She blinked and put a hand to her head. Her hair was loose over her shoulders. “Imagine that,” she murmured.
“Have you been out here all night?”
“I had a place to stay.” She pressed her lips closed. “At least I thought I did.” Her breath caught and she pushed a thumb against her mouth. “Oh, Luc, I was all alone and I didn’t know who to trust and I can’t even trust that painting. I’ve been staring at it all morning through the glass, and I don’t know if it’s her or not.”
“Did you go inside?”
She swallowed. “No.”
“I’ll take you in there.” I reached for her arm again. “If you’d like me to.”
Hesitant, she lowered her thumb. “I would.”
I took her in the shop, waving away Monsieur Santi’s solicitations. She stood before the five other paintings and slowly lifted her chin.
Looking at them again, there was no doubt in my mind. Maman’s enigmatic directive to leave well enough alone seemed to confirm it. But Clare’s face, so near, was mirrored in the paintings.
“It can’t be her, Luc, can it?” She stepped closer, touched the frame. “She couldn’t have really been in Paris all this time. Been so close and not come to Mille Mots to find me? It can’t be her.”
Through her jacket, her back was straight.
In the center painting, the model reclined on a curve-backed sofa in a dress the color of rubies. The neckline of the dress was edged with puffs of lace and it fell unabashedly off one shoulder. There, right by a pink nipple, was that same mole.
Two artists and seven intimate paintings of Maud Ross. How many others were there? Clare hadn’t wanted to see the first one.
Her gaze roved from one to the next to the next. The model danced with flashing calves. She sipped absinthe with a heavy-lidded expression. She leaned towards the painter with her dress dipping forward. She stretched, languid, disheveled, on a sofa. Clare’s breath caught.
“Is it her, Luc?” She asked the question hesitantly, almost fearfully, as though she didn’t want an answer.
When I didn’t reply, she turned her head away.
She wanted her mother. But she wanted the refined Scottish mother who raised her, the elegant woman who had elegant dinner parties, the lady artist who sat so beautifully tortured at her easel. Not this woman who ran off to be painted like a courtesan. The mother Clare talked about and wished for was an icy ideal. I couldn’t give her the one here in the painting, not when she held her breath, willing me not to. “You know, I was wrong,” I said, moving forward. Near to her, but not touching her. “It’s not her. Clearly it’s not.”
“Really?” She turned to me, hopeful.
“Actually, now that I look at the paintings again, I think it’s Sarah Bernhardt.”
Her face cleared. She exhaled. “It does look like Sarah Bernhardt, doesn’t it?”
“Absolutely.”
Monsieur Santi approached again, a disapproving look on his face. “Young man, this is not a museum. You come in here all of the time and never buy.”
“I’m sorry, monsieur.” I put a hand against Clare’s back, just barely brushing the linen of her jacket. “Please, let’s go.”
To my surprise, she leaned into my hand. “Luc, please take me home,” she whispered. “Take me back to Mille Mots.”
—
I used the money Maman had pressed on me for an omnibus to the Gare du Nord. Clare looked as though she’d blow away across the Seine.
On the train we sat next to each other, knees touching. She kept herself tightly wrapped in her jacket, wrapped in her thoughts. I whistled a little Scott Joplin, to make her smile, but she stared at her hands in her lap.
There was nothing waiting at Railleuse station to give us a ride back to Mille Mots. “Can you walk?” I asked her.
“Unless you have another omnibus tucked in your pocket.” A ghost of a joke, but it gave me hope.
We walked along the ridge that led to Enété village. I asked if she wanted to stop, to rest for a while, but she didn’t say a word. In the village, I led her to a bench in the shade outside the smithy and sat her down, brought her a cidre to drink, but she hardly touched it. From within one of the houses someone played an accordion.
“Do you like the music?” I wanted a conversation. She just sighed, so slight it was nothing more than a flutter of her shoulders.
Her silence unnerved me, so, as we walked on, I narrated. I told her how I’d roll down the ridge as a boy, for the grass stains as much as for the spinning feeling. I told her how I’d tag along with Marthe when she came to market in Enété. She’d buy me sugared beans that I’d eat out of a paper twist and then I’d help her carry home the sack of parsnips or fish or summer plums. I pointed out to Clare all of the trees and fence posts I’d once insisted on stopping at to rest, not because I was weary, but because I always knew Marthe was. I told her how Papa bought me my first tennis racket and how I spent all summer marching up and down the Enété road, hoping to show it off to passing farm wagons. I showed her the rock where I’d been bitten by a spider and the poplar tree where I’d had my first kiss.
She stopped at that, and I broke off my nervous rambling. She went under the tree, back against the trunk, and looked up into the branches. A mourning dove cooed. I couldn’t read her face. “Luc,” she said suddenly, “if I ask you a question, will you tell me the whole and complete truth?”
Could a girl ask a more terrifying question? I followed her under the tree. “That depends.”
Her body went rigid. “It shouldn’t. Aren’t we friends?”
“Is that the question?”
“A question.”
“Yes.”
“Then you should have no trouble being honest with me.”
I felt like saying that she hadn’t been honest all the time. I was learning to recognize that little tightening around the corners of her eyes, the way she bit her lip and avoided my gaze when I’d found her outside the Galerie Porte d’Or. Over the summer, I’d learned, in bits and pieces, how to read Clare Ross.
