Nevers Page 7

  Lighter steps are heard on the stairs, and the thin woman from the market rushes in, wearing a dirty, patched dress. “What did I tell you?” she screeches at M. Gustave. She scowls at Anneline, who has been rudely awakened. “That’s my piglet in your bed.”

  The woman dives toward the piglet, who shuffles backward on its trotters into Anneline’s lap. The chick hops between the piglet and the woman, cheeping madly. The woman bats the ball of fluff out of the way. It tumbles dangerously close to the fire.

  “Hey!” Odette yells. She gathers the trembling chick in her hand.

  “That piglet is my property!”

  “Yes, it is,” Anneline mumbles groggily.

  “Don’t you deny it—”

  “Take him,” Anneline says. “I don’t need another mouth to feed.”

  Odette grits her teeth. Anneline does not understand basic farming principles. Everything they fed the piglet would in turn feed them.

  The woman leans toward Anneline and snatches up the animal. “You keep your hands off my little pig!” she yells. She turns and runs down the stairs with the little pig kicking and squealing under her arm.

  “You keep your piglet from coming here!” Anneline yells after the woman.

  The chick cheeps sorrowfully in Odette’s hand.

  M. Gustave shuffles awkwardly. He strokes his chin and mutters about beards being made of hair, not feathers, and how much better chickens are than people.

  Odette reaches into her apron and places coins into his large, chubby hand. “For rent. And a roasting chicken,” she says.

  M. Gustave brightens. “I knew you hadn’t stolen that piglet.” He gazes at the chick. “You are a darling one.” He strokes the chick’s fuzzy head with a wide fingertip. “I wonder where you came from.”

  “It hatched yesterday,” Odette says. “Lisane has several new chicks. I would like to keep them.”

  M. Gustave shakes the coins in his hand. “I suppose it’s up to Lisane. What does she think?”

  Odette can’t fathom how to answer the question. “I don’t know,” she says. “She would probably like them to be close to her.”

  “You are right,” says M. Gustave. “They should remain here. You know, there’s nothing I like better than watching a chick crack out of its shell. I pretend it’s me breaking through. It would have to be a large egg to hold me though, wouldn’t it?”

  “Well, bigger than…” Again Odette doesn’t know quite what to say. But it doesn’t matter. M. Gustave is utterly distracted, gazing at Anneline, who must be feeling better. She is reading her novel, chewing on the ends of her hair, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  Finally, great, sweating M. Gustave bends toward the chick calming in Odette’s hand and whispers, “You will be large like me one day.” He raises his arms and flaps them, then heads out the door and down the steps to the street.

  The morning sun breaks through the clouds and lights up the room. Odette takes note of the spots that need scrubbing. The shutters next door bang open, and a woman’s friendly voice calls, “Wake up, son.”

  Odette looks at the faïence dishes lining the mantel, and, for the first time since she and her mother and Félix shared a cottage at the edge of a graveyard, she feels as though the house she lives in breathes, like something alive.

  Fifteen

  Niçois’s story about being whipped by his father had reminded Odette that nettle tea is good for treating fever. Félix swore by it. He would gather it from the edges of the graveyard whenever she or Anneline was sick and boil the leaves until they were as slimy as seaweed.

  As she heads down to the street to see if she can find some of the plant, Niçois leans out of his window. “Odette! Good news. My mother wants your help. She has work for you already. Today!”

  “But what do I do?”

  “Don’t worry—Mother will tell you. For now she asked me to give you this.” Niçois throws a grayish ball out the window. Odette catches it in her apron. It is a ball of wax, rippled where Niçois held it. Odette presses her fingers into the channels that his fingers made.

  “Take the wax to the priest and get it consecrated,” Niçois says. “It will be needed later on for the birth.”

  To get to the cathedral, Odette decides to cut through the alley that is always thick with M. Gustave’s chickens. But when she turns into the little street, her heart freezes: the man with the yellow hair, trim mustache and twitchy face is talking to M. Gustave. A chicken clucks at the yellow-haired man’s feet, but he kicks it out of the way. He wears leather shoes with buckles. The shoes are clearly from Paris, though the buckles are tarnished from age and misuse. Odette slips behind a pile of broken chairs. She watches, heart pounding, as the yellow-haired man drops something into M. Gustave’s hand. Odette hears the music of coins.

  M. Gustave puts his other hand on his belly and bows deeply, drawing back his right leg so that the toe of his sabot scrapes across the cobblestones. “At your service,” Odette hears him say. The yellow-haired man hurries away. Odette ducks farther behind the chairs until he has passed her—so closely that she notices the rags tucked into the backs of his too-large shoes to make them fit.

  Outside the cathedral the priest is gazing up at the sculptures that crown the great door. Most have no heads. The noses are broken off others. Many are also missing fingers or entire hands. “You can still recognize Saint John without his head,” the priest says with a sigh. “He carries a book. And Saint Peter holds a key. Those revolutionaries had no shame. They beheaded the saints the same as they beheaded the rich. Scoundrels. But I understand what they wanted. I have been to bishops’ parties where wine flows and everyone prattles on about how well they know Cardinal so-and-so. While beggars sleep in gutters!”

  Odette holds out the lump of wax.

  “Ah,” says the priest. “Another baby on its way?”

  Odette nods.

  The priest waves his hand over the ball. “God, Lord, king of ages,” he intones. “All-powerful and All-mighty, you who made everything. We beseech you to make powerless, to banish and drive out, every diabolical power and machination, and keep all evil from the keyhole.” He looks at Odette. “There. It will not let the devil pass.”

  On her way home Odette makes a detour to visit Anne. He is asleep, standing under the chestnut tree.

  Excuscita! Odette says. “Wake up.”

  Anne’s head lifts. Did he understand her? Odette can’t tell. He might simply have been startled by her voice.

  “I’m sorry you don’t like being a donkey,” Odette tells him in her best Latin. She speaks quietly and tries not to move her lips. She doesn’t want any townspeople passing by to think she’s daft. Anne shivers, as if his skin is loose on him. He nibbles the grass at his feet. Does he hear her?

  “You mentioned a girl last night,” Odette says in Latin. “Was it me?”

  Anne continues to eat the grass.

  Just then a group of noisy children run up. They throw handfuls of long grass at Anne and jeer. “Lazy donkey!”

  “That isn’t nice!” Odette scolds.

  The children glare at her. “Who are you?” one asks.

  “Just…nobody.”

  “Everyone is someone,” the child says.

  “Everyone is someone,” a bigger boy repeats. “Everyone is someone, and someone is everyone!”

  The boy pretends he’s enormous. In a deep voice he shouts, “I am everyone!” He looms over the smallest child.

  The children run away laughing.

  “I have to go,” Odette tells Anne.

  Anne still doesn’t respond. But as soon as Odette steps away, he clamps his teeth onto the hem of her dress.

  Promitto revenire, Odette says, wresting her dress from between his teeth. “I promise I’ll come back.”

  Using an elm leaf to protect her hand, Odette stops to pick enough nettles for tea. Next she begs a bone at the butcher’s back door, still distracted by thoughts of the strange donkey. All the way home, she puzzles ove
r their encounter. Anne did not seem to understand her, yet he wanted her to stay.

  She feels sure now that Anne did bray in Latin during the night. After all, she does not have a fanciful imagination, and she had slapped her cheeks to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. Niçois said that Anne only brays at night. So perhaps the donkey doesn’t understand things during the day? It is all so impossible though. It is ridiculous! Still, she has to trust her own senses.

  Odette is jolted from her musing by Niçois shouting from his window as she approaches the little house.

  “The birth will be this evening. I’ll come and get you when it’s time. Hang on to the wax until then.”

  Odette prepares tea and broth for Anneline, and as her mother takes feeble sips of each, heavy footsteps once again pound up the stairs.

  M. Gustave enters and bows. “A widow requests your presence.”

  Odette studies him carefully, suspiciously. Can they trust him after the conversation she witnessed between him and the man with the yellow hair?

  “Mme Geneviève is her name,” M. Gustave continues. “She is old, so she cannot come here. She lives past the Port de Médine, in the woods, and wants to talk to you about Cluny. About a bridge?”

  Anneline leaps out of the bed. She grips M. Gustave’s enormous face between her hands until he looks like a codfish. “Is this really true?”

  “Do you call me a liar, Madame?” M. Gustave bubbles.

  “No! You have simply delivered such good news it is hard to believe.” She turns to Odette. “We must go. Immediately.”

  “You aren’t well enough,” Odette says. “I’ll go, and I will tell you what the old woman says.”

  “The nettle tea has restored me. And the broth. I am going. M. Gustave, you have delivered a fine message. But I regret I have no coin to give you.”

  “I think he has enough coins,” Odette murmurs.

  M. Gustave shuffles on his feet. Then he breathes in deeply, his nose whistling and his eyebrows quivering. “The broth smells delicious,” he says.

  So Odette and Anneline wait while M. Gustave, dipping his head into the pot like a bird, slurps up every last drop of bone broth and then washes it down with nettle tea.

  Sixteen

  Anneline talks feverishly for the entire walk to Mme Geneviève’s, remembering the summer afternoon she and Odette boated to find the box. She counts the times she has put up a poster in a new town—eleven—and never heard back. And she wonders, as she often has, what had been in the mysterious box. She lists off the husbands who had wealthy families. Claude. Marcel. Edouard. And the one with the bristles of dark hair in his ears—what was his name again?

  Geneviève’s blue cottage is nestled in a grove of small pine trees. Anneline raises her knuckles to the door, but she doesn’t knock. “I can’t,” she says. She gnaws her fingernails.

  Odette steps forward and raps on the rough wood. A voice on the other side calls out weakly, “Enter.”

  The cottage is dimly lit. It has a dirt floor, and the air is thick with smoke and the stench of dung. Through a window cut in the far wall, two oxen bob their horned heads into the main room. Between husbands, Odette and her mother have lived with oxen this way, their stalls pressed close to the house. Their massive bodies warm the cottage, and the beasts provide company too.

  Sausages hang over the fireplace, drying. The mantel is lined with candlesticks, shuttles and spools for weaving, a faïence jug with its spout knocked off—like the noses of the saints at the cathedral, Odette thinks—pewter cups and a bronze sculpture of a porcupine with holes where its quills should be. It is a match holder, the kind Odette has seen in rich people’s homes. She is surprised to see one here. The rich can afford matches, but everyone else makes do with borrowed embers.

  The table is edged with bowl-shaped scoops dug into the wood, into which soup can be poured and meals served to save using dishes. The long table is heaped mostly with tools—tongs, hammers—but also books, bones, scraps of leather and tin. A clock’s pellet heartbeat punctures the silence. The clock surprises Odette the way the match holder did. It is an article for the wealthy, who have the leisure to measure their days with time rather than chores.

  A bed is pushed close to the fireplace, and deep in its blankets is a wrinkled face framed by gray hair. Small, dark eyes peer at Anneline and Odette over the lip of a blanket. “The clock and the porcupine were gifts,” the woman explains. She must have noticed Odette looking at them. “Gratitude for service. I had strength once. I spent it all in the houses of the rich, polishing their silver, keeping their fires burning, tending their children. Ever since I hung up my apron and walked away, my body has begged for sleep. But I have so much to do. So many ideas to make real. Earthly answers to airy questions. Inventions.

  “I’ve devised a candle holder that collects the melted wax into a form for a new candle. You turn it over when the candle melts away, and, voilà! You have a fresh one. I am working on a match that you can light in the rain, soap that makes your hair free of scalp snow, and a liquid that will hold the heat of the sun so you can use it later.” The woman sits up. “I was just having a nap. Now, who are you?”

  “You called for us,” Odette says.

  “I never called for anyone.”

  “The large man said you had,” Anneline says.

  “M. Gustave,” Odette reminds her mother. Sometimes Anneline doesn’t even remember her name. She has called Odette Colette, Huguette, Henriette and Juliette, and many times simply ma fille.

  “Do you know anything about a key and a package left in Cluny some years ago?” Odette asks Mme Geneviève.

  “And a box under the struts of a bridge,” Anneline adds breathlessly. “It was empty when we found it.” She falls weakly to her knees and presses her face against Mme Geneviève’s blankets. “Please, please, please.”

  “Mother,” Odette chides, embarrassed. For all her faults and all her troubles, Anneline has never shown such weakness, such desperation. Such exhaustion. Is this another result of the bump on her head?

  Mme Geneviève looks at Anneline with distaste, then says decisively, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  But as she speaks, the old woman glances at Odette and nods conspiratorially. A thrill runs through Odette. It appears that Mme Geneviève knows exactly what they are talking about.

  The clumsy conversation is interrupted by the ring of horse bells. Then “Whoa!” cries a man’s voice outside the door. “Yoo-hoo, ma tante! It’s me!” Odette hears the rider drop to the ground. When he appears at the door, her heart drops. It’s the man with the yellow hair. Sharp nose, trim beard, tarnished shoe buckles.

  “Now I see,” the old woman says under her breath. She presses a smile onto her face. “Nephew Renard! It has been a long time. I wonder what brings you here today—at this exact moment that I have my first visitors in two moons?”

  “A delightful coincidence, ma tante.” The man’s voice is smooth, as if it has been dipped in oil.

  When his eyes land on Anneline, still on her knees beside Geneviève’s bed, he reaches for her hand and pulls her up. He kisses her hand, then tracks his lips up her wrist. “Who are you, ravishing creature?”

  It is true that Anneline looks particularly beautiful today. The fever has added color to her cheeks, and the sweat has made her skin glow and her hair curly. But Odette suspects that the man is more interested in the notice Anneline posted than in her beauty. Anneline giggles coquettishly. “Well, who are you, sir?”

  “Nothing without you. Tell me your name and then every detail about you—how you feel, what is important to you, your favorite kind of day.”

  “This may be my favorite kind of day,” Anneline says, smiling at Renard.

  Renard looks into Anneline’s eyes. “It is my favorite day yet.”

  Odette despairs, watching her mother gaze at Renard—a spy, a smarmy briber, a manipulator. Anneline had seemed to be making such progress since arriving in Nevers, but Odette kno
ws that once Cupid has landed his arrow, there is nothing she can say or do to divert her mother.

  As Renard and Anneline babble giddily, the old woman rises laboriously from her bed and hobbles over to the oxen. She signals for Odette to approach. “Are you Anneline’s maid?” she whispers.

  “I am her daughter.”

  “Are there other children?”

  “No.”

  Mme Geneviève looks over at Anneline, then at Odette. “Are you sprung from her loins?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are sure?”

  It is common for children whose mothers died in childbirth to be raised by relatives or neighbors, Odette knows. Still, she wonders why Mme Geneviève feels the need to press the issue. “Yes, I am certain.”

  The woman touches Odette’s cheek. “You are a serious one. And, I think, clever.”

  Renard has noticed them now, and he seems alarmed. “What are you talking about?” he cries.

  He drops Anneline’s hand as if it were a hot coal, hurries across the room and barges between Odette and his aunt, pulling himself up onto the sill of the oxen’s window.

  Anneline stares after him, insulted. Then she rouses herself.

  “Madame,” she says. “Do you now remember sending for us? I know that age addles the mind. And it clearly puckers the face—have you ever heard of Egyptian oil?”

  Mme Geneviève bristles. “Je suis désolée, but it appears you have come all this way for nothing.”

  Renard leaps down from the sill. “Do you not have something you could tell them?”

  “I could tell them about my latest invention—”

  “No, ma tante. The package. The box under the bridge. With the book in it.”

  Odette starts. “Book?”

  “Book?” Anneline repeats.

  Mme Geneviève crosses the room and crawls slowly back under her blanket. “This is all very confusing,” she says weakly. Quick as a moth’s wing, she winks at Odette, then closes her eyes and begins to snore.

  “Tante!” Renard barks. “We are—this woman is looking for something. If you can help her find it…”