She sees them coming through the inn yard. She’d returned, panting, asking the driver, the innkeeper’s wife, for news; but neither had any. Her husband had gone out, they said, and when Catherine stared, asked, Which way did he go? they pointed in the direction she had not taken.
She sees them, and her breath stops as if stabbed. Antoinette in Petrus’s arms, her arms about his neck, and he is holding her with both hands splayed over her narrow back. Just a moment, half a breath, and then Catherine finds herself running; she can hear Henri and Madeleine pattering behind her, but she—heavier, slower, more encumbered by her clothing—still reaches Petrus and Antoinette first. She is prying Antoinette’s fingers from her father’s hair, lifting her from his arms, and Petrus lets her, pressing a hand to his own chest.
“Oh, cara mia, thanks be to God,” Catherine says, over and over, touching her daughter’s hair, her dress, her face.
Antoinette says, “Maman, Maman, I could not find Pierre!”
“He will return, little one, he will come back,” Catherine says, and Antoinette looks up at her, clearly disbelieving, tears pulling her lashes into spikes sharp as thorns.
“What happened? Where was she?” Catherine says, looking up at her husband.
And he tells her, stripping off his gloves. Tells her of the woman, her grip on Antoinette’s wrist. Her fear of him he describes with something like pride, though he says, “She might only have been trying to help—but I could not think, I only took her away—” A slap of his gloves against the side of his leg, punctuating every other word.
“And thank God you did,” Catherine says, and then stops, for at the same time Antoinette says, “She was trying to help, Papa, she said she would take me to her coach, that you and Maman had already left the city and were far away, but that she could take me there. A place where everyone would love someone like me, she said; and you were going there, too.”
Catherine cannot look at him, then. Cannot make real what has forever seemed unreal, despite what she knew of his own life. But she gasps into her daughter’s hair, little puffs of air, over and over, rocking and rocking their bodies together until at last Antoinette says, “Maman, let me go,” and wriggles away.
There is a creaking among them as they set out again from Basel, like deadwood branches rubbing together overhead. Petrus kisses Catherine’s brow when she cannot stop weeping, but his eyes slide away, slick as minnows, when she tries to catch them with her own. He mounts his horse with a protestation of saddle and boot leather, and is off before Catherine has the children fully settled in the coach.
The first hour or so, as Basel’s cobbled streets taper into pitted dirt roads outside the city, she is occupied by handing out the dense dark bread, studded with chestnuts, and the hard, crumbling cheese, smelling of thyme, which the innkeeper’s wife had pressed upon them. She listens to the soft smacks of their lips as her children chew and swallow; she ignores Antoinette’s restlessness, curling an arm around her, tucking her close against her own side, that she might feel the press and fall of her ribs as Antoinette breathes; as if, in keeping her close now, she might make up for that moment of inattention in the inn yard, when she thought her daughter safe in the sun with a cat.
It is not until several hours after they left Basel that Catherine begins to breathe again herself, a knot in her chest loosening as a little wind ruffles the coach’s window curtains. She shifts her numbing sit-bones against the seat and moves the curtain aside. Outside, Petrus rides a little ahead of them, straight and easy in his saddle despite the hours they had been traveling, the gray-white plume of his hat rippling.
They crest a hill; and they are all cramped and ill-tempered. The air is thick with dust from the horses’ hooves, and the road is filled with creeping roots from nearby trees, which seem almost to lift themselves a little higher when they feel the foretelling vibrations of a coach’s wheels and a team of horses; and with stones, which roll and leave small hollows into which the horses might stumble; and with larger, washed-out places from the sluicing of the rain, so that the entire journey, when they are lucky enough to find a stretch of road that is navigable at all, jolts the spine bones and makes it impossible for the children to nap, no matter how tired they are.
They crest a hill; and Madeleine sits at the coach window, grumbling; and the two younger children each yank at either end of a wooden horse, hissing at one another because they know that if they shout, Catherine will feel forced to intervene, but that if they keep their voices just low enough she might overlook their misbehavior.
They crest a hill; and Catherine, her very skin dry with weariness, her ears aching for silence, her bones for stillness, glances through the parted window curtains with little interest. And there before her lie the soft yellowed grasses near the roadside, and the wildness of the forest just beyond the boundary of the road; and beyond that, mountains, with trees that crowd like teeth, and breathe, and tremble, so thick together that the mountains seem living beings, watchful and waiting. Green here, nearest the road; and softer farther on, blurred into blues, and even farther, grays, so that Catherine squints, as if in doing so she could pick out all the details of them. And then back to Petrus, his gently jouncing back, his hands steady on the reins.
Looking at him, she finds herself, with a sudden swooping sensation—as if she is a bird herself, diving after insects or plunging merely for the rushing joy of it, knowing she could pull herself upward again—standing at an upstairs window of her house in Lyons, leaning a little far over, straining to keep her father in sight for as long as she possibly could. And then, just as quickly, she is in the coach again, the world around her clearing like a window swiped free of water droplets, brilliant, unveiled. Spreading out before her, unfurling like a summer bloom, like a carpet unrolled and laid at her feet. Her toes curl and uncurl in their shoes and stockings, itching, suddenly, to walk, to set out.
She is, she realizes, with a jolt not unlike that of the coach over the road, doing exactly as she has always secretly wished. Adventuring. Just like Papa. A leaping in her belly, of anticipation, as if they are about to drop; but it is a drop she leans toward, a drop she wants, aches for, and she thinks, I have been here before.
Which is entirely impossible, of course. And yet. In her memories, her fingers trace Papa’s journeys, and her imagination conjures thickets and woodlands, mountains and valleys; rivers teeming with fish and ports teeming with people. She stares at the mountains until her eyes ache. The life she has always wanted, and which she had so completely put out of her mind many years ago, has suddenly appeared before her when she was not paying attention; and she fears, if she looks away, it might vanish.