Afterword

Logan Mountstuart died of a heart attack on 5 October 1991 – he was eighty-five years old. His heart was not receiving enough oxygen because it was not being allowed its regular flow of blood, as one or more of his coronary arteries had become blocked (they are called ‘coronary’ because these vessels encircle the top of the heart like a crown). Starved of blood, his heart muscle, and its rhythm, broke down and Logan Mountstuart’s life ended.

He was discovered towards the end of the day by Jean-Robert Stefanelli, who had come to Cinq Cyprès with the gift of a basket of apples. Receiving no answer at the door, Jean-Robert went around to the rear of the house. There he saw the deckchair under the chestnut tree and beside it a half-drunk bottle of white wine in an ice bucket and an open book, cover-side up (it was the Collected Plays of Anton Chekhov). The ice in the ice bucket had melted, and Jean-Robert realized that something was amiss. Wandering around, he soon discovered LMS, dead, face down on the grass beside a corner of the barn where there was a large clump of thistles. He noticed that LMS’s cat was not far away, curled up on a stone, watching everything intently.

Logan Mountstuart was buried in the graveyard of the village of Sainte-Sabine. His grave can be found in the north-east corner of the graveyard. He had made provision for a gravestone: a simple black granite rectangle set in the ground, it reads:

LOGAN GONZAGO MOUNTSTUART

1906-1991

Escritor

Writer

Écrivain

In his will he left the house, Cinq Cyprès, to Mrs Gail Sherwin. She, her husband and their two children spend some weeks there each summer. A search of the property was carried out after his death by his cousin Lucy Sansom (who had been willed LMS’s library and manuscripts). No trace of the novel Octet was found. Jean-Robert Stefanelli remembers helping LMS build a bonfire a week before he died. ‘He burnt many papers,’ Stefanelli recalls. ‘For an old man he seemed very well, and very happy.’ There were no obituaries.