Somewhere below my window, someone turned on a gramophone. I didn’t recognize the music—something lively and quick on a piano—but a weight lifted in my heart.
“Good night, Father,” I whispered up to the stars, and crawled into bed with the gramophone music at the edge of my sleep.
The next morning, my growling stomach woke me up. Sunlight pushed against the corners of the bed curtains. France was still as bright as yesterday. I sat up. My dress was wrinkled and spotted with crumbs from last night’s almost-meal. My impolite stomach informed me that it hadn’t been enough.
I washed up and waited, but no one came to dress me or do my hair. No one brought a fresh tray. Maybe I was meant to dress myself and go down to the dining room. Did the French eat porridge for breakfast? I didn’t know. They probably ate strange things like I’d been given last night. My stomach growled again.
Somewhere outside my window there was a rhythmic thumping. I pictured woodsmen with axes, like in fairy tales, I pictured giants with butter churns, I pictured marching soldiers. I leaned out over the windowsill and looked for the sound, but all I could see was green lawn, tangled roses, and the mossy slate of the château’s roof.
I took off my crumpled dress and all of my underthings. My trunk had been halfway unpacked at some point while I napped yesterday, maybe by whoever had brought my supper tray. I had to search through the trunk for fresh combinations and petticoats, for new stockings and garters, but those hateful black dresses of mine hung in a row in the crooked wardrobe.
I’d had six weeks of black. I’d had a lifetime of gray. In France, the palette was much bigger than that. The colors I’d seen since arriving, they were ones I’d only ever read on the unused tubes in Mother’s paint box. Maybe that’s why they overwhelmed me. I’d never even seen them splashed across a canvas. But to see the ultramarines and viridians and carmines painted across a country, across a house, across people, I wondered. Did people feel the same when their lives were as bright as a painting? Could they mourn and wish and hate and dream when their days glowed with color? I thought again of the gramophone music drifting up through my window last night, those exuberant trips and trills of the piano. Here, so far from Scotland, so far from the life I’d always had, could I be different, too? I shut the wardrobe and opened my valise.
The dress in there wasn’t black and it wasn’t new. It was an old dress of Mother’s, a tea dress already five years out of fashion when she left it behind at Fairbridge. It had a pouty bodice, a froth of a skirt, and sleeves ending at my elbows in tiny pearl buttons. It was utterly romantic and as green as the Scottish hills in springtime. I’d cut it down and basted it with my embroidery needles when Miss May wasn’t looking. It wasn’t stiff crepe, it wasn’t mourning black, it wasn’t sedate as schoolrooms. It was just the different I needed.
I slipped into the green dress. It felt faintly rebellious, to be putting on a color only six weeks into mourning. Miss May, that old Victorian relic, would faint at the thought. But she wasn’t here. Madame Crépet, with her honeycomb yellow dress, Monsieur with his paint-spattered coat, and Mille Mots, so white and green and twined with flowers, they were here, and I meant to be part of them. I sent a quick, guilty prayer up to Father, hoping he’d forgive me.
I finger-combed my hair back and regarded myself in the mirror. I wondered if I looked older. I wondered if I looked like a little girl playing dress-up. I supposed there was only one way to find out.
The rest of Mille Mots was as shabby as my bedroom. The hallways were lined with peeling wallpaper and mismatched furniture. Here and there, on scuffed tables, perched sculptures, some grotesque in their subjects, some heartrendingly beautiful. I found a staircase carpeted in a faded green runner that led down to the front hall I remembered from yesterday, all pale stone and dark wood and a cacophony of paintings. I hadn’t been given a proper tour. I wasn’t sure which way to the breakfast room.
As I was standing in the hall, contemplating four equally quiet doorways leading to places unknown, the front opened with a bang. A boy entered, whistling and swinging a tennis racket. It barely missed me.
I ducked. “Blast, but France is a dangerous place!”
The boy broke off with his whistling and stared.
He wasn’t exactly a boy, I realized upon second glance. He was fully a head taller than me. Fresh from his exercise—his dark hair damp and curling, his shirt spotted with sweat, his face pink from exertion—he looked a man.
“Pardon,” I said, and stepped back against the wall.
He tilted his head. I didn’t know who he was to stare. He wasn’t dressed like a gentleman at sport. Father always wore a jacket, even when playing croquet. I felt a pang thinking of Father, always respectable. But this man wore neither jacket nor vest. Just a white shirt, open at the neck, tucked into loose trousers. Like a pirate, he’d tied a crimson scarf around his waist.
My face burned under his scrutiny and I looked down at the toes of my boots.
“But you’re right, of course. France is a dangerous place.” I looked up to see his eyes twinkling. He brandished his racket like a fencing sword. “It is a country of the three musketeers, of the guillotine, of opera ghosts. But it’s also a place of art and of love.”
“We have art in Scotland,” I said, a trifle defensively.
“Ah, are you an artist, mademoiselle?”
“I’m only fifteen.”
“And I’m nineteen, but what does that matter?”
Maybe he’d understand about the scores of sketchbooks in my valise. “Are you then?”
“I sketch Paris for tourists. Amongst other things.”
Paris! “And yet you’re here, in the country, playing tennis?”
“I have to visit my maman occasionally.” He gave an elaborate bow. The red scarf at his waist swept the tops of his plimsolls. “Luc René Rieulle Crépet.”
He certainly wasn’t the “petit Luc” Madame Crépet had promised. “Clare Ross. Just Clare Ross.”
“Clare Ross.” He tried it. From his tongue, the familiar sounds that made up my name suddenly sounded exotic and magical. I wished he’d say it again. “But surely you weren’t wandering Mille Mots in hopes of meeting me.”
My traitorous stomach answered for me.
“Ah, but you’ve missed breakfast, haven’t you?” He poked his tennis racket into a nearby umbrella stand. “We should go to the kitchen to find you something.”
“To the kitchen?” The kitchen at Fairbridge was presided over by Mrs. Gowrlay, a humorless woman with hairs on her chin. I thought it not impossible that she was an ogress disguised as Scottish cook. “You can meander down to the kitchen whenever you want?”
“I spent most of my time there as a boy. Marthe has five sons and a collection of parakeets. She never minded, as long as I stayed away from the stove.” He stepped towards a doorway. “Come on.”
I took a step towards him. “If you think she wouldn’t mind.”
“She takes pity on anyone who comes to the kitchen hungry.” He said it with a wink. “There’s sure to be a loaf of ficelle, some Maroilles cheese, some garlic sausage. Maybe even almond chouquettes.”
I didn’t know what half of those things were. “Really, a bit of tea and toast is fine.”
“Nonsense. You are in France, mademoiselle. In our kitchens, there is so much more.” He pushed open a door, leading to a set of hidden stairs. “Unless you are afraid.”
An adventure, I told myself. “I’m never afraid.”
—
