XII
I sat with Father for an hour, long enough to assure myself he was truly no longer at death’s door, and then I begged to be excused to sleep in my old bed in the back room for a few hours after my long night of riding.
As I slept with the shutters closed against the daylight, I dreamt I heard Donatien’s voice in the dark.
“Violaine, Violaine, come on, let’s go out to the standing stone. That was fun, wasn’t it? Are you wearing your ring?”
“No, what ring? What are you talking about?”
“We’re married. I’m your husband.”
“You’re insane. You tried to hurt me.” I wanted to get away but couldn’t move. He ran a finger down my arm from the crook of my elbow to my wrist. “Stop it. No.”
I jerked awake with a little cry. Slowly my surroundings came into focus and my sense of horror receded. Donatien couldn’t be Thérion. I recognized his voice in the dream, though it was dark. And Thérion would have stopped when I asked him to. Thérion was always kind; he would have listened to me. I pushed myself up and shook off my drowsiness.
It was early afternoon. I got up and went back to the main room to eat some bread, and then took up my post on the stool by Father’s bedside again. Edmée sat knitting in a chair as Father slept. He looked better than he had that morning. His color had returned a little and he wasn’t coughing, though there was still an audible wheeze in his breathing.
“Will the doctor come back?” I asked Edmée in a whisper.
“He’s supposed to. Tomorrow morning, he said.”
“Has there been any word from the Marquis?”
“Only what Doctor Guillon told us. He said Monsieur du Herle rode into Thônes to fetch him and give him directions to get here. He didn’t tell us you were coming. Did you have a quarrel with the Marquis?”
“No – maybe. Perhaps a misunderstanding. I couldn’t find the Marquis or Monsieur du Herle to ask permission to come after I received your letter. I waited all day and into the night, but neither of them came back to the manor. I was afraid if I kept waiting it might be too late, so I just left by myself in the middle of the night. I hope the Marquis won’t be angry with me.”
“Oh, dear. You shouldn’t cross him. What a thing, to ride around the countryside in the middle of the night in only your chemise! What in heaven’s name were you thinking?” She shook her head again. “I didn’t know what to do but write you. Your sisters were here to watch by his bedside, but it was you he kept asking for.”
“It was right you wrote to me,” I said, looking at Father and not at her. “I needed to come home.”
“But you’ll go back? You haven’t run away for good?”
“I – I don’t know.”
She sighed. “It’s not a good time for there to be trouble between you and the Marquis. Your Father just signed a lease on a house in Annecy before he fell ill. He’s getting too old to spend the winters up here, now that he can afford to move. I’m to go with him and we’ll have room for Aimée and her governess, and perhaps Valentin, if you want to take him out of school. But if the Marquis thinks you’ve betrayed him, running off like that …” She broke off as Father stirred restlessly in his sleep. Then she turned back to catch my eye and look me in the face. “I hope you weren’t thinking of coming back here to stay. That would be difficult, now there’s been so much talk. People saw you riding off with a well-dressed gentleman, and rumors started going around. It was as we feared. We told everyone you’d gone into service in another town, but no one believed you’d humbled yourself enough to become a housemaid.”
I nodded, feeling struck in the chest. I might have expected as much, but it was still a blow to learn I wasn’t remembered with kindness or forgiveness in the village. At least there would be no more offers of marriage to contend with.
“Is that why you wanted to leave? Because there were rumors about me?” I asked.
She looked thin and worn out. Her braids of straw-blond hair were going gray under her coif and there were dark bags under her eyes.
“As long as father can still afford the house in Annecy, it doesn’t matter. But if it falls through because you offended the Marquis … it might be best if you did go into service. How we’d find a position for you, I don’t know. But never mind, we can speak of it later, when he’s better.” She looked at Father intently, and seeing how easily he breathed, she closed her eyes for a moment in relief.
I tried to imagine what my mother would have said, if she were still alive and sitting here instead of Edmée. She might have asked whether I was happy with the Marquis and whether I was treated well at the manor. But Edmée didn’t ask.
After some time had passed with the two of us sitting in silence, I asked, “Will you be all right here with him if I go to Hortense’s to see Aimée?”
She smiled, “Yes, go and see them, and Françoise-Angélique too, otherwise they’ll scold me for keeping you here so long when they didn’t know you’d come. You’ve plenty enough daylight to get there on that horse of yours. I wonder what a stallion like him thinks of the society in our stable. It’s like a prince bedding down with peasants,” she said, chuckling a little.
In the barn, Zéphyr seemed to have gotten his rest also. He snorted and paced as though eager to get out of his stall. When I went to saddle him, I felt a weight in the saddle bag, a rectangular form I hadn’t noticed in my haste in the dark the night before. My Book of the Rose. I opened it and found a letter from Thérion tucked into the cover.
“Dearest Violaine, by the time you read this, I’ll be missing you terribly. Forgive me not writing more just now and, as I wrote before, for not sending Harlequin to accompany you. If you leave a letter here in the book’s cover, it will make its way back to me at Boisaulne, and you’ll also find my letters to you here. When you’re ready to return to Boisaulne, Zéphyr will carry you back to me. Don’t tarry too long, I beg you. Every night I don’t hold you in my arms is a wound. Send word when you’ve arrived safely.”
The medallion of Cernunnos was still between the book’s pages, too. I slipped it into my pocket and carried the book into the house, into the back room. This was all very strange, even for my strange Thérion who concealed himself behind masks within masks within masks. I sat on my bed and reread the note several times. The words “as I wrote before” made me think I must have missed a letter from him, and the missing letter would explain some of the odd events of the day before – why Harlequin was absent, why Zéphyr was saddled and tied up by the standing stone, as though waiting for me. Of course I knew now the reason Harlequin was missing was that he’d gone to Annecy to fetch the doctor.
I tiptoed back into the front room.
“I thought you’d gone,” whispered Edmée.
“The Marquis left me a letter,” I whispered back. “I just found it. All’s well, but I need to write back to him and let him know I arrived safely.”
“God be praised.” She set down her knitting, and helped me find a quill, ink, and paper amidst Father’s untidy papers.
I hurriedly wrote to Thérion that I was safe there at Father’s house. I explained my confusion and worry from the day before and asked whether I might have missed a letter from him.
“I’ll write again soon,” I scribbled, “but I must leave in a moment to be sure of getting to my sister’s house before dark. Thank you a thousand times for sending the doctor. It was wisely done, and Father appears to be out of danger.” I left it for the next day to tell him what had happened with Donatien. I tucked the letter into the book’s cover and placed the book under the mattress of my bed so that Edmée wouldn’t disturb it by mistake.
I rode Zéphyr to Hortense’s house. I brought the stallion into the stable and found Pierre-Joseph sitting at a table in the corner mending a tool. He half-stood when he saw me, before sitting back down again and returning to his work, not looking me in the eye.
“Evening. How do you do?” he said gruffly. “You’ve come a long way, eh?”
With equal stiffness, I half curtseyed. “I came to see Father. He’s much better. Are Hortense and Aimée inside?”
“Don’t know. Go on in. I’ve got to finish this and clean up. I’ll take care of the horse too, in a minute,” he said, indicating Zéphyr and nodding me toward the door into the house. I supposed he was none too pleased to see me if I had drawn gossip around the family as Edmée had told me. But no matter. Thérion still cared for me and longed for my return to Boisaulne, so I was spared the reckoning of my lost honor for the time being.
Stepping into the kitchen, I heard music coming from the next room. For a moment I thought of the fairy music that had nearly drawn me down into the realm beneath the earth, then I shook my head, trying to clear my ears of the illusion. The sounds were still there. I opened the door into the next room and saw Aimée seated on a stool before the hearth with her hands on the strings of a harp taller than she was. She was plucking out a melody lovely enough to draw the fairies’ envy.
She jumped up when she saw me and ran to me, crying, “Maman! Maman!” I lifted her up and hugged her to me, tears springing to my eyes. Her hair was braided smoothly and tied with satin ribbons in perfectly even bows, as I had never managed to do it myself. She introduced me to her governess, Madame Grasset, who had been sitting on the bench by the wall looking on. She was a pleasant, middle-aged woman with a lyonnais accent. When I had paid my regards to her and learned Hortense had gone out to the pasture to call my nephews home for supper, Aimée and I went outside to walk and look for them.
I told Aimée what her brother had written to me in his teardrop-spattered letter.
“But it’s true,” she said. “Cousin Ronald and Jacquot have been jealous and mean to me ever since Madame Grasset came to stay. Tante Hortense says Madame Grasset takes up too much room with her harp and turns her nose up at the suppers Tante Hortense makes. It’s always ‘In Lyon we do this and in Lyon we do that,’ and it gives Uncle ideas of trying new things Tante Hortense doesn’t want to do, so then they quarrel and everyone’s cross.”
“Do you want to go with Grandfather and Edmée and stay in the new house in Annecy? Edmée says there’ll be enough room for you there.”
“Only if Madame Grasset can come too.”
“Of course she’ll come. I’m sure she’d be more comfortable in a town house than up here on the mountain, where she doesn’t even understand what anyone says in patouè.”
“And Valentin? Maman, I miss him. He wrote me some letters too, and Madame Grasset helped me read them. You should see how well I can read now, almost as good as you already. But Valentin sounds so sad. He shouldn’t be with those fathers, the Jesuits. He ought to be learning music with Madame Grasset like me.”
“I don’t know, sweetheart. He does sound unhappy, but your Papa would have liked him to become an educated man. I think your Papa would say it was better for him to stay, and the discipline will toughen him, and it’s the ordinary price of learning.” Imagining what the Pastor would have wanted for Valentin, however, was already in itself a sign that it wasn’t what I wished for my son.
“But they don’t feed him properly,” Aimée insisted. “He could get sick from the bad food. And it’s not fair, he’s beaten worse than the other boys. They punish him for being a bad Catholic because he doesn’t always know how to recite all their prayers. One day perhaps they’ll guess he’s no Catholic at all. He’d be happy with Madame Grasset, I know he would. She’s always nice and doesn’t scold except when I’m really bad. And the harp is the best thing on earth. Do you know she has a fiddle too? He could learn the fiddle with her and we could play duets.”
“Well, perhaps we can talk about it with Madame Grasset later and see what she thinks.”
“I’ve missed you too, Maman, so much. Aren’t you ever coming back to stay?”
The question twisted my heart painfully. “I don’t know, darling. The agreement was that I would stay with Monsieur le marquis as long as it pleased him to keep me.”
“I wish you’d never leave again and would stay here with us forever.”
Could I do it, I wondered? Boisaulne felt long ago and far away, as if it had never been never anything more than a wonderful dream. If I hadn’t had the reassuring weight of the silver medallion in my pocket, I might have doubted I was ever there. But I couldn’t truthfully tell her I didn’t wish to go back. Thérion’s love had become as necessary to me as bread, as water, as breathing. I had lived in the world formed by his imagining, a place that was the expression of his soul. It was wrenching to think of ever leaving all that behind me, yet this beautiful dream stood in opposition to my own children’s hunger for love and happiness and my duty to them. But even if it were possible to break the agreement my father had signed with Thérion, even if my heart didn’t cry out in anguish at the thought of never being with my love again, Edmée had already made it clear it might cause no end of trouble if I didn’t return to Boisaulne.
“I can’t come back forever, darling,” I told her. “But once the Marquis sees he can trust me to visit here and return, when he sees how faithful I am to him, I hope he’ll permit me to visit more often.”
“Do you love him more than you love us?”
“Of course not. But the love between grown-up men and women is a different kind of love than that between parents and children. It would break my heart if I could never be with my Marquis again, but it also breaks my heart not to see you. If I could, I’d bring you and Valentin and Madame Grasset all to live with us in the manor, or at least I’d visit you in Annecy every month. When I go back I’ll speak with the Marquis. God willing, he’ll no longer deny me the wish of my heart to see my own children more often.”
Aimée nodded, but still looked anxious, so I added, “Anyway, as soon as your Grandpapa’s well again, I’ll do my best to see whether you and Valentin can go and live with them, and Madame Grasset too. And then when I visit I can see you all at once.”
With so many mouths to feed at dinner, Hortense was busy and distracted, and there was little chance of speaking with her until the last of the pots had been scraped clean and Aimée had gone to bed. Then she and I walked together with a lantern to the house of our younger sister, Françoise-Angélique. I hadn’t spoken with her since before Father had come back from his trip at the beginning of June. Françoise’s twin girls had been born in April, just as the midwife predicted. Now as the three of us sat whispering around the table before the fire, she alternately nursed each baby to drowsy contentment, while Hortense or I held the other twin who slept.
“Never mind about us, everything’s gone on just the same here,” Hortense said, when I asked them for the news of the villages. “We want to hear all about your life at the manor. Was I right to tell you to go?”
“Well, it’s done now,” I said. “I do wish I’d been here to take care of Father when he got sick, and I missed the children terribly.”
“Of course you did,” Françoise said. She gave the baby on her breast a kiss on top of her fuzzy head. “But have you been happy, apart from that? Do they treat you well there?”
Much as I hated to give Hortense reasons to feel pleased with herself for how she had treated me in June, I couldn’t refrain from describing Boisaulne in rapturous terms. They listened in astonishment. I didn’t tell them about the invisible spirits who served Thérion and his guests, for they would have thought I’d gone mad, and there was no way anyone who hadn’t been to Boisaulne could believe the things I had seen. Hortense asked whether the servants were well-trained, whether I had my own maid, and whether it fell to me to manage them and give them their orders. I answered in the same phrases Harlequin had used when he had first brought me to the manor, that the Marquis had trained all his servants to be exceedingly discreet, well-nigh invisible. I had little need to speak with them and there was no duty on my part to manage them, though I received some assistance with dressing and arranging my hair.
“And does the Marquis give you gifts?” Françoise asked. “Do you have jewels and pretty clothes?”
“He has the most marvelous library you could possibly imagine. It’s filled from floor to ceiling with books. Every wall is covered with shelves and shelves of them, and I can read any of them I like, whenever I want, any time of day or night.”
“Ah,” Françoise said. “That must be nice for you. But, how about clothes? Do you have brocades or satin things?”
“The clothes,” I shrugged, “well, they’re not always the most comfortable, and at first I was constantly afraid of getting them dirty. But everything’s always so clean and smells nice there, that’s what I love, even more than the rich fabrics.”
“What are the dresses made of, velvet? Or silk?”
“Yes, and there are brocades also. I have a wardrobe stuffed full of them. There’s a fresh chemise laid out for me every time I go into my chamber. The bedclothes are wonderfully soft, too, and the mattresses are all of feathers. I don’t think I’ve seen a single bug or mouse inside any of the rooms since I got there. Oh, and there’s a garden, and a park with paths, almost as big as a village. I can walk for hours in it, and there are always flowers in bloom. For the first month and a half, I was lonely, and the only friends I had were in the garden, birds and deer, squirrels and rabbits, lizards, frogs, insects and spiders.”
Françoise drew her brows together. “It’s too bad you were so lonely. I wish you’d written.”
I took a deep breath. I didn’t know when I would have another chance to apologize. “I’m sorry I kept silent,” I forced myself to say. “It was cruel of me, and foolish. Forgive me.”
“You really should have written,” Hortense said, “if only for the children’s sake. I could understand you being angry at me and at Father. But Aimée cried herself to sleep every night for the whole first month.”
I felt lower than the lowliest worm. Tears prickled at the corners of my eyes.
Françoise frowned at Hortense. “Hush, you don’t have to make her feel worse.” To me she said, “Of course you were grieving and angry. Anyone would be in your shoes. Only it makes me sad to think of you so alone.”
“But I wasn’t lonely for long. That was the best gift of all I’ve gotten, charming company, men and women of learning and brilliance who’ve come from Paris and Scotland and all over.” I tried to describe my new friends and the conversations we had, though I didn’t tell my sisters about Donatien or his visit to my room the night before and what he had tried to do to me.
“But it’s strange,” Hortense said, “I’d have expected you to come back looking like a duchess, but you’re dressed just the same. We’d have liked to see you in your new finery. Why didn’t you bring some of your clothes back from the manor to show us?”
“And couldn’t you have brought something back for us, too?” Françoise asked, her eyes wistful as she patted one of the twins on the back, trying to get her to burp.
I stammered, “I didn’t think of it. Forgive me. I wish I had. Next time I’ll try.”
Both of them squinted at me and cast glances at each other.
“I don’t know what’s the good of a rich gentleman and a fine manor,” Hortense grumbled, “and leaving your children and losing your good name for his sake, if you can’t even bring away any good clothes or jewels.”
I thought of showing them the silver medallion in my pocket, but to them it wouldn’t look like anything but a shabby old trinket, more fitting for a forest witch than a nobleman’s mistress.
At last they came to the subject of the Marquis himself.
“Is he handsome?” Françoise asked. “Is he young? What does he look like?”
I thought, if I cannot share at least this secret with my own sisters, with whom else could I ever share it? So I confessed to them what I hadn’t told any of my new friends in the Castle of Enlightenment, that I had never seen my lover’s face. That he only came to me in the dark. We talked in the dark, made love in the dark. I couldn’t say whether he was handsome, only that his tenderness and roughness and passion fed my soul.
“But surely you can come up with some way to light a candle or a lantern once he’s gone to sleep and see his face that way?” said Hortense.
No, I explained, I had tried many times, and it appeared to be all but impossible.
“But how can you make love to a man you’ve never seen?” Françoise asked incredulously. “Suppose he’s some monster? Or a wanted criminal, a highwayman who’s taken on the Marquis’s identity and hidden himself away in the woods? Suppose he’s a Jew, or a Moor, even?”
These thoughts hadn’t occurred to me. Françoise might even be right. I was prepared to find out my lover might be a cripple or deformed, but not that he might be in hiding from the law, or a member of some outcast group, or a dark-skinned foreigner. I supposed I would still love him even if he were ugly – but could I still love him if he turned out to be an African or an Arab or a Chinaman?
I hoped I would. I thought of Shakespeare’s Othello. Hadn’t Desdemona loved her Moorish husband truly? Thérion’s mind and soul were beautiful, and he was masterful in bringing my body to a state of ecstasy, making every inch of my skin tingle and feel alive. If he were a villain I could not bear it, but the color of his skin could make no true difference to me. And if I discovered he was of another faith than I, what of it? My God was Nature now. Yes, I hoped I would still love him.
“But I’m almost certain I know who he is, in any case,” I said.
“Who then?” asked Hortense.
“I don’t like to say, in case I’m wrong.”
“Then you can’t be all that certain.”
“But I nearly am. Only I’d be much embarrassed if I said it and it proved false.”
They look at each other again and shook their heads.
“An honest man isn’t mysterious,” Françoise said. “Honest men don’t hide.”
Perhaps not in their world.
In the morning I rode back to Father’s house. The doctor had already come and gone. To my joy, Father was able to get out of bed to take his midday meal with Edmée and me before going back to his room to rest. In my Book of the Rose I found a new letter from Thérion.
“I’m grieved to learn you didn’t receive my note along with the letters I left out for you from home. I don’t know how it went missing. I’d left instructions for you to take Zéphyr and go to your father’s house at once. I’d already sent Harlequin to Thônes for the doctor and told him to go on from there to Annecy to see to your father’s affairs in town. I had to leave the manor myself to take care of a few matters, but foolishly I had no fear for your safety, thinking you’d be traveling in the day with Zéphyr. I only hope you can forgive me and thank God you arrived safely in spite of the mix-up. I’m much relieved, too, to hear your father is recovering. How soon can you return? I’m sick already with missing you.”
I spent a long time composing my reply, trying to explain what had happened with Donatien. But suppose I wasn’t believed? I could hardly have believed it myself if it hadn’t happened to me. My hand trembled and I felt sick to my stomach as I wrote. I spilled a streak of ink across the paper and had to waste the entire sheet and start over again. I tried to explain, too, how much it meant to me to see the children again, and why I needed to stay at least a week, or maybe two – to help Father and Edmée with the move to Annecy, once Father was well enough, and to see Valentin and take him out of the Jesuit school. As I wrote, it pained me to remember that my new friends at Boisaulne were only there through to the end of the summer, and if I stayed too long they might leave before I got back. Then I scolded myself for thinking of my own selfish wishes instead of my duty.
When I was finished, instead of tucking the letter under the cover of the Book of the Rose, I folded it up and put it in my pocket. I wanted to mull it over, reread it again later, and be sure of my words before letting Thérion read them.
By day’s end, much had been accomplished. Father continued to regain his strength, and Edmée and I made arrangements to send a few wagonloads of furnishings down the mountain to the new house in Annecy, where it was agreed the children and Madame Grasset would go to live as well. Before I went to sleep, I took the letter out of my pocket, read it again, and tore it up and threw it in the fire. I had expressed myself too clumsily, and it would worry Thérion too much. I would write a better letter the next day and wait till I returned to Boisaulne to tell him in person what had happened with Donatien. To ward off any more nightmares of Donatien, I went to sleep with the medallion of Cernunnos around my neck, as if it really were a protective talisman. I wished Thérion were there to wrap his arms around me, but at least the medallion reminded me of him.
In the morning I found another letter from Thérion. “I miss you more than I can express in words,” he wrote. “But I can well understand you must be busy caring for your father and children. Only think of me and know that without you, there’s a darkness in me even deeper than the night I always carry around me. Please return as soon as you can bear to.”
I tried to comfort him by writing a cheerful letter, giving him the news of my family, assuring him I missed him too and was grateful to him for making it possible for me to come. I avoided any mention of returning to Boisaulne.
That day I helped Madame Grasset pack up her harp into a crate, and we brought it along with the first wagonload of furnishings to the new house in Annecy – Aimée and the governess riding in the wagon and I on Zéphyr. After we had unloaded the wagon, we went to Valentin’s school together.
One of the cassocked fathers brought Valentin down the narrow stone stairwell to us, where we waited in the entry hall. The priest excused himself and went back upstairs. For a long moment Valentin simply stared at the three of us sitting there across the room from him, with the saucer-eyed, dazzled gratitude of a prisoner granted a pardon on the brink of the scaffold. Then he propelled himself into my arms. Aimée piled on with an embrace on top of ours, sobbing. When we had dried our eyes, he showed us the bruises on his back and shoulders, and on his shins under his stockings, from the beatings at the hands of his masters and schoolmates.
He and Madame Grasset sized each other up. She had brought her violin with her in a handsome hard leather case, and she took the instrument out to show him how to hold it with one end tucked under his chin and the bow in the other hand. He almost dropped it when she instructed him on how to draw the bow along the strings and it sang out a quavering note. Oh yes, he said, he’d like to learn to play, and he’d be good, gooder than any boy had ever been in the whole history of the world. He’d learn all of his lessons and never talk back, if only he could come home with us. So I went up the stairs to find the priest and settled up his school fees, and we took him home.
In the morning I rode back alone along the lakeshore, through the valley, and up into the mountains back to Father’s house. At home, I found a new letter from Thérion tucked into the Book of the Rose under my mattress. He told me once again, with even more urgency than before, how he missed me and longed for my return as soon as possible. My absence was like an illness, and with little exaggeration, he said, he might well die of it if I were to stay away too long.
“But there’s something else I wish to ask you,” he wrote. “I hope it won’t cause you any offense, but Harlequin tells me there’s been some trouble among his guests. The young painter, Clio, has made accusations against his friend Donatien and he doesn’t know how to judge the truth of them. The girl claims Donatien accosted her in a way that frightened and hurt her. But Harlequin and Ulysse have known him many years and wanted to avoid rushing to judgment with no proof of his guilt. Donatien says he’s the victim of a malicious falsehood and the girl is merely angry at him for toying with her affections. So I ask you – with regret, since I don’t wish to distract you from your visit home – have you ever witnessed Donatien behaving as this girl described?”
Ice crept through my veins as I read the letter. God in Heaven, what had I done, keeping silent about Donatien? Now Clio, too, had been drawn into the nightmare, and it was all my fault. I sat down at once to write my response, explaining in as much detail as I could bear to my own experience with Donatien and urging Thérion to believe Clio’s story. I couldn’t help but wonder as I wrote – if I had told him sooner, if Clio had never said anything, would I have been believed, given that she was doubted and questioned? Would Thérion believe me now? Would he think I had brought it on myself, as I had accused myself of doing in my own mind?
I asked his permission to stay through the rest of the week, to finish helping Father and Edmée with the move to Annecy. Before I went to sleep, I left the letter inside the cover of the Book of the Rose and put the book back under the mattress. In the morning, my letter was gone, but there was no answer from Thérion. I took Zéphyr and rode alongside the hired wagon driver again to Annecy to bring the second load of furnishings and see the children in the new house. I stayed overnight in Annecy and set out again in the morning to return.
In the last hour before I reached the village, the clouds turned dark purple-green, and then charcoal. A jagged line of lighting speared a tall pine on the ridge above me, so close I could smell smoke as the branches exploded into sparks and flames. Zéphyr reared up and almost threw me. He wheeled around in a circle three times, snorting and shaking his head while I clung to the reins and we veered at right angles. When I urged him back onto the lane, pulling back on the reins to slow him, he ducked his head so low I almost tumbled forward onto the ground. We righted ourselves at last and fell back into the rhythm of a walk, both of us jittery and shaking. Thunder drowned out the clopping of Zéphyr’s hooves and rain began to pour down in such thick sheets I could barely see the path in front of us. By the time we cantered up to Father’s house, Zéphyr and I were both as drenched as if we’d swum through the lake.
It took me a long time to get changed out of my sopping, muddy clothes, and to wring out my hair and dry it by the fire. I warmed myself with the hot verbena tisane and a swallow of génépi that Edmée served me. Outside, the deluge showed no sign of letting up. I went into the back room, my heart pounding in anticipation of an answer from Thérion. But when I pulled the book out from under my mattress, there was still no letter under the front cover. I flipped through all the pages to be sure I hadn’t missed anything, but couldn’t find a scrap of paper with any note from him.
Something was wrong. Did my last letter upset him too much to respond? What if he was sick, or hurt?
I sat down to pen a new note to him, telling him how his silence made me anxious. “But Father’s well enough to travel at last,” I wrote. “So I should be able to take Zéphyr back to Boisaulne tomorrow, or as soon as the rain lets up. Father and Edmée finished packing today, and Pierre-Joseph and his sons came and brought our cows and goats back to their farm. Father’s plan before the storm came was that they’d lock up the house tomorrow morning and drive down to Annecy in the buggy. I only hope they won’t get stuck in the mud, and the rain doesn’t go on too long. But I promise, I’ll come to you just as soon as I’ve seen them off, even if we have to wait another day or two for the roads to dry.”
I fell asleep to torrents of rain and wind pummeling the roof and rattling the shutters. In the dark before dawn, when the storm had finally exhausted its fury and subsided to a light drizzle, the quiet was so abrupt it woke me up. I reached for the book under the mattress, but my groping hands found only scraps of loose hay.
The Book of the Rose was gone.