Simon Tolkien - The Inheritance

Eventually he found himself standing on the far side, looking up at the grey stone church and bell tower built on the top of a small hill, sloping up from where he stood at the water’s edge. Beyond the church the ground ran down again to the ruins of what had once been the chateau. It was sadly dilapidated. The glass in all the windows was broken and most of the roof had fallen in. It was a desolate place, but incongruously, unexpectedly, a white truck was parked in front of the main door, which hung precariously off its hinges, swinging backward and forward in the slight breeze.

As Trave stood looking at the car, wondering who it might belong to, two people came out of the church and began walking quickly down the path to the house. They had their backs to him, but Trave could see from their dress that they were male and female. The man was carrying what looked like two crowbars and the woman was holding a piece of paper. It was impossible to be sure as long as her back was turned, but Trave had the sense that she was angry about something. She was gesticulating with her hands, and her walk seemed unnaturally fast. There was something vaguely familiar about her figure, and Trave ran along the side of the hill toward the house, eager to see who she was. Just before she reached the car, the woman must have become aware of his approach, because she turned round to face him. Trave recognised her straightaway. It was Sasha Vigne.

He stopped dead in his tracks, and so for a moment did she. But she recovered more quickly than he did, covering the last few yards to the car in a few rapid strides, before she yanked open the passenger door and joined her companion inside. Trave could hear her shouting at the man to drive: “Vite, vite.” The car’s motor gunned into life just as he reached her door, and the car shot forward toward the church, throwing him out of the way, before it turned half circle and disappeared down a track that seemed to lead straight into the woods. Trave ran after it a little way but then stopped with his hands on his knees, panting. His heart was racing but so was his mind. Sasha Vigne was the last person that he had expected to meet in this lonely place, far removed from all civilization.

He needed to find her again, but he had no car. Cursing his decision to walk to the chateau, Trave turned back the way he’d come and started to walk quickly down the path towards Marjean village, shimmering on its hilltop in the last of the winter sunshine.

Sasha had been the only mourner at her father’s funeral, which took just under twelve minutes to complete in Chapel number 2 at Oxford Crematorium’s Garden of Remembrance. She was given the last slot before lunch, and the minister was already running late when her father’s turn came around. There was thus little time available for meaningful reflection before the big red curtain was drawn electronically around the light oak coffin and Andrew Blayne made his final invisible journey down the crematorium’s carousel toward the central furnace, which had been belching smoke when Sasha arrived and was belching smoke when she left with her father’s ashes in a small white plastic urn half an hour later.

Andrew Blayne had left no instructions on whether he wished to be burnt or buried, but in the end Sasha had found the choice surprisingly easy to make. Sitting in his room on the day after his death, Sasha had tried to puzzle out what he might have wanted. But then a sudden breeze blowing through the open window had made up her mind for her, as it picked up the last scents of her father and dispersed them forever. The wind was like fire. Clean and quick and true. Not like the earth. The thought of her father’s body slowly decomposing in the wet soil had made Sasha sick to her stomach. God knows, he had known enough decay while he was still alive. The end was the end. Sasha had never believed in the resurrection of the body. Not even when she was a little girl and her mother took her to church twice on Sundays.

And so she had made her booking with the undertaker and ended up outside the crematorium’s iron gates on a cold November day with a sense of complete isolation from everyone else in the world. But that of course was just what she wanted to feel. Her grief for her father was an event waiting to happen, but for now she was almost glad of his absence. Without him, there was nobody to deflect her from her purpose.

First thing the next morning, she cleared out her bank account and changed her money into French francs. She had already given notice to her landlord and packed her belongings into two suitcases. One she deposited in the left-luggage office at Paddington Station, and the other she took with her on the boat train. The codex was wrapped inside her clothes, and the urn was in an outer pocket. She had not yet found a place to scatter her father’s ashes, and it didn’t seem right to leave what was left of him behind. After all, she didn’t know when she would be coming back.

She got to Marjean late on Friday evening. Nothing had changed since her last visit two years before. There were no new houses, and just as few people in the narrow streets. The same single-track road wound down through the vineyards to the blue-black waters of the lake, and in the distance Sasha could just make out the silver-grey bell tower of Marjean Church, fading in the last rays of the sun.

She checked in to the small inn on the edge of the village where she had put up before. The landlord was an old man with a brown weather-beaten face, and he made no comment as he took down the details from her passport, filling out the registration form in laborious block capitals. But a passing alertness in his pale blue eyes made her think that he recognised either her face or her name, and he smiled when she gave the purpose of her visit as tourism. It made her slightly uneasy, but the sensation was transient, and she forgot about the old man almost as soon as he had shown her to her room and left her with the key.

Underneath her buttoned-up exterior, Sasha could hardly contain her excitement. But she knew that darkness would come quickly once the sun had set, and she had no option but to wait until morning before driving out to the church.

She was restless at dinner and drank too much of the local red wine, trying not to think about John Cade, who had been this way already, armed with the same secret that she had worked so hard to discover. And yet he hadn’t found the cross. Just a bullet in the lung fired from a high-velocity rifle. Sasha remembered what her father had said when she first brought the codex to his attic room in Oxford: “You’ll go to France just like he did… And something terrible will happen to you.” Sasha shivered. The words seemed like a prophecy.

She wanted to believe that she had begun a completely new chapter in her life, that she had left the past entirely behind her on the other side of the English Channel, and yet unbeknownst to her, less than four miles down the dark road, Trave was pacing up and down in another hotel room, thinking just like Sasha about Marjean Church and what may or may not have happened there.

At first light she drove out of the village, looking for the wrought-iron gate in the wall that ran along the right side of the road. She remembered it clearly from two years before, but now it had disappeared, and the entrance was virtually indistinguishable from other openings where the wall had fallen down and local people had carried away the stone for their own construction works. Sasha went straight past the gateway the first time and only realised her mistake when she found herself coming into Moirtier-sur-Bagne. Turning the car round, she drove back toward Marjean at a snail’s pace until eventually she found what she was looking for. She knew it must be right because the two white prancing horses on top of the gateposts were just visible beneath the fast-growing ivy. Beyond, the track was half-dark with overarching trees cutting off most of the sunlight, but there were no serious obstructions to her progress. Mass was still said at Marjean Church, and the cure made sure that his parishioners kept the way clear for his car.