“That’s it,” Jeremy said positively, “this is the one I like.” I nodded in happy agreement. The jeweler measured us and said he would size them, and have them engraved on the inside in the script we selected, to say Penny and Jeremy and the year.
“There’s an excellent engraver on this street who does all our work,” the jeweler assured us. He took down our names and address. Jeremy paid for them, and, feeling his mission accomplished, drifted to the front of the store, as men do when they’re waiting for a woman who’s still browsing.
“This wedding band will make a perfect complement to your engagement ring,” the jeweler told me, pointing to the ring on my finger. It was of a similar antique gold, which Jeremy had had specially made with a ruby that his mom handed down to him, who in turn had gotten it from her mother. I trembled slightly at the thought of soon meeting Jeremy’s ruby-bequeathing grandmother in person.
“I’d like to get my fiancé a groom’s gift,” I confided in a low voice to the jeweler, nodding surreptitiously toward an interesting case of men’s cuff- links, tie-clips and rings, all with unusual designs. But before I could examine them further, Jeremy chose that moment to come drifting closer, eager to move on. The jeweler smiled at me without betraying our secret conversation, for he knew I’d be back.
On the way home, the night air had a velvety freshness to it, with the scent of budding blossoms and leaves on the trees, so welcoming after the cold, nearly scentless winter. We passed other people who were also lingering in the longer daylight hours, meandering by with a pleasant nod to fellow strollers, instead of the usual hurried indifference.
“Boy, everyone’s in a good mood tonight,” I commented. Jeremy gave me a smile.
“Are they?” he asked, his hand tightening in mine. He drew me closer into his arms, and gave me a long, lingering kiss that made me feel as if we were on a little planet of our own, suspended in time and space, spinning sweetly, with only the support of sheer air and light, yet as secure as any star in the nightly firmament. It felt deliciously dangerous to be this much in love.
Chapter Four
When we arrived home, the whole first floor of the townhouse was bright with lights. “Bet she’s invited all her friends to your sleepover jamboree,” Jeremy commented, putting his key in the lock.
We stepped into the vestibule, and peered into the reception room, where Honorine was quietly and happily ensconced at the little walnut desk with a computer on it. She didn’t even hear us come in, because she had earphones on her head, and suddenly began singing to herself in French to the jazzy tune she was listening to, loud, in the way people do when they can’t hear their own volume.
I surveyed the room in amazement. The cluttered, old- fashioned reception parlor, previously overwhelmed with mail, files and news clippings waiting to be sorted, had quickly yet brilliantly been transformed into a neat, orderly front office.
On closer inspection I saw that the unopened mail was now carefully arranged into desk trays, labelled according to the week of the postmark. Honorine was still clacking away at the computer, but she must have felt my gaze now, so she looked up, blushed a little, and smiled. “Oh, it’s you!” she cried, pulling off her earphones.
“What’s going on with the computer?” Jeremy asked.
“Hope you don’t mind!” she answered, beaming. “But I got so bored watching TV. I was dying to go on the Internet.” She slid her chair aside so Jeremy could see the screen, and she demonstrated how she’d got it working again. “It’s just that the older software was fighting with the new. Mostly, it needed an upgrade, and a couple of other changes, to tell it which voice to listen to. You see?”
Jeremy, suitably impressed, said, “Are you a programmer?”
“No, not at all. Really it’s not that complicated,” she said modestly, “once you figure out how to get in and talk to it . . . See . . .” Honorine clacked away some more, whizzing through a demonstration of the new system, brisk and efficient. “Now it should be much faster for you.”
I could see how hard she’d worked to impress us. “Honorine,” I said. “You’re incredible.”
I gave Jeremy a meaningful look. “Well?” I said. “Who says a philosophy student isn’t marketable?”
Excited, Honorine reached into her backpack lying beside her on the floor, and she pulled out a wad of papers and handed them to Jeremy. I peered over his shoulder. Page after page, in French and English, were recommendations from her teachers, saying that Honorine was scrupulous, hardworking, highly intelligent, as honorable as her name implied; and one teacher in particular made a point of saying that Honorine possessed an exceptional mind that was très subtil.
Subtlety, evidently, is highly prized in a philosophy major. So is argument and persuasion. I read on. Honorine was versed in five languages, including Chinese. Jeremy, who’d initially taken her for a slacker, was profoundly impressed by both her accomplishments and sincerity.
“You know,” Honorine suggested shyly, blushing a little, “perhaps . . . you think . . . I might be a suitable personal secretary here in London. Do you know of anyone who needs an assistant?” She turned beseechingly to me, obviously asking-without-asking for a job.
“Well,” I admitted, “it’s true we need someone, but honestly we really don’t know how it will work or where things will lead . . .”
Her face lit up with pleasure. “Parfait!” she cried.
“Now, hold on,” Jeremy cautioned. “For one thing, you are vastly overqualified.”
“It could just be temporary,” she assured him quickly, “only until I can find my true vocation.” If anybody else had put it that way, they might have sounded affected. But in Honorine’s voice, it seemed totally natural. “A little experience for me, without a long-term commitment for you.”
I saw that it wasn’t really fair of me to leave Jeremy the role of “the heavy” in all this, what with Honorine’s face all alight with hope. So I added more cautiously, “I think we should see what your mother has to say. Why don’t we ask her when we go to visit this weekend? All three of us?”
Honorine understood the bargain, and now she had a look of confident determination. “Yes, I will come with you. I know we can lay out a convincing case,” she declared. “Bonne nuit!” she said brightly, and scampered up to the guest bedroom.
Jeremy waited until she was completely out of earshot; then he said, “Look, she’s a nice kid, and you handled her fine—you got her to agree to go back home. And I wouldn’t want to hurt her for all the world. But you really don’t want to get mixed up with a runaway; if anything happens to her, your entire family will blame us.”
“But we need a good assistant. Someone special, not just a secretary. Doesn’t it seem as if fate has already taken a hand?” I argued enthusiastically. “Like there’s a reason she appeared on our doorstep at this point in our lives.”
“Maybe so,” Jeremy said affectionately, “but all I’m saying is, tread carefully.”
I had been rummaging through a drawer where I kept all my maps. “Look, the odds are that Honorine’s mother won’t let her stay with us in London anyway,” I said. “Let’s see where we’re going this weekend. Hmmm . . . Mougins . . . must be away from the coast, so that would be the opposite direction from Great-Aunt Penelope’s villa in Antibes. . . .” It was our villa now, but we still referred to it as Great-Aunt Penelope’s. “There it is. Mougins is an old town up in the hillside. Not terribly far from Cannes, as the crow flies . . .”
Jeremy groaned. “Somehow, the minute that kid showed up,” he said, “I knew, in my heart of hearts, that our goose was already cooked.”
“Don’t be silly,” I replied. “It’s only a weekend in the country. Good food, nice company. What’s not to like?”
Part Two
Chapter Five
So Jeremy, Honorine and I went winging our way to visit what I had begun to think of as ma famille française. I was pretty excited. Deep down, I’d secretly hoped that I harbored the p
otential to be a devastating French female . . . I merely needed a little exposure to that side of my lineage. Perhaps I could learn by some sort of osmosis. Take Honorine, for instance. She just had that natural sleek, radiant quality that is somehow the heritage of French girls, mysteriously acquired amid all those school days of wearing navy blue cardigans and white Peter Pan blouses and good wool pleated skirts and serious shoes, and being fed pain au chocolat after school without guilt. Yep. A weekend in a little French country house would be a great crash course for me.
When we landed at the airport in Nice, I immediately felt the soft sunlight streaming in the windows, indicating that the Riviera had already gotten a head start on the warm weather. Since we were in town just for the weekend, we’d rented a car at the airport.
“We could stop by the villa to check it out,” Jeremy said, tempted by the relaxed atmosphere.
“Detour to Antibes now?” I said, glancing at my watch. “That would make us quite late. Besides, Celeste would be highly insulted if we showed up without warning. She’d think we didn’t trust her to look after the place.” Celeste had worked for Great-Aunt Penelope, and was now our housekeeper. She had a naturally proprietary air, and she liked things to be properly scheduled, comme il faut.
“How do you know she’s not down in the wine cellar, drinking up the sherry?” Jeremy teased.
“You don’t have sherry,” I retorted, thinking of his recently stocked collection. “You have port.”
From the back seat of the car, Honorine was watching us in amusement. Jeremy steered the car out of the airport labyrinth, and we were climbing up to the Moyenne Corniche road, which wove its breathtaking way along the cliffs above the splendid coastline of the Mediterranean Sea. We were immediately enveloped by the cheerful Matisse colors of blue-white-and-yellow for sky, clouds and sun, brilliant in the Côte d’Azur’s inimitable combination of brightness and softness. The air was redolent of flowers, fruit and that salty sea, that sparkled and shimmered as if the fish were dancing just beneath its surface. Every harbor we passed was dotted with fishing boats and yachts. I inhaled contentedly, leaning my head back, letting the Riviera once again soothe me and smooth me. But, since I wasn’t exactly born into this lifestyle, I didn’t dare close my eyes, for I still can’t quite believe my little Cinderella luck.
We headed north from Cannes, away from the coast, climbing up, up into the hills, where the winding local roads lead eccentrically to one rotary after another, so it was like circling halfway around a clock and then darting away onto an even smaller road with yet another rotary to circle. I’d never seen this part of the South of France before, so very high up, and miles away from the coast. The air was a bit more humid, and the vegetation more lush.
As we reached the medieval town of Mougins, the steep roads narrowed even more, with ancient walls rising high on both sides, at times to the point of absurdity. There was a fairly dicey moment when Jeremy had to slow the car to a near stop in order to get through a terrifyingly narrow passageway under an old stone bridge.
“Another coat of paint on this car and we wouldn’t make it,” I observed, as we squeezed through the tight pass, with the stone walls pressing in on either side of us. But after all, I told myself, these villages had been built not for cars, but for horses, donkeys and mules, long before today’s fancy restaurants and spas began attracting modern traffic.
Higher and higher we climbed, with a brief, stunning glimpse of fertile farmland spread out in valleys far below, impeccably sculpted into neat lines of contrasting shades of green—endless rows of vegetables, herbs, silvery-branched olive trees, and gnarly fruit trees openly basking in the abundant sunshine. Beyond this, off in the horizon, were other villages, with plumes of smoke rising from the tiny chimneys of faraway stone farmhouses, and villas with terracotta-colored tiled roofs.
Returning to her roots had a slightly dampening effect on Honorine’s high spirits. She was slumped in the backseat, closing her eyes to the magnificent views, with her earphones on again. But when we drew nearer our destination, she seemed to sense it, for she opened her eyes just long enough to tell us which turns to make. Then she went right back to her private earphone world of canned music.
Jeremy glanced at her in the rearview mirror, and whispered to me, “Geez, I feel like we’ve inherited a grumpy adolescent kid that we’re forcibly taking on vacation.”
“She certainly is drooping like the last rose of summer,” I agreed. We drove a short way in silence; then, glancing at the map, I confirmed, “Right turn here.”
Now Honorine sat up alertly, yanked off her earphones and directed us down a private driveway, which turned out to be a long, elegant avenue slicing through a private park of tall, beautiful old pine trees, and big leafy chestnut trees that demonstrated how gloriously a tree can grow when given ample space. Seated grandly at the far end of the drive, behind several squares of lawn rimmed with formal flowerbeds and potted topiary, was a fine old château, its multitude of rooms laid out with intellectual precision, its long windows and French doors like regal proud eyes, watchful of our approach.
I gasped. Was this the “country cottage” that Tante Leonora invited us to? Phew! Even Jeremy, with all his bigwig, world-wide connections, was impressed.
“Blimey,” he said drolly, slowing the car as we pulled up to the entrance.
Honorine reached for her backpack on the floor. “You can turn left and go halfway down the drive to the garage. Park anywhere you like. It’s fine. Leave the suitcases in the car,” she instructed. “And the keys.” She didn’t elaborate, so I assumed a servant would take care of it. We left the car, and followed her to the front path.
The château was a pale, yellowy- cream-colored building, with dark green shutters and a dark green roof. It stood three stories high, and was laid out very widely, with window after window in perfect symmetry; and on the left, there was a square four-story tower with a matching roof of its own. Honorine now scampered up the five steps to the big front door, and she offhandedly led us inside with the natural ease of a well-bred girl who is so accustomed to her elegant surroundings that she barely notices them. She put her key in the lock of the front door, and pushed it open.
The dark wall panelling of the great, high-ceilinged entrance hall made the interior feel cool and somewhat somber. We crossed the polished cherrywood floor to a wide staircase with two curving, coffee-colored banisters. Just before we went up, Honorine pointed out a doorway to the left, and told us that it led to the salon, so that we could find it when we came back downstairs.
Our footsteps echoed on the staircase. When we reached the second level, Honorine went bounding down the hallway ahead of us, like an enthusiastic puppy who wants to show you the way. She stopped at the very last room at the end of the corridor, whereupon she pushed open a big, heavy door. We entered an enormous bedroom that overlooked the front park, designed to make its occupant feel very grand and important, just gazing out at the view.
“You can sleep or relax awhile,” she said, smiling. “Come down when you hear the bell for champagne before dinner, in the salon.” She stepped out and closed the door softly behind her.
The room had that nice scent of polished wood furniture and floors. I glanced at the finely embroidered, upholstered chairs, the antique commode, the hand-crocheted bedspread, the Savonnerie carpeting, the brocade draperies, the gorgeous framed mirror, the gilded chandelier, and the large round crystal vase of pink and white flowers that added their springtime fragrance.
Passing the huge canopied bed heaped with pillows, I walked over to the adjacent bathroom, which had a lovely antique tub, and a deep sink with very old but fancy brass taps. A white antique cabinet was piled with fluffy white towels monogrammed in dark green. Another white cupboard was stacked with plenty of fine Provençal soaps, sachets, shampoo, bath salts and scented lotion from nearby Grasse, the capital of the French perfume industry. On the windowsill was a pale yellow vase with fresh violets.
While
looking out this bathroom window, I saw a Vespa come puttering around the side of the château, its helmeted rider steering it in the direction of the garage in the back.
“This soap smells really good,” Jeremy commented. As we were freshening up, we heard a thump in the hallway outside. Jeremy opened the door, and found that our suitcases stood politely in the hall. “You didn’t tell me you came from the landed French aristocracy,” he joked as we unpacked. “Had I but known, I’d have asked your father for a dowry.”
“It would have done you no good, you cad,” I said. “We’re the poor relations, remember?” I peered into my suitcase. “What do you suppose we should wear to dinner?” I asked, anxiously scanning my overnight bag, suddenly comprehending a cryptic e-mail my mother had sent me just before I left, almost as an afterthought: Darling, you should bring a nice cocktail dress, elegant shoes, a good pantsuit and a silk blouse. Also, this is as good a time as any for your best jewelry. Love, Mum. I glanced up and saw that Jeremy was unpacking a nice weekend suit that seemed perfect for the occasion.
“How did you know how to dress for this ‘country’ shindig?” I asked suspiciously.
“Darling, I’m English,” he said maddeningly. I almost threw a small pillow at him, but when I noticed the fine old eyelet trim on it, I put the pillow back down again. “After all, I’m going to meet my little French fiancée’s family,” Jeremy said. “Did you think I’d show up in sweats?”
“Hook this chain for me, will you?” I said, holding up my graduation-day diamond pendant, adding jokingly, “I’m scared.”
At that moment, we heard a soft, low bell that resonated through the house. “Show time,” Jeremy said, kissing the back of my neck after he’d hooked the necklace.
A Rather Charming Invitation Page 4
