Nevers

by Sara Cassidy

Her legs had grown longer by then, and she leaped over the gravestones as she looked for the letters. She found them. In fact, she discovered they were on nearly every gravestone. These were words, Félix had explained, families of letters. NÉ meant “born.” MORT meant “dead.”

  She tries not to snatch the note from M. Mains’s hand, which, she thinks to herself, will smell of rag paper. “Thank you,” she says, hoping he will be on his way.

  When M. Mains lingers, Odette collects her mother’s clothes, even though they remain damp, and gets to her feet.

  “Since you’ve been washing clothes as well as knitting, your hands will smell of the Loire and the algae that thickens it. It is the longest river in France. But length doesn’t have a smell,” M. Mains says to her.

  “I suppose it doesn’t,” Odette says. She starts up the bank. “Thank you again for the letter.”

  “Message,” M. Mains corrects. “And you could thank me by letting me smell your hands.”

  “No!”

  At the top of the bank Odette looks back at M. Mains. Perhaps she should have let him smell her hands after all. But he has moved on. He charges toward a fisherman by the river’s edge, calling out, “Your pole! Is it made of elm or oak?”

  Odette wants to read the message in private. But Anneline is home waiting for her clothes, so she won’t be alone there. Odette finds her way to the cathedral and sits in the chapel beside the duchess’s tomb. She hears again the water trickling under the floor. It calms her.

  She unfolds the message and reads:

  a delIght to Meet yoU yeSTerday

  i am Sorry about thE confusion

  plEase accept mY apOlogies hUmble

  Nevers shOuld Welcome you

  I love how LETTERS make words, don’t you?

  mme geneviève

  Quite a strange note, Odette thinks. It was nice of the old woman to apologize for the peculiar visit, but why put M. Mains through all the trouble of finding her for such a simple message?

  Odette stares at the stone sculpture of the duchess on top of her grave, at the long, smooth fingers that never washed clothes or pinched a candlewick to snuff out a flame but touched the hands of dukes while dancing the allemande in large rooms with lamplight and plates of food of all kinds…

  A monk bursts into the chapel. Odette leaps up from the pew, startled, and her mother’s clothes fall to the floor. The monk takes a handful of candles from a ledge and backs out of the chapel. “Washer girl,” he says, noting the damp bundle of clothes, “I did not mean to frighten you. My humble apologies.”

  Odette stands and curtsies. “It is fine.”

  “Again, my humble apologies,” the monk repeats.

  That’s funny, Odette thinks. Mme Geneviève had offered humble apologies too. No, she’d said it differently. She’d said apologies humble. Backward.

  Odette reads the message again. Why had Mme Geneviève written that bit about letters and words, with letters all in capitals, and not used capitals where they were supposed to be? Félix had taught Odette that capital letters should only ever be at the start of words. Gravestones were exceptions—all the words on gravestones were in capitals, but that was because capital letters, with their straight lines, were easier to make with the chisel’s flat blade.

  After leaving the chapel, Odette has an idea. She’ll stop at the blacksmith’s on the way home and hold her mother’s clothes near the fire to dry while she pretends to be interested in watching the blacksmith work.

  The blacksmith’s hammer falls steadily, like a great heartbeat, making sparks and ash fly. Every dozen swings, Odette turns her mother’s dress and bloomers over in her hands. The blacksmith’s dark beard is beaded with sweat, and the large man frequently wipes his runny nose on his sleeve. Every so often he stops hammering to fish a kerchief from a pocket and mop his brow.

  “A kerchief around your forehead would stop the sweat from rolling into your eyes,” Odette blurts. Félix wore a kerchief when he dug in the summer heat, she remembers. “It’s better than a hat, because the heat can still escape through the top of your head.” Odette takes a dark rag from a hook nearby. “This would work.”

  The blacksmith bends low and lets her tie the rag around his head. “Not too tight!” he squeaks. The joke makes her laugh. When she is done, the blacksmith strings a rope between two hooks. “Hang the clothes here to dry, and go and play, as young girls should, while my fire does its magic.”

  Thanking him shyly, Odette flings her mother’s clothes over the rope and runs, not to play with the children in the square—she is too old for that —but to the mill. She was too proud to scavenge oats when Niçois was with her, but now she fills her apron greedily.

  On her way back to the forge, she gathers wild chamomile flowers to dry for tea and fresh bilberries. She shares these with the blacksmith, who is happy with how the kerchief is working.

  “Ever since I turned forty, my eyebrows have not been as thick as they were,” he tells Odette. “The moisture runs right through them—like when the Loire breaks its banks.”

  Odette laughs.

  “Right into my eyes,” the blacksmith continues. “It stings like onion juice. That’s what sweat is, isn’t it? Our sourness, boiled out of us? But this rag”—the blacksmith lifts the cloth from his head and wrings it, making the fire spit—“stops the flow. You are an angel.”

  The blacksmith reaches for her mother’s clothes. Odette leaps between the clothes and his soot-black fingers. “Allow me!”

  “They are lovely clothes. They belong to a lady, I can tell. One who may have fallen on hard times, but still.”

  “My mother,” Odette tells him, folding the clothes neatly.

  “Did fate or luck bring you to our capital city?”

  Odette’s ears fill with the rumble of the tall stone wall. “The past.”

  The blacksmith smiles. “The past delivered all of us to where we are, didn’t it?” He raises his hammer, readying to strike. “Though you could say the future brought us here too.”

  “Is that a letter?” Odette points to the piece of metal the blacksmith shapes on his anvil.

  “Yes, for the butcher’s sign. I made it wrong the first time. I made it little. But the mighty butcher wants a big one. A capital B.”

  “A capital B is a bisou—a kiss,” Odette says, repeating what Félix once said while teaching her to read. “Like two lips seen from the side.”

  “Yes!” the blacksmith says, puckering his lips and kissing the hot air.

  Odette stands transfixed as he turns the capital B in the fire, hammers it into shape and quenches it in a bucket of water, making it fizz.

  Twenty

  As she winds through the narrow streets toward home, Odette thinks about Geneviève’s note. It is so strangely written. Why were the capital letters scattered, then rammed together suddenly in LETTERS?

  As she approaches the apartment, she hears someone screech, “Witch! Naked witch!”

  Odette hurries up the stairs to find her mother in bed with her knees drawn up and Aline et Valcourt laid over her chest for modesty. The skinny woman leans over her, wagging a bony finger. “You bewitched my piglet,” the woman shrieks. She pulls the pink creature from a bag hanging over her shoulder. “Look at him. He hasn’t eaten or moved since you kidnapped him. I’ve tried everything. Tickled, yelled, pushed corn into his mouth, dunked him in cold water…”

  “Cold water! Poor thing,” Anneline says. Like little pink sails, the piglet’s ears turn toward her voice. “One of our chicks has the same illness. Listlessness. Won’t eat or sleep. Stares into space, shivering.”

  Six chicks in all have hatched from Lisane’s eggs. Five are healthy and strong, pattering about and drinking and eating. But the first chick, the one that arrived prematurely, is not well. It drowses on the bed, barely able to keep its eyes open. Odette warns her mother constantly not to roll over onto it.

  “Where is the chick?” Odette asks now, searching the bed with some panic.


  “I put it in the cupboard with the others,” Anneline says. “I couldn’t bear its sad eyes any longer.”

  Odette throws Anneline her clothes as she passes and finds the sorrowful chick huddled in the armoire. Odette carries it over to the woman. “See? Lethargic.”

  Immediately the piglet comes to life, wriggling and kicking to get free of the woman’s grip.

  “Is this what you’re missing, little pig?” Odette asks.

  She places the chick on the floor. The piglet leaps out of its owner’s arms and presses its damp snout to the chick’s beak. The chick’s feathers fluff. Light returns to the little bird’s eyes. The two, piglet and chick, dance around each other, squealing and squeaking.

  “Looks like we have found the cause of their sickness,” Odette says.

  “Like Aline and Valcour when they are reunited,” Anneline sighs.

  The skinny woman can’t speak. She sinks onto the mattress and stretches out her bruised legs. Anneline clears her throat to get Odette’s attention and points. A tear tracks down the woman’s dirty cheek.

  “I can’t give you my piglet,” she says. “I’ve lost so much.”

  “We don’t want your piglet,” Odette says. “But these two clearly need to be together.”

  Anneline has dressed quickly and is edging toward the door. I have to go, she mouths to Odette. Renard awaits.

  “I’ll take the chick,” the skinny woman says.

  Odette’s heart lurches. She is fond of the chick. And needs it—the chick will one day lay eggs for them. “No.”

  “Oh, let her take it, Odette,” encourages Anneline, eager to get on with her day.

  “No,” Odette repeats.

  “It’s just a chick,” Anneline says.

  Odette thinks fast. “How about we share them?” she suggests. “You have the chick and piglet for one moon. We have them for the next.”

  “But what about—” the woman says.

  “You get most of the coins when the pig goes to market.”

  The woman mulls this over. “And the—”

  “After the pig goes to market, the hen is ours. Its eggs too.”

  The woman sighs. “Fine.”

  “And,” Odette continues, “you must feed them on time, and talk to them kindly and calmly.”

  The woman scowls.

  “Or no agreement.”

  The woman’s shoulders soften. For a moment she even looks plump. “I’ll try.”

  “Then we have an accord,” Anneline proclaims and darts out the door.

  Odette glances out the window and down the street to where Renard sits on a low wall, banging his heels against the stones. His hair has been greased, and he wears a dark, moth-eaten cape. When Anneline throws her arms around him, he nearly tumbles backward.

  “You take them for the first moon,” the tall woman says to Odette, then rushes out the door, clutching a sou Odette watched her filch from the mantel. Odette watches out the window as the woman hurries up the street, calling after a fishmonger.

  Odette gets to work on her garden bed, clearing weeds and breaking up the soil. The piglet and chick scamper nearby, and Lisane pulls up worms to feed to her new chicks who dawdle after her.

  Niçois calls down from the top of the wall. “Your first birth went well, Mother says.”

  “They have a big family now,” Odette answers. “Eight brothers and sisters.”

  “I wonder what that’s like.”

  Odette has often wished for a sibling or two. Friends whose visits never end.

  “Catch!” Niçois drops a small bag from the top of the wall. “We’ll eat tomatoes, carrots and courgettes from the same seeds.”

  Odette opens it. Bounty!

  Niçois swings his legs over the wall and leaps down. He squats and raises hillocks in the dirt with his hands.

  “There,” he says after each one.

  Odette pushes a seed into the top and says, “Here.”

  “There.”

  “Here.”

  After they’ve planted the garden, Niçois has errands to run for his mother.

  Odette makes porridge and again studies Mme Geneviève’s message.

  She thinks about the monk with his humble apologies and the blacksmith with his important capital B. She remembers Félix teaching her the capital letters. The letter I was an ionic column for a Greek temple. M was a bed that a magnificently massive man had slept on, breaking it. U was for utensil—a ladle. S was a serpent, of course. T was a table. I M-U-S-T. They spelled a word!

  Back upstairs Odette puts the rest of the capital letters in Mms Geneviève’s message together. It makes sense now that the old woman wrote my apologies humble—it put the O in front of the U to spell YOU.

  I MUST SEE YOU NOW LETTERS

  LETTERS is the clue, which leaves….

  Without a further thought Odette jumps to her feet and runs down the steps of her home, through the streets of Nevers and to the little shack in the woods.

  She knows the way perfectly. As if she has lived in Nevers all her life.

  Twenty-One

  Mme Geneviève is curled up in bed when Odette enters the cabin. “Are you alone?” she asks Odette.

  Her breath is ragged. Odette is taken aback by how weak she looks.

  “Yes, I came alone. Were you napping?” Odette asks.

  A tear slips from Mme Geneviève’s eye. “I have so much to do, but I am tired. I gave my life to the rich, and now I have so little for myself.”

  Odette straightens Mme Geneviève’s blankets. She fills a cup with water and brings it to her, then feeds the oxen and starts a fire to make some broth.

  “You know how to work,” Mme Geneviève says admiringly. “But sit for a moment, ma fille.”

  Odette draws a chair up to the bed.

  “I did not tell the truth the other day,” Mme Geneviève begins. “There is a…” She closes her eyes. “Book. Just like my cursed nephew said. Bottom of the oxen’s feedbox. Under…”

  The old woman’s voice fails. Odette holds the cup of water to her lips. Mme Geneviève drinks and again tries to speak. “I worked in big houses. In the book is a story I overheard during my last days as a maid. I hid the book long ago—under that bridge—then looked and looked. For you.”

  “Me?”

  Mme Geneviève grows quiet in her bed. She closes her eyes again. Odette dips a cloth in water and presses it to her forehead.

  “Do you have family that I can fetch?” Odette asks. With revulsion she thinks of the yellow-haired man. “Renard…?”

  “No!” Mme Geneviève says with surprising strength. “He can’t be trusted. He’s the one who stole the book from under the bridge. Luckily, the fool left it in a tavern—stopped for a drink on his way home. Always put your address in your books, Odette. If I hadn’t, I would never have seen my book again. Ever since then Renard has suspected I have it and has tried to get it from me. But it cannot fall into the wrong hands. A man’s life is at stake. Your father—”

  Odette is shocked. “My father? His life can’t be at stake.”

  Mme Geneviève squeezes Odette’s hand. “No. You’re right. He is dead.”

  “Did you know him?” Questions rush Odette like rain in a sudden storm. But which is the most important one? “What was he like?” she asks.

  “I did not know him well. We worked for a short while in the same house. He was helping the master organize his library. He was gentle. He cared about his work. I heard later that he had left a child on this earth when he died. Well, a child in the making. And when I discovered that his cousin…Odette, someone needs you. Terribly.”

  “Who ?”

  “It’s in the book,” Mme Geneviève says weakly. “In the feed box. My time on this earth is almost over. But I’m so happy I found you. Read the book with someone else. Two remember better than one.”

  Mme Geneviève turns her head to look at Odette. Death blazes, cold, white, in her eyes. Odette gazes back with all the strength she can muster.
<
br />   “Everything is better with a friend by your side. Do you have a friend?”

  Odette shakes her head.

  “Not one?”

  Odette remembers the girl on the plate, but of course she can’t count her as a friend. She is only a picture. Then she remembers how Niçois recognized her in that girl. Niçois sees her. Odette. He doesn’t care about who she isn’t or who she should be—he knows who she is. “Yes. I have a friend.”

  “You will need each other. So you can remember the story.” The old woman breathes choppily. Her throat rattles. With supreme effort, she rises up on an elbow. “I want nine bells,” she tells Odette. “Tell Father Contrefort. Nine bells. I worked as hard as a man my entire life. Harder, in fact.”

  Mme Geneviève collapses back onto the mattress. Odette reaches for her hand. It’s cold. Odette lifts the edge of the blanket. Mme Geneviève’s feet are cold too, and white as tallow. “Death starts kindly, at the tips,” Félix had once explained. “The toes, fingers, ears. Then, like a river, a freezing river, its tributaries move toward the sea: the heart.”

  Odette rubs Geneviève’s hands and feet, but they won’t warm. Maybe a song would be comforting? Odette sings through to the end of “À la claire fontaine.”

  I would that the rose

  Were still on its briar

  And my sweet friend

  Still there to love me…

  Never will I forget her…

  Mme Geneviève falls deeper into sleep. Her eyes sink. It is as though she is evaporating, Odette thinks, withdrawing from her body. “The body is only a vessel,” Félix had once said as a blackbird darted through the graveyard. “Life moves through it.”

  “Mine too?” Odette had asked, studying her hands, her bruised knees.

  Félix stopped digging. He leaned on his shovel. A tear beaded at the corner of his eye. “Yes,” he said. “It will pass through your body too. But that is years and years and years away.” He put down his shovel and picked her up and placed her feet on his dirty boots. “Of all the people I have known, dearest girl, you are the most alive.” Then, down in the fresh, damp grave, he danced a quiet jig, her legs moving in perfect time with his.