The Splendour Falls

‘No.’ Lucie shook her head. ‘He has a space, a little space, between his teeth, right here.’ She bared her own front teeth and pointed to the spot. ‘He says it is to whistle with.’

‘Ah.’ Fortunately, I was spared the need for further comment. We had come nearly to the bottom of the ramp now and Lucie tugged at my sleeve, her voice dropping to a solemn whisper. ‘François says it is not good to scare the ducks.’

I took the hunk of bread she gave me and began to throw out crumbs in my best non-threatening manner. It was rather like dropping a chip in Trafalgar Square. From everywhere, it seemed, the ducks came flapping. A small Armada of them massed in the shallows of the river while others tumbled over one another on the cobblestones, adding their full-throated pleas to the general mayhem. They fluttered, they splashed, they begged and demanded and, like the pigeons of Trafalgar Square, they didn’t show the slightest fear of people. How had Neil put it, exactly? No proper sense of danger …

‘… and this one, this is Jacques,’ said Lucie, pointing out her favourite birds among the bunch, ‘and that one with the funny legs I call Ar-ree.’

The bird in question did have funny legs, quite long and skinny, together with a rumpled and dishevelled look that reminded me instantly of my cousin. Something unseen broke the surface of the water beside us and sent a spreading wash of ripples out, unstoppable and oddly sinister.

The gawky duck stared at me and I tossed a crumb towards it. ‘Why Ar-ree?’ I asked, casually.

‘It’s an English name,’ she told me, with a proud upward glance. ‘My Uncle Didier, he has an English friend … well, he’s dead now, of course, but his friend is called Ar-ree. Last week he came to feed the ducks with me, and he said this duck looked just like him.’

I tore the bread between my fingers, with a jerking motion. ‘Harry?’ I checked. ‘Was his name Harry, Lucie?’

‘Yes, Ar-ree. It’s such a funny name. Are many people in England called this?’

‘Quite a few.’ I frowned, thinking hard. Her Uncle Didier, she’d said. I put the names together in my mind – Didier Muret and Harry. Didier and Harry, here. ‘Was it last Wednesday that he came to feed the ducks with you?’

She nodded. ‘François had a headache last week, so he couldn’t walk with me. But after lunch my Uncle Didier said he could take me out, instead. He’s dead now,’ she said again, quite matter-of-fact. ‘He’s not as nice as François. François always lets me stay here a long time, and then we have an ice cream. But Uncle Didier had his friend to talk to last week, and he didn’t let me give the ducks all my bread. He was in a hurry, he said.’

A duck flapped against my foot and I took an absent step sideways, flinging down another scattering of crumbs. My bread was very nearly finished. ‘Your uncle’s friend, did he look anything like me?’

‘Yes, very English,’ she said, squinting up at me to check. ‘But his nose was not so straight.’

‘I see. What else do you remember about him?’

‘He was very funny, and he likes to feed the ducks, like me. And he can make his ears wiggle.’ Which obviously raised him above the level of the common man, in her opinion. I looked down at the scruffy little duck with the long ungainly legs, and tossed him my last breadcrumb.

He really did remind me of my cousin, that duck. And if Lucie had her story right, then Harry had been here, in Chinon … Harry had been here.

I wasn’t given time to ponder this new piece of information. Lucie grabbed me by the hand and pulled me back up the ramp to where François and Neil waited, chatting like old friends. Neil laughed at something François said, and turned to look at me. ‘Still standing, are you, after that attack? We couldn’t see the two of you for feathers, from up here.’

Lucie looked up at him, her brown eyes curious. ‘Monsieur Neil,’ she asked, in careful English, ‘do your ears move?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

The tone of his voice penetrated my troubled fog of thought, and I smiled in spite of myself. ‘I think she’s asking if you can wiggle your ears.’

‘Oh. Of course I can.’ He crouched to Lucie’s level, and demonstrated. I leaned against the low wall, next to François. I wanted to ask him about Didier Muret, but I couldn’t summon up the courage, so I tried to slide into the questions sideways.

‘She is,’ I said in French, ‘a lovely child.’

‘Yes. I’m very fond of Lucie.’

‘She talked to me a bit about her uncle. She seems to be taking his death well, for one so young.’

I felt the brush of his eyes and he lifted his shoulders. ‘Didier Muret,’ he told me, cryptically, ‘was not the sort of man one mourns. And anyway, she didn’t know him well.’

‘Was he a historian?’ I kept the question lightly curious. For after all, I thought, we only had Victor Belliveau’s word …

‘A historian?’ He turned that time, to look at me directly. ‘No, Mademoiselle, he was a clerk – a lawyer’s clerk – when he worked at all.’

‘Oh. I must have got it wrong, then.’ The doubting flooded back, and what had seemed so certain moments earlier now hovered in the realm of the improbable. Why would an unemployed lawyer’s clerk, who reportedly read no English, be interested in a British article on Isabelle of Angoulême, I wondered? It simply made no sense.