of fact when her sister had failed to respond to the always sacred season’s greetings. Marguerite, given her contacts with the police – a word Madame de Verney spat out with a mixture of furious disdain and rampant curiosity – should certainly be able to find her.

  How the old woman, who now rarely left the gilded comfort of her Second Empire chairs, had heard of Marguerite’s involvement with the death of Olympe Fabre, let alone with Chief Inspector Emile Durand, she had no idea. Though news did have a way of travelling with the speed of lightning, or at least the speed of tongues, in the Paris circles she frequented. And it was true that, since Rafael had returned to Boston, her best hours had been spent with the chief inspector, who increasingly called on her whenever a case he was investigating for the judiciare involved a member of the beau monde she was better placed to understand than he was.

  In fact, Marguerite reminded herself as she stared out into the empty countryside, it was only the chief inspector who had bemoaned her announcement of a sudden departure for the country. He had been able to discover nothing about the missing Yvette from distant colleagues in the Loir sûreté. Regional and metropolitan branches of the police rarely managed to work together, he pointed out to her on the telephone, a caustic edge to his voice hinting at past disagreements. He had threatened he might come after Marguerite if she needed his help, and also told her that he wanted to discuss with her a delicate and quite different matter that his superiors insisted he look into.

  As the train drew close to their destination, Marguerite wondered once more what could have made Olivier demand her instant presence at La Rochambert. In the eight or so years of their separation, they had rarely broken an agreed-upon routine: a summer month together in the Loir valleys that had shaped her childhood, and a winter month in the stately Paris hôtel particulier she now inhabited. And ten months of unquestioning independence. The arrangement had made their marriage a triumph both of the form his Catholicism demanded and the freedom from each other they both desired.

  Divorce, given his family, had never been an option, never mind its rising numbers in this new electric world. Olivier’s code was secret liberty and public restraint: he was modern and had never given this its older designation of secret vice and public virtue. For the good of the community, marriage was indissoluble, the family, cornerstone of society, sacred. Marguerite, as emancipated as she might be, was, willy nilly, the wife of the Comte de Landois and must behave accordingly. The word ‘separation’ was never one he used. They merely kept to their discrete lives.

  Yet Olivier had called her to his side now. Expressed urgency. Could his health have taken a turn again after the problems of this summer, when he had told her he would prefer to be on his own after a very few days? He was no longer a young man. He had hurtled past the mid-fifties mark.

  With no warning, the train lurched and bumped to a screeching halt. Everyone was flung from seats to floor. Cases crashed from racks. Umbrellas and hats rolled. Baskets tumbled, their contents spilling out like restless souls. The air filled with screams and shrieks.

  An eerie stillness followed the eruption of noise. It was made up of shock and unspoken questions and a testing of limbs. Images of severed bodies and broken-backed engines hurtled through Marguerite’s mind together with hundreds of newspaper accounts of railway madness: engineers driven to hacking frenzies by the labour of feeding the beast’s ravenous maul; passengers’ nerves destroyed by the sheer speed of the racing demon; lovelorn women hurling themselves through doors; travellers in trances forgetting who they were or metamorphosing into monstrous doubles. Ever more democratic in its reach, the railway fled through the country creating a hundred new ills alongside its benefits.

  Marguerite pulled herself up, made sure that Martine and her own little maid, Jeanne, were unhurt and leapt from the compartment to see if help was needed.

  Outside, despite commotion, the carriages were all upright. Towards the front of the train, a crowd of men had gathered near the smoking brute of an engine. Vapour curled in the cold air, making everything hazy. A brisk wind heaved it to the east across a flatness of field and tugged at top hats and caps and coattails. All heads were turned in the same direction: something just under the train held their attention.

  A dog barked with a wild yap. Packed mud clung to Marguerite’s feet and the braided trim of her long emerald skirt. Now that she was closer, she could see uniformed railway staff bent over the track on all fours. A body was being pulled from the rails
; whether dead or unconscious, she couldn’t yet tell. She shuddered. All around her there were shouts and cries, distorted by the wind. An engineer was screaming over and over for all to hear that he had pulled the brake, had tried to stop in time, but the gloom of the light, the speed, everything had combined to stop him.

  A conductor emerged to bar Marguerite’s way.

  ‘Non, non, Madame. It’s nothing. Just an obstacle on the track. Not for a lady’s eyes. We’re sorry for any discomfort. We’ll be off again soon enough.’ He was deferential, polite, but he was also firm.

  The obstacle, Marguerite noted, had to be carried off on the shoulders of three men. Even at her distance she could see that the splay of the limbs, the position of the head, didn’t bode well. In fact the ‘nothing’ that had occurred and brought the train to a screeching halt was reminiscent of nothing so much as death.

  ‘Let me through, Monsieur. I’m the Comtesse de Landois. I have medical training. I’ll be able to help.’ She asserted rank and walked past the conductor now, not waiting for permission, her lie of expertise only an exaggeration after all those months of lectures at the Salpêtrière and the Hôtel-Dieu, where she had sat with two other women amidst a horde of men.

  But there was no help to be had for the man in the mud-splattered suit. The body was mangled. The legs, she could now see, dangled and must be all but severed at the knees – as if he had flung himself across the track. While voices barked conflicting orders, she pulled off a glove and felt for a pulse at neck and wrist. There was none.

  A less than clean blanket had been fetched from somewhere and the men turned him over on to his back. He was a large figure. Heavy in his inertness. The jowly, pockmarked cheeks had colour, even if it looked like the stain left over by tea, but the lips she was about to put her mirror to were ashen. There was a scar on the left cheek. She stopped mid gesture as her gaze moved upwards. One of the man’s eyes had been torn from its socket, leaving the face a grotesque shell.