Cagnac smugly clicked his tongue against his palate. A table had been laid in the vast marble-tiled dining room, and two servants were standing against the wall waiting to serve lunch, two boys dressed in white short-sleeved shirts and black slacks, hands clasped over their belts.
They’d brought out a special wine for the aperitif, yellow and strong, shipped in by the Cagnacs from the Haute-Savoie. Unbidden, the Cagnac woman poured a little into each glass, Daniel’s excepted.
Ladivine snatched up Annika’s glass, spilling a few drops on the table.
“She’s not old enough to be drinking wine,” she said, not looking at the Cagnac woman.
She was so angry she could have smashed the glass on the ground.
Even more swiftly, Annika took back the glass and swallowed the wine in one gulp.
She banged it down on the table, wiped her lips with one hand, and gave a little laugh, pretending she’d played a prank on her mother.
But there was no laughter in her eyes, only a coldness and a despair that wrenched Ladivine’s heart.
Marko broke into a half-amused, half-irritated grimace, as he often did when the children wouldn’t go to bed and insisted on acting up.
“Really, Annika,” he said, ruffling her hair.
“A little good wine never killed anyone,” Cagnac said jovially.
The servants next brought out an array of dishes, all of them, Ladivine noted, exceptionally heavy: pork cutlets covered with melted cheese, potatoes sautéed in goose fat, salad drenched in walnut oil, and for dessert thick crêpes stuffed with chocolate cream.
The children ate greedily, and far more than Ladivine would have thought possible, they who usually ate like birds, as she liked to say.
She herself was struggling to fend off revulsion. She ate a little piece of meat, a potato, then pushed away her almost untouched plate.
The Cagnacs ate energetically, saying nothing, the better to concentrate on their pleasure. Now and then they let out satisfied little grunts.
Ladivine saw them eyeing Marko and the children, as if to be sure they too were enjoying the food, clearly willing, she thought, to do whatever it took, perhaps have still other dishes brought out from the kitchen, so vital did they seem to find it that Marko be like them in every way.
She looked at them, lowly and sorrowful, impotent, unhappy, and she felt the awful bond between the Cagnacs and her children and husband growing ever stronger thanks to the repellent meal they were sharing.
How can you like such food? she wondered.
Although she wasn’t eating, she was the only one sweating. Her hair stuck to her forehead, lay clammily against her neck.
Marko was serenely stuffing himself.
We know what you did to Wellington — and what about the Cagnacs, what’s their crime?
What vile act is illuminating their faces with that hard, white, triumphant light, so intense that they don’t want to be alone in it?
Which is why, seeing Marko and the children giving off that same radiant glow, perhaps still a bit dim and flickering, they’re drawing them close to expose them to the full light of wickedness.
Oh, it must wear them down, having to endure that incandescence day after day with no company but each other.
And she thought: Well, not me, I won’t be a part of it, my darkness keeps me. . Not me, I won’t. .
She wasn’t far from feeling a genuine hatred for Richard Rivière.
Because were it not for his advice they would not now be at the Cagnacs’, ensnared in their vile web, they wouldn’t even be in this country.
No, not the country, she wasn’t sorry to be in this country, and she never would be — not for anything, come what may.
She’d made a very dear friend in the big brown dog. She’d never had such a friend.
Where they shouldn’t have come was the heart of this forest, it was the Cagnacs’, it was into this forest that Richard Rivière never should have sent them.
What was he after?
Above all, what did he want to come of his daughter Ladivine’s meeting these immoral people, and what was he trying to tell her?
That here she was seeing everything he loved, everything he most prized?
That this world, so utterly alien to Clarisse Rivière’s, hostile to that world on principle, was now his world, in his new Annecy existence, filled with a joy unknown in Langon?
Was he trying to show Ladivine, his one, precious daughter, just what sort of man he’d become?
Did he want his daughter Ladivine to be so charmed by the Cagnacs that she would finally allow herself to choose Annecy over Langon, that her allegiance would finally desert Clarisse Rivière?
She’d remained ever faithful to Clarisse Rivière’s spirit, which he might have seen as a condemnation of his running away from it, from Clarisse Rivière’s intolerable innocence.
Well, thought Ladivine, snorting to herself, if the Cagnacs had been sent to this outpost for the purpose of enchanting her, if their mission was to deliver her into Annecy’s loving, treacherous arms, then clearly Richard Rivière did not know his dear daughter so well.
Because nothing could possibly disgust her more than these old faces aglow with their crimes, these fatty foods, this sweet yellow wine.
And they were no more taken with her. It was Marko they wanted on their side, flanked by his children, ripe for the plucking.
She leapt up and hurried out, her nausea peaking.
Her broken sandal dragged over the tiles.
“No coffee?” asked one of the servants, coming back from the kitchen with a cup-laden platter.
Ladivine thought she heard something insolent and contemptuous in his voice, and she had the distinct impression that he was deliberately barring her way to the front door.
She sidestepped him, giving him a brusque bump with one shoulder, and walked out into the white-gravelled courtyard.
The heat hit her in the face, throat and arms, like so many blows aiming to knock her off her feet or drive her back into the airconditioned hall.
But she held her ground, tottering, resolute, took a few uncertain steps forward, searching for a shady spot.
The forest started up close by on all sides, and yet no tree shaded the Cagnacs’ property, not so much as a parasol sheltered the table and three metal chairs in the middle of the courtyard.