The marten chattered in sudden agitation, breaking the train of her reverie. She looked down at the apple core in her hand and tossed it down the slop and watched it roll down the grass. The marten had scampered up to the stone wall and was crouched near her head and tugged on a nearby lock of hair. Haidée sighed and turned to scold the animal for its impertinence, but it darted just out of reach when she moved and chattered again. The marten gave her a hard beady-eyed stare, swiveled its head toward the other side of the wall, turned back to her, and once again looked out.
Now curious, Haidée shifted to her knees and peered over the wall. At first, she didn’t see anything other than the green land, the trees, and the sky. But as she shifted her gaze off toward the edge of the island and the sea, she saw a tall black figure with his back to her, looking out into the water.
Its job done, the marten stopped squeaking its alert and pounced off the wall to land on her shoulder. But Haidée hardly noticed the liberties the creature was taking as she squinted against the late morning light. The figure with his dark hair pulled back seemed familiar to her in his ill-fitting coat. As his unfashionable wardrobe took hold in her mind, she finally remembered his name. Jacot Renaud. And then she wondered how she could have forgotten the irritating man so quickly.
For a moment, she watched him, but soon grew bored when he did not move. She was about to turn back to her own musings when he suddenly crouched down, letting the end of his coat flap outwards like a pair of ominous black wings. He leaned down and the light caught at his spectacles which were dangling on one had, making it brightly glitter like a large topaz. He was looking down, inspecting the ground.
Haidée frowned at his abruptly strange action. Didn’t he say that he was an astronomer coming to the observatory on Mont Saint Filan in order to further his own experiments? Why was he out here in the wind and the air when he should be inside doing calculations and calibrating various astronomical instruments?
And then she remembered a bit of conversation she had heard before—at dinner on the first night that she had arrived on the island. Renaud had said that he had corresponded with an acquaintance at the observatory, another astronomer who had committed suicide not to long before.
Something flickered in her mind, ideas fading in and out and not quite connecting. She bit her lip as the thought coalesced that perhaps there was something that she was missing.
The suicide, she thought, had happened at that spot—or at least as she had understood it. Danton Neville was said to have stood at the west end of the island and had jumped. The most logical explanation for Renaud’s presence—was that he was here to see where his friend had died. But somehow, looking at him crouched on the ground, Haidée found hard to believe.
She bent lower so that only her eyes were over the wall. She narrowed her gaze, thinking back to the night that Legard had died. Renaud had been the first out of bed and into the hallway. But who could say that he wasn’t actually coming back from somewhere else and that Haidée had in fact caught him trying to go back into his room? There were many things that she did not know about her fellow traveler and that made her suspicious. Perhaps she should also start asking questions about the suicide and what Neville’s relation to the other astronomers at the observatory had been. She could start asking her only apparent objective source, Davenport, the observatory librarian.
But even with that newly formed plan, there was no way she could get to the village now—not with Renaud standing in full view of the path back to the observatory.
He put his glasses back onto his face. Then he took something out of his coat pocket, a glass vial and a spoon. Amazed, she watched Renaud scrape up some of the dirt on the ground with the spoon and poured it into the vial. Then he placed a stopper on the vial and flicked the spoon to get the rest of the dirt off before putting them back into his pocket. But he wasn’t done. She saw him take out a handkerchief to pick up something else from the ground before straightening back up. The marten on her shoulder began chattering excitedly and Renaud chose that moment to turn toward the wall. Haidée gasped and flattened herself below the top of the wall.
“Do you always make a racket at the most inopportune moment?” she whispered harshly to the marten who had jumped from her shoulder to her lap and was bobbing its head, trying to get her attention.
The marten, apparently, had noticed something about the scene that had alarmed it—and it seemed to be trying to tell her something. Or, her tonic was taking an effect on her mind and she was ascribing something that shouldn’t be ascribed to a small crazed animal in the first place.
She slumped over and took out the bottle of poppy wine as the marten commenced to run around in circles, chittering to itself.
“Being a lunatic isn’t helping your cause,” she murmured. “I am not going to look over while he’s still there.”
The marten finally stopped and stared at her. She fancied that the animal was looking at her in disbelief.
“Well, what can I say?” she replied, half convinced that she was pretending to talk to a real companion instead of acknowledging the fact that she was just babbling to a dumb animal. “I’m a coward.”
She opened the bottle and downed the tonic in one large gulp. The marten squeaked, and to her, it sounded like disapproval.