“Then why haven’t you?”
Something in her question was expectant. An expectancy that surprised me, given that this was only our second real conversation. Clare Ross, when she gave her trust and her friendship, gave it completely.
But I evaded. “If you see how my maman used to dress me, you’ll understand why I’ve never inspired a great passion in any girl.”
I took her to see the few portraits in the east hallway. She followed the string of Lucs down the hall—a fat-cheeked baby clinging to the back rail of a chair; a scowling boy in a hated lace-collared blouse and long curls; a boy, prouder and freshly shorn, posing with a tennis racket and a smile. She laughed at each one and I blushed.
“They’re not very good,” I mumbled. “I didn’t really have hair as long as that.”
“Pity,” she said, with a glint in her eye. “I think the curls are rather fetching.”
I refused to answer.
“It’s interesting, though, how even the portraits of you contain so much more than your face.”
“My tennis racket, of course. And in that one, my rocking horse. He put my favorite things in the paintings.”
She stepped closer to the one of me scowling at the painter. I was almost seven in the picture, furious to be sitting in a moth-eaten ruffled blouse rather than off meeting other boys. At seven, I was sure I was missing out on some vital part of manhood, both in the outfit and in the time spent sitting still.
“There’s more. Right there, around your wrist. A ribbon? And what are you holding clutched in your fist? I can just see the gleam of something.”
“Marbles,” I said. I hadn’t even noticed Papa painting them in. “That summer, I was mad about marbles. We all were. Marthe’s oldest son, Alain, would tag along with her and we’d play in the dirt outside the kitchen door. Our playing was fierce.”
“And the ribbon?” She touched the painting, where my wrist stuck out from the end of my jacket. “Or was it a bracelet?”
“A ribbon.” I yanked my sleeve down as though she’d really touched me. “That was the summer Maman left us.” I shrugged, hoping I looked nonchalant, as though I still didn’t think of it now and again. “She and Papa, they’d had a terrific fight and she went to my grandparents’ in Perthshire. I snuck into her wardrobe and pulled a ribbon from her dressing gown. Wore it around my wrist under my shirt all summer. I missed her.”
I didn’t tell Clare how the fight was all my fault.
That spring, Papa had just got his commission for Les Contes de Ma Mère l’Oye. He’d spend all day in the tumble-down chapel courtyard, sketching remnants of knights and ladies pressed into the stained glass, while I ran from one corner to the other with a makeshift sword, hunting for trolls and monsters. He’d be so wrapped up in his studies that he wouldn’t even come for his midday potage. Maman worried and buzzed around him, bringing coffee and sandwiches, keeping his pencils sharpened, making sure the gardener didn’t touch a blade in the courtyard. Even though she was halfway through a marble bust, she put aside her own work—her chisels and mallets and rasps—to concentrate on his.
It was one afternoon, where early violets were pushing up along the edges of the shadows, that Papa became frustrated. He was starting in on the first canvas. There was nothing in the middle but a few faint lines and whorls, measured out with his thumb, but I trusted him. Tomorrow those scattered lines would be something wonderful—a princess or a lion or a castle arching to the sky. But at the moment, Papa slumped in his chair, glaring at the canvas.
“Papa, why have you stopped drawing?” I asked. I was crouched by a hole with my wooden sword, harrying the snake inside. “What’s the matter?” In truth, he hadn’t been drawing all morning.
He muttered an incomprehensible string of something. When he wanted to swear at a canvas, he did it in English.
I shrugged. In the end, the snake hole was more interesting than grown-up words. “You should ask Maman,” I said. After all, it’s what I always did when I had a problem. “She can help.”
But Papa waved his hand dismissively. “She wouldn’t know. This is a question of art. It is not for her to understand.”
Later I went to find Maman, to show her a newly wobbly tooth and to tell her about the snake’s valiant escape. She sat in her studio, high up in the east tower, which, gradually, was becoming less and less of a studio. The piles of unsold sculptures that usually lined the walls were gone, tucked away somewhere in the château. Her old, scarred worktable had been moved against the wall and covered with a green blotting pad. She sat at the improvised desk with her book of household accounts, adding up columns of figures. A stack of letters sat in the corner, awaiting Papa’s signature.
She pressed a kiss to my forehead but shooed me away. “Maman is working, mon poulet.”
I stepped away, kicking the edge of the rug. It covered up the chips of stone that had always littered the floor before. “I’m sorry you aren’t an artist any longer.”
“Of course I am.” She licked a finger and turned a page in her ledger. “I’m just busy with other things today.”
“I don’t think so.” I wiggled my tooth. “Papa said that you aren’t. He said that you don’t understand art the way he does.”
The row that followed, out in the chapel courtyard, shook down three panes of stained glass. The next morning Maman was gone.
I moped around that summer, hiding in her wardrobe and hoarding marbles. I suppose Papa was moping, too, though he was always at his easel. He painted in nothing but blues and blacks. I learned later that he’d been writing her letter after letter, pleading in English for her to come back to him. She resolutely stayed in Perthshire at her parents’ house.
Since the whole mess was exactly my fault, I knew I had to be the one to fix it. It could be a quest, like Sir Gawain, I decided. I was old enough to be a hero. With Maman’s sewing scissors, I cut off my long curls and left them on her dressing table as an offering. I found a dented helmet in Papa’s costume box and, armed with my wooden sword and an old palette for a shield, I set off through the woods in the general direction of Scotland.
I didn’t get far before my feet went right out from under me. Deep in the woods, I’d found a well, dry and forgotten beneath the leaves, and I tumbled down.
I was far enough from Mille Mots that Papa couldn’t hear my calls, though I shouted myself hoarse. The stones crumbled back down on top of me when I tried to climb up. The skies darkened and I swore I heard wolves howling. I stayed awake all night, hands crossed over my head, until Alain, checking his snares early in the morning, found me, crying, shivering, and bruised up and down. He brought Papa, who took off his jacket and hauled me up with a rope. I had nothing worse than a broken ankle, but Maman was on the next boat. Papa spent two days filling in that well himself and was once more her cher Claude. I never did set off on a quest again.
I didn’t tell Clare all of this, as we stood in the hallway in front of Papa’s portraits. She’d noticed the faded ribbon around my wrist in the painting and that made me feel vulnerable enough.
I think she knew that. She didn’t say anything, didn’t touch the painting again, but she moved very close, so close I could hear her breathing.
“Maman came back, though,” I said without thinking, then felt awful for saying so. Because for Clare, her mother hadn’t.
Her face was closed. “You must have needed her so much, she felt it across the miles.” She tipped her chin up at the portrait. “The way you kept that ribbon close, so close that you forgot all about it while you posed.”
“I didn’t know Papa saw all of that.” The ribbon, the marbles, the boy frustrated that his maman had disappeared.
“I told you that art is more than circles and lines. More than branches and fruit and piles of stone. It can tell a story.”
“Then what is your story?” I asked.
“Maybe not so different than the one your father captured here. Though instead of a ribbon, I have a green dress.”
The one she was wearing now, far too elegant for a fifteen-year-old girl. It had been her mother’s, I knew now.
