“Papa says that they ran out of stonecutters. He blames Napoleon.”
“Who doesn’t?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Well, if we’re talking about those who supported his decision to—”
“We’re not.” I bit into a section of orange and caught the drip of juice from my chin with a thumb. “One of us isn’t at university.”
He grinned at that and opened a canteen.
“What’s inside, then?” I peeled off another section of orange and rose up on my knees. “Medieval chisels? Skeletons?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He dribbled water on his hands.
“You haven’t found one yet?”
“No, I mean I don’t know.” He shook his fingers and then wiped them on his trousers. “I’ve never been inside.”
“What?” I dropped the rest of my orange. “That’s ridiculous.”
The quarry was fronted by a wall of carefully squared blocks. Around the edges of each block, though, were neat rows of grooves, evidence of the medieval stone masons and their tools. Sunlight pushed through the doorway, onto a packed dirt floor. Beyond, still darkness.
I scrambled to my feet.
“Clare, no!” He jumped up, too, and caught my hand.
He didn’t say anything for a moment, just held my hand. A rabbit darted from the bushes, across the clearing before the quarry entrance. I couldn’t hear a thing other than my heart in my ears. His fingers were still damp.
“Is it haunted?” I finally asked.
He ducked his head and let go of my fingers. “No.”
“Then why can’t I go in?”
“It’s dark. The ceiling might fall in.” Again he wiped his hands on the sides of his trousers. “It might be full of wolves.”
He stood so straight and still, shoulders tight. Either he was terrified of caves or he was terrified to let me go. Not since Nanny Proud had anyone worried about me like that.
“Don’t worry. I refuse to meet a wolf.” I straightened my straw hat. “I’ll only be a minute.”
Inside the cave, it smelled like fresh earth, the way I imagined it would smell if you were buried alive. The very thought made me breathless. “Hallo!” I shouted back into the dark. Not even a flutter of bat wings answered.
I walked back into the cave as far as the light went. It bled into little galleries off the main one, but I couldn’t see a thing. I turned into the first and walked with my hands outstretched until I felt cold, damp stone. Counting steps, it didn’t seem very big. Maybe the size of the dining room at Mille Mots.
“Clare!” I heard Luc call. “Be careful!”
I was careful. More than he knew. If for a moment I stopped being careful, everyone would see how un-grown-up I was. How, every night, I cried into my pillow. My heart ached with missing my father. It had never stopped aching with missing my mother. If for a moment I stopped being careful, everyone would see that I wasn’t as strong as I wished I was.
I leaned against the wall. Limestone crumbled in my hair. Something about all of this darkness pressing in around me was comforting. It was the gray and the black that I missed in all the color of France. In the cave, the dark embraced me.
A tear dripped out, then another, then I was turning my face to the wall. The limestone caught my tears, but echoed back an errant little sob.
“Clare?” Luc called.
With a fingernail, I scratched C.R. in the soft limestone. Then thought about how he taught me to taste France, how he wrote me letters from Paris, how he stood outside right now, worrying about me when no one else did, and added L.C.
When I emerged back into the bright, Luc hadn’t moved from where I’d left him. Terrified of caves, then.
His face grew sober. “It’s so dark in there. I shouldn’t have let you go in alone.”
How could I explain that was exactly what I needed? How that moment alone in the wild dark somehow made me feel less alone? “But it was lovely,” I said. “It is lovely.”
He shifted on his spot on the leaves and violets. “You never said, why did you follow me today?”
His eyes, I noticed, were brown like almonds. “Because I didn’t want to be quietly ignored.”
He didn’t quietly ignore me after that.
As summer stretched, we were outside as often as we could be. Sometimes the light-speckled chapel courtyard, sometimes the bank of the river, sometimes the woods or the caves. But most often it was the chestnut tree on the back lawn, within sight of Mille Mots. I’d sit, drawing, Luc would lie, reading. When the shadows swung to afternoon, he’d sneak into the kitchen past the dozing Marthe and bring me pilfered pastries or bread and jam or bowls of almost-ripe apricots. He gave me my first taste of coffee and, when his mother wasn’t looking, my first taste of coffee with brandy. I fell asleep each night full of dreams, and Luc, he didn’t miss a weekend home.
I never saw him draw again, though. It was one of the few secrets he had from me. “I’m not very good,” he always said. “You should see me play tennis.” Though I never did, I begged him to show me. “Come and watch when I play in the Olympics,” he’d tease.
But I wondered where his drawing pad was, the one he’d closed so quickly when I caught him at the Brindeau caves. I wondered if he’d ever sketched me again.
“Why should I say?” he asked one Saturday morning as we sat beneath the chestnut tree. “You won’t tell me what you sketch.”
“Yes, I did. The château.”
