The Orchid Shroud - Hardcover

Wan, Michelle

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385661193 ISBN 13: 9780385661195

Publisher: Doubleday Canada, 2006

Synopsis

Following Michelle Wan’s masterful debut Deadly Slipper, The Orchid Shroud takes readers back to the ruggedly beautiful Dordogne region of France, to a tantalizing world of wild orchids . . . and the discovery of a chilling murder.

Business is booming for Julian and Mara. She has been contracted by Julian’s old friend, Christophe de Bonfond, to restore his sixteenth-century manor house, her biggest commission yet. Julian has been engaged by Christophe’s cousin, Antoine, to landscape the new sales pavilion of his prestigious Coteaux de Bonfond Winery.

Things take a horrifying twist when Mara’s workmen find a mummified baby in the manor house wall. Forensic analysis shows that the infant, nicknamed Baby Blue after the blue silk shawl it was wrapped in, was smothered and that the crime took place over a hundred years ago.

Julian and Mara are increasingly drawn into the web of this old crime. Julian, always searching for his mystery orchid, discovers that the infant’s shawl is embroidered with a botanically accurate depiction of the very flower he has been seeking, while Mara finds herself a suspect in a more recent murder, one that seems to be linked not only to the dead infant but to the terrifying spectre of a modern-day werewolf.

As sinister revelations threaten to pull Mara and Julian apart, The Orchid Shroud will draw readers into the legends and superstitions of the Dordogne, the competitive business of the French wine industry, and the breathtaking world of wild orchids. All served with a dollop of superb Dordognais cookery.

About this title

About the Author

Michelle Wan was born in Kunming, China, in the middle of an air raid. She has lived in India, the U.S., England, and Brazil, and has worked in Paris and Harare. She and her husband, a tropical horticulturalist, reside in Guelph, Ontario, and travel regularly to the Dordogne to photograph and chart wild orchids. She is the author of Deadly Slipper.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1


WEDNESDAY, 28 APRIL 2004


The first shattering blow echoed down the line of empty rooms. The big man stepped back, raised the iron mallet again. It struck home with another sickening thud.

Christophe de Bonfond recoiled at the first hit, turned away at the second. His normally cheerful face was pale.

"Je ne peux pas . . ." he murmured to his companion. "I can't. It really is too much."

"Then don't," Mara Dunn responded in French, drawing him away by the arm. She was a small, slim woman, forty-something, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that read in English: Outside of a dog a man's best friend is a book. Inside of a dog it is very dark. This was attributed to Groucho Marx. Her head was topped with short-cropped hair. She had dark eyes, straight brows, and a decisive chin. Her expression, normally vivid, was at the moment tightly composed. Why had he insisted on being there? She said in an even tone that belied her exasperation, "We'll leave them to it, shall we?"

The little man nodded, shuddering as the steady, awful cadence of blows continued. In his haste to be gone, he pulled free of her and scuttled through a doorway leading into a small antechamber that gave access to the stairs.

"Smokey," Mara called over her shoulder, "I'll be down on the terrace with Monsieur de Bonfond if you and Theo need anything."

Aristophanes Serafim, otherwise known as Smokey the Greek because he was from Thessalonika and a chain smoker, paused in the middle of his swing. A limp Gitane clung like a tubular growth to his lower lip. His sweat-stained T-shirt was stretched over a barrel chest and a large belly.

"What would we need?" He spoke French with an accent as thick as feta cheese. The blunt head of the mallet completed its arc. A large sheet of plaster crashed down around him in a cloud of dust, exposing roughly dressed stone that had not seen the light of day for more than a hundred years. Smokey's younger brother, Theo, equally big, sledgehammer in hand, stepped up to inspect the damage.

"Well, just in case." Mara's eyes lingered anxiously on the pair. She had not worked with the brothers before and was not reassured by what she had seen so far. Their setup had been casual at best; the necessary precision of the task they were undertaking seemed beyond their comprehension. "Please try to take things down as carefully as possible." She glanced up. "You're sure of the bracing?" Her greatest fear was the roof collapsing.

Both men regarded her with indifference. The Serafims were good at demolishing walls but didn't seem to care much what else came down with them.

***

The terrace ran across the back of the main part of the house, overlooking an expanse of geometrically clipped yews and boxwood: an eighteenth-century garden done in the Italian manner, for all that this was twenty-first-century southwestern France. In fact, everything about Aurillac Manor placed it more in the past than in the present. It was a large U-shaped structure, consisting of an original central block with wings, added on at later times, extending backward to enclose part of the garden. Built of local stone and along traditional lines, with Early Renaissance and Baroque touches, the overall effect was charming if slightly quirky.

She stood beside Christophe at the terrace's edge. Below them played an eighteenth-century stone fountain in the shape of a leaping dolphin. Its nose, chipped off at the tip by some past violence, pointed like a crooked finger at a door giving access to the south wing. Water dribbled from the dolphin's mouth into a handsome but rather scummy pool. Aurillac's grounds staff was down to one old man and a girl. If asked, Christophe would have complained of the difficulty of getting good help.

"Silly of me, I know." His brown eyes were unhappy. He was a small, round person in his early sixties, immaculately dressed in fawn-colored trousers and a summer jacket of slightly darker hue. His sparse, graying hair was neatly slicked back; his features were soft and rosy. He resembled, Mara thought, one of those nice pink marzipan pigs displayed in the windows of the better confectionary shops. Except for his expression. Confectionary pigs smiled.

"It--it's too much like living flesh . . ." Christophe managed to sound both apologetic and petulant at the same time. The flesh of the de Bonfonds was what he meant, overlying the brittle bones of old money, the stiffened sinews of class and privilege dating back centuries, embodied in a house.

"You wanted a gallery," Mara reasoned with him. "You can't have it without knocking out walls." A naturally quick, impatient person, she had learned the necessity of coaxing clients along. The demolition stage was never easy. People had a hard time seeing past the rubble.

It had been Christophe's idea to convert the entire upper floor of the north wing into an elevated gallery. The galérie was a popular feature of grand French country residences in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Initially a broad corridor linking parts of a house, it had evolved its own specialized function as an elegant walkway, a place for meditation and indoor exercise, a showcase for displaying family treasures and works of art. According to Christophe, the fact that Aurillac Manor lacked a galerie was not because it wasn't grand enough but simply owing to pure bad planning.

"You see," he had explained when Julian had brought Mara out three months earlier, "Aurillac, or at least the central block, will be five hundred years old next year. The galérie is my birthday present to the house, you might say, and the perfect architectural complement to a little book I'm writing on the history of my family." One had to take his use of "little" as an intended understatement, for the draft was said to run to over four hundred pages. "The de Bonfonds were ennobled, you know, by King Louis XV in recognition of invaluable services rendered to the crown. In fact, our family motto, 'Blood And My Right,' was suggested by the King himself, who intended it to refer to the rights and privileges conferred by our ancient bloodline. Rather like the British Royal Family's 'God And My Right,' except that the Brits"--here he had giggled--"recognize a higher power."

The book, in turn, was intended to mark the quarter-century anniversary of Christophe's small, elite publishing house, Editions Arobas. It was great fun, he said, everything coming together all at once like that. Christophe, who seemed to have pots of money, had glowed with excitement.

"Can you do it?" he had asked Mara earnestly as they strolled through the series of gloomy rooms making up the north wing. "Julian told me how good you are. I did talk to an architect, you know, but I didn't like him. A dreadful man with dirty fingernails, pas sympathique du tout."

"I expect he mentioned these are all load-bearing walls?" Mara, a French Canadian interior designer with an eye for old houses, had seen many misguided renovations since setting up shop in the Dordogne eight years ago. "You can't just knock them out. They hold up your roof." She had spoken coolly, but excitement had surged through her like a drug. The wing, built before communicating corridors came into fashion, consisted of three large rooms, one giving onto another by way of smaller, interspersing antechambers. That meant breaking down five dividing walls in addition to the portion of the old exterior east wall where the wing had been joined on, thereby extending the gallery all the way to the front of the house. The creative use of space was her metier, and her mind leaped ahead to all the possibilities.

In the end Mara had worked out a plan (with another architect, who had clean nails and who was more sympathique) for converting the internal walls into a series of weight-bearing arches. The structural integrity would be ensured, and Christophe would have the sense and functionality of continuous space. She also planned to cut away the window embrasures at forty-five-degree angles to increase the illumination. It was Mara's most important commission ever and a challenging project. Christophe was proving to be a grit-your-teeth client. Changing his mind. Fretting. (What if the structure was damaged? What if the gallery was not, after all, to his liking?) And now not being able to stomach the violence of the hammer's blow.

"Look." Once again she took him by the arm, turning him firmly from the dribbling fountain that was beginning to wear on her nerves. "Stop worrying. This is just the messy part. Think about the finished product. You'll love it. Family portraits on the walls, statues in the alcoves. The private space of a gentleman, for pleasure and contemplation." She threw out the line like a sop.

Christophe brightened. "Of course. You're right, as ever. I'm so glad Julian introduced me to you. I simply could not have entrusted the work to someone who didn't understand my feelings." He allowed himself to be led away. A moment later he glanced slyly at Mara and shook his head. "Although what l'Adoree will say to all of this I really dread to think."

"Who"--Mara's back went rigid as she braced herself for another complication--"is l'Adoree?"

"The Adored One, my great-grandmother, so named because my great-grandfather loved her passionately. Theirs was the romance of the century." He gave her an impish grin. "Her spirit still walks, did you know?"

"Formidable." Mara laughed gustily. A ghost she could deal with, and Christophe's sense of humor seemed to have returned. In a good mood, the man was tremendously likable, which made his sulks and moments of unhappiness all the more...

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday Canada
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385661193
• ISBN 13: 9780385661195
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352