I should have talked to her rather than sending her from my door in a fury. Maybe I could have persuaded her to return to Fairbridge. But she didn’t and I felt responsible. I wrote to Clare often. John did his best with her, but she was lonely up in that big house. Occasionally I heard news of Maud, through friends. She was here and there, never staying very long in one place. After a while, I lost track of her. I wish that M. Santi had better news, but he confirmed what I already knew. Maud isn’t in France any longer.
Luc, please don’t worry about this matter anymore. When Maud wants to be found, she will. Until then, we’ll give Clare all of the friendship we can.
Your Maman
I had met Madame Ross once. I was eight and had been dragged on one of Maman’s flying trips to Perthshire, the one Clare remembered. Scotland was grayer than France, the flowers were smaller, and the food saltier. There wasn’t much for a disgruntled boy to do but wish he was back at home.
Maman adored Madame Ross, that was clear. They called each other “Eena” and “Mudge” when they thought no one was listening. Clare was only four then, with short curls and an enormous hair bow that was forever falling out. She was too little to play with me, but kept trying to escape the nursery to find her mother. She adored her even more than Maman did.
She had that Little Folks’ Painting Book, the one she mentioned to me in the letter. I remembered her running into the room with a colored picture, proud that she’d stayed mostly in the lines. “For you, Mother,” she’d said. But Madame Ross just frowned and sent her away with the instruction to “do something original.”
After Clare had slipped from the room, tears on her cheeks, Madame Ross said, “Really, Eena, maybe that’s the best I can expect from her. After all, not everyone is an artist.”
Ten years later those dismissive words hadn’t left me. I used my tips that week to buy Clare a dozen soft Conté pencils and a wooden box to keep them in. I knew her best was more than anyone could expect.
That weekend, I came home to Mille Mots. I didn’t tell Maman I was coming, so no one was waiting for me at the station in Railleuse. It was the kind of summer day where the trees lazily waved as I passed and the air smelled like fresh grass. I’d brought only my school satchel, weighted down with books, a pair of clean socks, and one dusky gold plum. I tried to put from my mind the paintings in Galerie Porte d’Or and Maman’s letter. I inhaled and thought of home.
The walk was dusty, winding up the ridge that bristled through the countryside like the spine of a dragon, then through the village of Enété, where I used to sneak as a boy to buy sugared almonds and poke the glassy-eyed fish in the market. I ate my plum and tipped my hat to a woman sweeping her step. Past the last house in the village, the one with green shutters and a crooked door, the road wound down towards the Aisne. A sandpiper darted past, chirping enthusiastically. I whistled back at him, smiled, and stretched my arms.
A few kilometers past the village, the road narrowed. Against the summer green of the fields, I saw the lindens lining the drive to Mille Mots. And, behind the green, the château itself.
I slipped around to the back. Maman would be at her battered table in the garden, going over accounts. Papa might be at his easel, near the river, unless the horseflies had driven him inside to the studio. And Clare, maybe stretched under the chestnut tree.
But when I rounded the corner, to where the poppy-dotted lawn stretched along the river’s edge, I saw them. At the old table in the garden, Clare and Papa sat, facing each other across a trimmed sheet of paper. He’d read my letter, it seemed, my plea to fill Clare’s lonely weeks with lessons. Papa sipped from a small cup of coffee, tapping his pipe against the corner of the table but not lighting it, not yet. Clare bent over the paper, pencil flashing, the tip of her tongue escaping as evidence of her concentration. Papa never touched her drawing, but traced shapes in the air. I knew the voice he was using, that slow, patient voice that always made you feel your efforts were golden, even when riddled with errors. He leaned back and tugged his beard, quite obviously content.
Clare was less so. She frowned. She erased. She gnawed at the pencil when she didn’t think Papa was looking. Papa nodded over her sketch, satisfied, but Clare only seemed to grow more and more frustrated. She wanted to be drawing the château, I knew, the landscape around Mille Mots, not the lines and circles Papa was insisting upon.
Finally Yvette came out with the dented coffee pot and Clare took it as an invitation to drop her pencil and push back her chair.
She looked up then and noticed me standing on the lawn. She brought her hand up to the brim of her hat. Scratching her eyebrow? Shading her eyes? Waving, at me? For some reason, my heart beat faster. I waved back.
She jumped to her feet, tipping the chair back. Papa didn’t admonish her. He tugged at his beard and watched her skip off towards me, her braid swinging down her back. Her hat fell off.
“You’re in your ‘students’ uniform’ again.” She bounced to a stop in front of me. “And I have a new dress. See?” It was plain and white, but of a fine fabric. She smoothed the front. “Your mother, she said the queens of France used to wear white for mourning. She saw no reason why a fifteen-year-old girl couldn’t do the same.” The dress came up high on her neck and down to skim the top of her high, buttoned boots. Around her waist she wore a wide sash.
“It’s very nice, mademoiselle.”
Something fell, just a fraction, in her face, but she twirled with a pasted-on smile. I swallowed.
The other times I’d seen her, in the front hallways and out beneath the chestnut tree, she’d been wearing the gauzy dress that was her mother’s. Its raggedness, its repurpose, its oddness, almost made her seem part of Mille Mots. A young bohemian, dressed in the green of the countryside, dressed in a way that made her happiest. But this new dress was unmistakably a girl’s dress—short, flounced, and modest. Reading her letters, I kept forgetting she was exactly that. A girl. I slipped a hand beneath my jacket and pressed it over my heart. It had no business beating the way it was.
“Luc!” Maman came bustling from the kitchen door. “I thought you weren’t coming until tomorrow.” She set a plate of cakes by Papa and wiped her hands on her skirt.
“I like to surprise you, Maman.”
I was sure she didn’t believe me, but she walked heavily across the lawn, her gold earrings twinkling. “Even a cat is full of more surprises than you, mon poussin.”
“I was eager to be here.” I didn’t meet the demoiselle’s eyes.
I did see the look in Maman’s, though, and it drew hard. “I see.”
“I was bringing Papa a new package of Conté pencils,” I said quickly. “Number threes.” I dug into my satchel for the wooden box. “The last time I was here, I saw he was out of them.”
Maman frowned at the elegant case, but held out a hand for the pencils.
The copy of Tales of Passed Times I left in my satchel, but I touched it once through the canvas.
“I should go to greet Papa,” I said, as though I hadn’t walked from the Railleuse train station only to see Clare Ross again. Maman watched me with eyes inscrutable. I bowed, quickly and stiffly, and walked away.
I’d waited for two weeks for Luc to come home from Paris. I wanted to hear more about Uncle Jules and his parrots. I wanted to talk about castles and ogres. I wanted to hear that funny, teasing Luc I’d found in the letters.
But the boy who came unexpectedly from the train station, buttoned up tight in his black suit with a school satchel over his shoulders, he was someone altogether different. He looked like a banker, not a pirate. Dark amid the breath and color of Mille Mots. I thought for a moment he looked happy to see me, but something changed in the time it took me to cross the lawn to greet him. He called me “mademoiselle,” as though we weren’t becoming closer than that. And then he kept himself at a distance.
So when, early the next morning, I looked through my window and saw Luc stealing through the kitchen door with a small rucksack and Bede by his side, I didn’t even think. I pulled my hat from the wardrobe and slipped from the house after him.
He’d been heading for the stand of trees that ran along the river, so I picked up my skirts in one hand and ran in that direction. There was no sign of him among the trees, but I jogged along the tree line, peering through the branches to where they thinned out along the bank. When a bevy of larks startled from a tree up ahead, where the staggering tree line met the denser forest, I knew I’d found him. I darted into the woods.
He walked and I followed for what felt like hours. I stayed close enough to see the back of his brown jacket but far enough behind that I could stay out of sight. As he hiked, he stabbed the ground ahead of him with a found walking stick and sang American jazz songs. Even though I didn’t know the words, I wanted to sing along with him. I stepped over rocks, edged around trees, and stayed quiet. I didn’t want him to turn around and send me home.
I was just wondering if he was ever going to stop when the trees opened up onto a clearing, bordered by a rock face. It was empty. The face was high—maybe as tall as it was up to my tower window in the château—and jagged, as though someone had carved it away with a chisel. I crossed the clearing and put my hand against the rock, but there was no way Luc could have climbed it.
To the right, the rock face curved down to, unbelievably, a railroad track, grown over with weeds. I peered down the track, narrow and straight as a ruler, but didn’t see him or his rucksack.
So I followed the rock face to the left, past crumbles of rocks that soon began resolving themselves into old, battered-down walls and doorways. I was seeing the outlines of long-gone rooms butting up against the face, with charred stone and dirt floors grown over with matted grass.
The face sloped down and I passed more rooms and then little pockets, carved clear out of the rock. Shallow little caves, tucked in at regular intervals, with wood violets scattered in front. Overhead, trees spread shade over the entrances. Luc could be in any one of them. And I could be walking home alone.
