Page 60 of The Splendour Falls
Lucie looked up at him, her brown eyes curious. “Monsieur Neil,” she asked, in careful English, “do your ears move?”
“I beg your pardon?”
The tone of his voice penetrated my troubled fog of thought, and I smiled in spite of myself. “I think she’s asking if you can wiggle your ears.”
“Oh. Of course I can.” He crouched to Lucie’s level, and demonstrated. I leaned against the low wall, next to François. I wanted to ask him about Didier Muret, but I couldn’t summon up the courage, so I tried to slide into the questions sideways.
“She is,” I said in French, “a lovely child.”
“Yes. I’m very fond of Lucie.”
“She talked to me a bit about her uncle. She seems to be taking his death well, for one so young.”
I felt the brush of his eyes and he lifted his shoulders. “Didier Muret,” he told me, cryptically, “was not the sort of man one mourns. And anyway, she didn’t know him well.”
“Was he a historian?” I kept the question lightly curious. For after all, I thought, we only had Victor Belliveau’s word…
“A historian?” He turned that time, to look at me directly. “No, Mademoiselle, he was a clerk—a lawyer’s clerk—when he worked at all.”
“Oh. I must have got it wrong, then.” The doubting flooded back, and what had seemed so certain moments earlier now hovered in the realm of the improbable. Why would an unemployed lawyer’s clerk, who reportedly read no English, be interested in a British article on Isabelle of Angoulême, I wondered? It simply made no sense.
François looked back at Neil and Lucie, his weary eyes softening. “She is just like her father sometimes, very charming. And she doesn’t take no for an answer.”
The child was giggling at the moment, a delighted and infectious sound. “Again,” she commanded, and Neil sighed in mock despair.
“They’ll fall off, you know, and then you’ll be sorry.”
But he wiggled his ears again, anyway, and was rewarded with another fit of giggles from his appreciative audience. It was a difficult sound to resist. So it was odd that François’s smile faded, the lines on his face deepening as though something had pained him.
Concerned, I touched his arm. “Are you all right?”
I saw the shiver, hastily suppressed, and fancied for a moment that his gaze seemed faintly questing on my face, but when he spoke he looked himself again.
“Yes, I am fine, Mademoiselle. I am an old man, that is all. Sometimes I see the ghosts.”
Chapter 20
Thro’ her this matt
er might be sifted clean.
I didn’t go straight back to the hotel. Instead I turned along a narrow street and went in search of the smaller square where Martine Muret kept her gallery.
It wasn’t difficult to find. A few acacias grew here as well, draped over cobbled stone, well pitted and grown dark with age. The sun shone warmly, cheerfully, upon the clustering of leaning shops and houses, reflected in the gleaming glass front of the little gallery.
Even without Christian’s paintings hanging in the window, I believe I would have known the place belonged to Martine. It looked like her, somehow—so smart and neat and elegant, with everything in perfect order. But Christian’s oils clinched the matter. They stood out from the other paintings easily, the bolder brush strokes and exquisite play of light and shadow lending them a warm, romantic feel. Stepping closer, I peered with interest at the softly swirled self-portrait Paul had mentioned. Christian, I thought, had a master’s touch. He’d shown himself no quarter, tracing every jutting outline of his sharply contoured face, the pale eyes gently somber and the golden hair uncombed.
He’d breathed similar life into his landscapes. I saw the walls of Château Chinon shiver under storm clouds, and the idle spreading peace of fields flecked liberally with grazing cows, but my favorite of his paintings was the one that showed the river.
He had painted it at sunset, not far from the steps where Paul often sat. The steps themselves were plainly there, beneath the looming silhouette of Rabelais, and on the placid water three ducks drifted round a weathered punt, moored close against the sloping wall, while further off the gleaming arches of the bridge stretched like a golden thread from shore to shore. The only thing missing from that picture, I thought, was Paul himself, sitting halfway down the steps with his back to the traffic above, reading Ulysses and smoking an illicit cigarette.
It wasn’t often that a painting so transported me, and when Martine herself came out onto the doorstep to greet me, she had to speak twice before I heard her.
“It is a lovely painting, that one, is it not?” She smiled, understanding.
“Very lovely.” I bit my lip. “Is it very expensive?”
“Not so expensive as his others. It is a smaller canvas, and there are no cows in it. Tourists,” she informed me, “like the cows, and so the cows have higher prices than the river. But if you like, I have a price list.”