Nevers

by Sara Cassidy

  Odette smiles, remembering how that dance went on and on. Félix never did anything by half. As they danced, the sun burned through the gray sky, and the two of them laughed, wondering if maybe their dancing had called it out.

  Then her mother had come into view, walking toward them with a basket filled with lunch—wine, bread, roast chicken.

  Mme Geneviève’s breathing quickens. It is as though she’s winning a foot race, charging ahead of the others toward the finish line. Her hand lightly squeezes Odette’s, a pump, and then her breathing stops. Odette knows there is nothing she can do to change things. She has been in the presence of corpses before. Of course she has—Anneline is her mother, after all, and has the singular talent of creating corpses.

  As is the custom, Odette stops the hut’s one clock. Then, having no coins and not wanting to rummage in the cupboards like a thief, she arranges the bowls of two spoons over Mme Geneviève’s eyes. The tasks buoy her against the unfathomable weight that pulls on her like a tide. Why could she not have met Mme Geneviève sooner? A hardworking woman, an inventor, someone who understood what it was to be adrift without a father…

  The oxen make mournful sounds low in their throats, like cats purring sadly. Odette strokes their heads. “Yes, she is gone. I will find a home for you. Don’t you fret.”

  Then Odette climbs through the window into their stable to find the feedbox. She lifts the lid and, after giving each ox a large handful of feed, works her hand through the oats. At the very bottom of the box she touches something unusual. A handle. She pulls, and up comes a small, ornately decorated book.

  It is bound with red thread. Odette, with some labor, reads the impressive title:

  A Tale Told in the Dining Room

  of a Burgundian Mansion

  by One Duchess to Another

  on a Rainy Afternoon over Glasses of Beaujolais

  as Overheard by the Author

  Maid and Inventor

  Geneviève Pitié

  Odette climbs back into the main house. A robin sings on the windowsill near the bed. Odette smiles, imagining it is Mme Geneviève’s soul saying goodbye.

  She sits on the edge of the bed, lifts the book’s cover and begins to read, forgetting for the moment Mme Geneviève’s instructions about reading it with a friend.

  Enjoy this story, for it is mysterious and true, and then write the last chapter.

  In the county of Jura, a duchess ached to hold a man in her arms, to nibble on his earlobes and profess love.

  Odette is so engrossed in the book that she does not notice the sound of horse hooves approaching the little house. She reads:

  So when a Burgundian duke passed through the Jura, he was invited for supper. He was a fabulous conversationalist, extraordinarily handsome. The duchess sized up his earlobes, touched her tongue to her teeth and began to woo.

  Soon she visited the duke in Burgundy. It was a dark night, and she pretended she had gotten lost on her way home from Paris. After supper, when the chateau was dark and everyone slept, the duchess from the Jura crept along the hallways and knocked at his bedroom

  “That is mine!”

  Renard grabs the little book from Odette’s hands.

  “No!” Odette cries. She tries to tear the book back, but Renard clings to it. His untrimmed fingernails sink into the cover like claws.

  Odette is enraged. This book is meant for her!

  She thinks quickly. Perhaps Renard will weaken when he hears about his aunt. She nods toward Mme Geneviève’s body. “Your aunt has…”

  Renard barely glances. “Finally. The old ewe is gone.”

  Odette dives for the book, but Renard turns quickly. His back to her, he leafs through the book’s pages frantically. “What? No pictures!”

  “She wanted me to have it. It’s mine!”

  “Well, in her state she won’t know if you have it or not, will she?”

  “Re-na-ard! Darling!” Anneline is outside the hut, warbling his name. “Did you find the wine?”

  Renard shoves the book under his stylish but dirty blouse and hurries to the door to meet Anneline just as she crosses the threshold.

  “Renard, my love.” Anneline looks into the room. “Daughter! What are you doing here?”

  “I was visiting Mme Geneviève. But she has died. Just now.”

  Anneline crosses herself cursorily. “Poor woman.”

  Renard dabs at his dry eyes with a fancy, threadbare handkerchief and crumples into Anneline’s arms. “My aunt has passed to the other side!” he sobs. Anneline strokes his hair.

  Odette watches the two, disgusted. Her eyes move to the bulge where the book is tucked under Renard’s shirt. “I will alert the priest and the carpenter,” she tells the pair.

  Renard raises his head from Anneline’s shoulder and, while pretending to blow his nose, gives Odette a cold smile. “Thank you, dear. That would be so nice of you.”

  Odette walks past the couple, out of the little house and into the spring day. But instead of going to the cathedral to tell Father Contrefort the news, so that the bell ringer can pull the bell ropes and the monks can recite funerary prayers, she sneaks to the back of the little house and finds the door into the oxen’s stall. Once inside, she squeezes between the warm beasts and presses up to the window to spy on her mother and Mme Geneviève’s dreadful nephew.

  Anneline is still comforting Renard. “Shhh. It will be all right,” she says, stroking his yellow hair. “Death takes us all.” A curate had spoken these exact words when comforting Anneline after her fifth husband, the bank manager, succumbed.

  Renard looks up at Anneline. “You are so beautiful,” he says.

  Anneline giggles. “And you are so handsome!”

  “Your eyes.”

  “Your lips.”

  “Your shapely calves.”

  “Your yellow hair.”

  Odette fights repulsion as the two run their hands over each other. And then—THUNK.

  “What was that?” Anneline asks.

  “Nothing,” Renard says. He kicks A Tale Told in the Dining Room of a Burgundian Mansion under the bed in which Geneviève still lies. “Only my heart, beating for you.”

  “Oh, Valcour!”

  “Valcour?”

  “I mean, Renard!”

  As the two fall to the floor, kissing passionately, Odette clambers quietly through the oxen’s window back into the house, sinks to her knees and creeps toward them. But just as her fingers touch the book, Renard and Anneline turn and bump into her. Odette freezes. Too late.

  “Daughter! I didn’t see you there.”

  “I thought you’d left,” Renard says angrily. “Why you—” He swipes at the book in Odette’s hands.

  “Why are you attacking her?” Anneline asks.

  “I’m just teasing her. Poor girl has had a shock today, what with my boring—I mean, dear aunt dying. She needs some cheering up.”

  “You have a kind heart,” Anneline says, kissing the end of Renard’s pointy nose and taking his hands firmly in hers.

  “Yes. So kind,” Odette says. And, gripping the book tightly, she runs out of the little house and into the woods.

  “Hey!” Renard calls after. “Hey!”

  Odette looks back to see Renard leaping up onto his horse. “Just going to get us some wine,” he calls to Anneline. He clicks his tongue and snaps the reins. “Hue!”

  Odette removes her sabots and knots them in her apron along with the book and then tears along the path. As the horse pounds closer and closer, she searches for a tree to climb. Finally the perfect one presents itself. She throws her bundle under a fern and clambers up, branch to branch, as quickly as she can.

  She is breathless at the top of a cottonwood tree, hidden by fresh spring leaves, when Renard’s horse canters past below.

  Twenty-Two

  When Odette finds the carpenter, a sinewy man her mother’s age, and tells him that Mme Geneviève has died, he grows quiet. “She had many talents,” he says. “She
was going to invent a tool that let me sharpen all of a saw’s teeth at once. That would have saved me so much time.”

  “She had a long list of things she still wanted to invent.”

  “I worked alongside her in several large houses. She was a dedicated maid who worked harder than most. But she never boasted. Pine could do for her burial—a modest wood for a modest woman. But I also have this oak coffin here, for sale at a good price. I built it for a man who in fact turned out not to be dead. He had merely fallen into a deep sleep. There is a tiny bit of damage to the inside of the lid, but otherwise it’s a lovely coffin, and it has, you could say, the selling point of having been tested.”

  “Tested?”

  “Well, the man was buried for a little while. As the mourners left the gravesite, one heard rapping. Thinking it might be a badger, and thus supper, he investigated and discovered it was something a bit more than a badger. If you look at the lid here, you can see the marks from the man’s knuckles, so desperate was his knocking. And there are scratch marks too. See here? I thought they trim the nails of the dead. Clearly, not always.”

  “Good thing someone heard him,” Odette says nervously.

  “Yes. The sad thing, though, is he hasn’t been quite the same man since he was buried. He is afraid of wood of every kind, which makes life difficult, as you can imagine. Tree or cart wheel, even a twig in a bird’s mouth, sends him into a raving panic. He lives in a little stone hut on a rocky hilltop. His wife and children deliver his meals.”

  “But you are selling it for a low price?” “Yes. Because of the damage—minor though it is.”

  At the cathedral, Father Contrefort is again staring sadly at the saints with their missing fingers and noses. He reaches up and strokes the stump of a toe, as if he could make it grow back, then takes out his handkerchief and wipes his eyes. “And they say you can’t get water from stone,” he jokes.

  “Father, I bear sad news. Mme Geneviève the maid has died.”

  “I am very sorry to hear that. We will ring the bells.”

  “Her last request was for them to be”—Odette takes a deep breath—“rung nine times.”

  “Nine times? Impossible. It’s seven for women. Nine for men. Who, after all, was made of whose rib?”

  “Those were her last words. Nine bells.”

  “Her last words.” Father Contrefort strokes his chin.

  “Mme Geneviève worked all her life in the houses of the rich. As hard as any man. She was an inventor too. She invented marvelous things.”

  “Pride is a deadly sin.”

  “She wasn’t proud.”

  “Invention may be a sin as well. We trust in God to make all things.”

  “She was creating a liquid that would hold the sun’s heat, to release at night and keep people warm.”

  “That would be against God’s wishes.”

  Odette thought of the nights she and Anneline had shivered in the dark. She thought of various neighbors coughing from the smoke from their fires, and the hours spent getting firewood.

  “God wants birds to have their trees, doesn’t he?” she asked the priest.

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “But we cut them down for firewood.”

  “Sunlight is meant for the daytime. If you take some of it away, there won’t be enough.”

  “We sit in shade at the height of day, so there is sunlight to spare.”

  Father Contrefort looks at Odette with new interest. “You are clever,” he says.

  “The revolutionaries said men and women were equal—”

  The priest’s smile fades. He looks at his broken statues. “Don’t talk to me about revolutionaries.”

  A small stone lands at Odette’s feet, as if fallen from the sky. She looks up and sees a man’s face in a window of the bell tower. He puts a hand out the window and waves, then puts a finger to his lips. His cheeks are wet with tears. He clearly knew, maybe even loved, Mme Geneviève.

  Odette, as she runs home, counts as the bells ring. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Odette waits. Nine.

  She finds Niçois lying in his yard, drenched with spring sunshine, his dark hair tangled up in the long grass. A ladybug ambles across his chest. Odette positions herself in the sun’s path, blocking the light. Niçois, surprised by the sudden shade, opens his eyes.

  “I need you,” Odette says.

  Niçois jumps to his feet. “I am at your service,” he says.

  Odette indicates the book she has bundled into her apron.

  “We need somewhere private to read this,” she tells Niçois in a low voice.

  “I know the place. My grandparents’ old hut!”

  Niçois leads Odette down the banks to the rough riverside hut where his father was raised. The hut is nearly lost in overgrown reeds and bushes, and it’s filled with rabbits that have made it their home.

  They sit on the damp dirt floor, and Odette opens the little book. To her dismay, the first few pages, which she read at Mme Geneviève’s house before Renard surprised her, have gone blank. “I see,” she says. “This is why we must read the book together. So we can help each other remember it.”

  For the rest of the afternoon, with wild rabbits sleeping on their laps, amid columns of sunlight that pierce the rotting thatch roof, Odette and Niçois—whose mother taught him to read using midwifery texts—read the book straight through to the end, stopping before turning each page to test each other’s memory of it, fixing each word in their minds before it vanishes.

  Twenty-Three

  —door. The duke answered. He wore pajamas of Lyon silk. The duchess threw her arms around him. “Goodnight to you as well,” the duke said, and, before the duchess knew what had happened, he had closed the door. The duchess was back in the hallway, alone. Well, she thought, I guess he is a modest man. Tomorrow I will try again.

  She did. After a day of batting her eyes and twirling her umbrella coquettishly as they strolled through the garden, and making deliberate kissing noises as she ate her oysters at supper, she again walked the moonlit halls of the chateau and knocked at his bedroom door.

  This time he didn’t even open the door. “Good night, Duchess!” he called from the other side. “Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed lice bite.” That, of course, was a joke. There are no lice in a chateau.

  The duchess took the joke as an encouraging sign. The duke was simply shy and clearly wanted to have fun with her.

  She left the next day feeling hopeful. From her home in the Jura, she sent the duke special cheeses from as far away as Normandy and England, and long letters about nature and the softness of her hair.

  She was sure that, with all her beauty and wealth, she could win him. She sent him a bottle of brandy with a pear that had grown inside the bottle. Finally she sent him a painting of herself.

  The duke returned the painting, with a note tucked into the frame: I am sorry. I am simply not interested. You seem like a lovely, persistent person. The truth is, I love dukes, not duchesses.

  The duchess did not understand the note at all. She flew into a great rage. She tore up her bedsheets and yanked the curtains from their hooks. The next day she consulted a wizard. She wanted revenge.

  The wizard gave the duchess a vial of powdered turtle shell and told her to stir the powder into the duke’s tea while intoning three times the name of an animal. A few hours after drinking the tea, the duke would turn into the animal she had named.

  The duchess visited the duke once again, pretending she was there to make amends. She asked the duke’s maids to make tea and set up a table for them on the terrace. “I will pour his tea for him. It is how we apologize in the Jura,” she lied.

  The duke was nervous. He had heard from a traveling silhouette artist that the duchess had not reacted well to his refusal of her. But he was a dignified man, a true gentleman, too gracious to refuse a cup of tea with anyone. So the two sat together on the terrace, which overlooked a valley, and exchanged pleasantries as the duchess poured
the tea.

  “And who owns those lands?” the duchess asked, pointing into the distance.

  As the duke went to the railing to see which lands she had indicated, the duchess quickly opened the silver vial that hung from her necklace. She emptied the turtle-shell dust into the duke’s tea and stirred, whispering, “Donkey, donkey, donkey,” inspired by the duke’s lovely ears and striking front teeth.

  The duchess knocked on the duke’s bedroom door late that evening to see if the spell had worked. She heard clomping on the other side of the door, and then a donkey brayed.

  Under the spell, the wizard had explained, the duke, now a donkey, would be able to bray only after the sun went down. During the day he would be mute.

  To be on the safe side, the wizard had also told the duchess how the spell could be undone. To be freed from the spell, the new animal would have to be bathed in the water of the oldest well nearby, on the night of a new moon, by someone related to him. The catch was that the spell had to be transferred to someone else before the moon completed its cycle. Some part of the existing animal would have to be ground and stirred into tea, and another animal—any animal—named while it was stirred.

  By now, dear Reader, you will have noticed that the words on these pages disappear soon after you have read them. It seems magical, but it is actually not magic. It is science. Chemistry. The ink, which your dear Author created, is a concoction of lemon juice, seawater, aluminium salts and North Sea seal’s blood. Once dry, it vanishes if exposed to the air for longer than a minute—giving you just enough time to read a page.

  The disappearing ink has been used for obvious reasons: this book must be read only by the reader I choose. If a bad person or a greedy person were to turn the donkey back into a duke, looking for a personal reward, that would put the duke in danger. And the duke, I’m sure we can all agree, has been through enough already.

  A final note for you, dear Reader: Someone else has suffered terribly from the duke’s disappearance, and that is the tavern owner named Miguel. He and the duke were in love, and Miguel searched for the duke for years. The patrons at his tavern frequently noted how tired he looked in the mornings, for Miguel often searched through the night. Eventually, in sorrow, he closed up the tavern, and at the writing of this, it is not known where he is.