He stopped first at Stéphane’s stall for the cheese, buying some aged Comté from the Haute-Savoie, a quarter of Brie and a generous slice of Bleu d’Auvergne. With the cream he also bought a half kilo of the butter Stéphane made himself. Finally, loaded down with his purchases, at Léopold’s stall he bought some of the Burundi coffee he’d come to like.
Back at home, Bruno quickly cleaned the sitting room, brought in wood for the stove, put the white wines and Monbazillac in the fridge and set the table. He scribbled down the timing he’d have to follow. The lamb would need reheating before he added the vegetables, so that would need less than an hour. The guests were coming at eight so they’d have the first course at eight-thirty and the main course at nine. He’d have to be back well before seven to decant the red wine. The tarte Tatin would take thirty minutes to cook, so he’d put that in just before the guests arrived. The lemon syllabub would take ten minutes, and then he’d put it in the fridge. The peas, new potatoes, baby carrots and salad could stay in the garden until needed. He washed his hands, prepared the tools and dishes he would need that evening and checked the table. Then he laid out the cheese board and covered it with a dish towel.
He drove to Pamela’s riding school to pick up Balzac from the stables where he’d left him after the morning ride and took the road past Audrix to Le Coux and Siorac to head along the Dordogne Valley to Château des Milandes. He parked, kept Balzac on his leash because of the birds and found Amélie, Hodge and Jennifer Muller being shown through the mews by Laurent. Balzac nearly tugged Bruno’s arm off in his determination to see Amélie, one of his favorite people. She dropped to her heels at the sight of him, spread her arms wide and braced herself for Balzac’s leap onto her chest and his affectionate licking of her neck.
“I wish I got a welcome like that,” said Hodge, grinning at the scene. Amélie disentangled herself from Balzac’s embraces and came up to hug Bruno.
“Have you eaten?” Laurent asked. “We just had a quick lunch at the brasserie here, only a croque-monsieur, since we’re all looking forward to your dinner tonight. I was just about to fly my hawk, and then Amélie will show our visitors around.”
“I’m fine, thanks,” said Bruno. “Let’s see your redtail.” And Laurent headed inside the mews.
“I went to see Félicité in Limeuil this morning, Bruno,” said Jennifer. “Thank you for the tip. She could not have been nicer. She got the key to Claudia’s room from Madame Darrail to show me around, and she was overwhelmed when I told her to take the dresses and whatever else she could use. She showed me some lovely selfies she’d taken of herself and Claudia together and forwarded several of them to my phone. Now Amélie is arranging for me to have lunch with her and Claudia’s friend Chantal at the Louvre when I get back to Paris. Everyone is being so kind.”
Then she broke off and gave an exclamation of surprise as Laurent emerged with his hawk on his gloved hand. Its hood was on and its jesses attached to the gauntlet.
“My Lord, I never thought the hawk would be that big,” said Jennifer, clearly awed.
Balzac lowered himself to the ground and gave a low growl until Bruno bent down to stroke and reassure him, keeping a tight grip on the leash.
“Will your hawk be happy with my dog here?” he asked Laurent, who said there should be no problem and led the way to steps that opened onto the wide garden. He removed the hood, bending again to use his teeth while his right hand loosened the strap, and once its head was free the hawk looked around and gave a low cluck. Already Balzac’s attention was being diverted by some movement in the lower meadow and Bruno said softly, “Rabbit at four o’clock.”
“I see him,” said Laurent and loosed his hawk.
He flew straight for perhaps five meters and then soared high over the trees, circling and climbing until he hovered, as if searching the ground. The rabbit had been still when the hawk was released, and it should have stayed that way. But it seemed aware of the menace high above and suddenly darted to one side as if heading for the cover of some undergrowth around a copse of trees.
The movement betrayed it, and the hawk appeared to pause and then seemed to tuck its wings tightly against its body and then dived almost too fast for the eye to follow. Bruno was sure it had missed, aiming for a point where the rabbit had been rather than where it was heading. But just before it slammed into the ground the hawk flattened its dive and at less than twenty centimeters above the ground flew straight and low after its prey. It seemed to anticipate the rabbit’s last, despairing veer to one side and then pounced, its talons striking, and with two punches of its beak the rabbit lay still, just its legs twitching.
Then the hawk lifted, the rabbit hanging from its talons, the great wings spreading as it gained height, circling back to Laurent. He gave a long, clear whistle, took some meat from his falconer’s bag and held it high in the gauntleted hand. The hawk swooped gracefully down, dropped the rabbit at Laurent’s feet and landed on his glove to take the beef as Laurent retied the jesses to secure it and then bent down to take the rabbit and stuff it into his bag.
“Mon Dieu,” said Bruno. “That was beautiful—terrifying but so efficient, amazing to watch.”
“Does he only eat the meat you give him?” Hodge asked.
“No, hawks eat mice or voles or small birds because they need the roughage they get from the fur of small animals or feathers from birds. But he associates this beef with me.” Laurent replaced the hood on the hawk, again bending to use his teeth to help tighten the strap.
“How long did it take to train him?” Jennifer wanted to know.
“A long time because I was learning,” said Laurent. “The longest part is what we call the manning, getting the bird accustomed to me and to the gauntlet and the hood. That takes months. But an experienced falconer can train a hawk to take a lure, which is how we start them hunting, in two or three weeks. It took me two months, but he was very patient with me.”
“What’s a lure?” Amélie asked.
“It’s a dummy,” Laurent said. “I have one that is like a small bird, two sets of wings sewn onto a small sack, and then I attach a piece of meat to it and start training him to take it. When he understands that, I’ll start twirling the lure around my head very fast, swooping it up and down on the end of a rope, so he learns to take a bird in full flight. My other lure is a model rabbit with two big ears, and again a piece of meat tied on with string. Then I start pulling the lure, jerking it this way and that so he learns how rabbits can move over the ground. They catch on fast.”
“But how do you get them to drop their catch and settle for a small piece of meat on your gauntlet?” Amélie asked.
“That’s not so much training, more the trust that develops between a hawk and a human. He knows that every time I hold up my gloved hand and whistle for him to come, there will be a treat for him.”
“That sounds like training a dog or a horse,” said Bruno. “It’s based on the trust even more than the reward.”
“It’s amazing when you think how important this has been to us humans, learning to train hawks and dogs, horses, even dolphins,” said Laurent. “I’m not sure we could have developed civilization without the relations we developed with our fellow creatures.”
“That’s quite a thought,” said Jennifer. “Did Claudia come out hawking with you?”
“Yes, just a couple of times, but very close to the château like we’re doing now. She asked if one day we might try it on horseback, but I told her the hawk would need some training for that.”
“But you can ride?” Bruno asked him.
“I learned. They say you never forget.”
“Hawking used to be very common, yes?” Hodge asked. When Laurent nodded his agreement, Hodge had a further question. “So why did it stop? Did it just fall out of fashion, or did some problem emerge?”
“No, it was late seventeenth, eighteenth cen
tury, when guns became sufficiently accurate for hunting. But even now, few hunters can hit a flying bird with a rifle. Most hunters for birds use shotguns, firing out a small cloud of shot. That’s a problem for falconers. You never want to feed your hawk any meat or any game that might have some lead shot inside it. It can kill the hawk.”
“What will you do with the rabbit?” Amélie asked.
“I was going to offer it to Bruno, but otherwise I’ll give it to Arnaud and Myrtille, my boss and his wife, for their supper.”
“I’ll be glad to have it,” said Bruno, and Laurent pulled it from the bag by the ears and handed it over. “Thank you.”
He went to open the back of his van, pulled out a plastic bag, placed the rabbit inside it and turned to see Balzac almost drooling as he watched. Bruno smiled to himself. Balzac had never caught a rabbit, although not for want of trying. He could run all day but never nearly as fast as a rabbit, and while Balzac’s powerful paws could start to dig their way into a rabbit hole, the warrens went farther and deeper than any single basset hound could hope to reach. Terriers were the dogs for rabbits, able to squirm their way inside the warrens and scare the rabbits out, where other terriers stood in wait at the opening. That was not the kind of hunting that Bruno enjoyed. It seemed too mechanical, almost industrial, with none of the excitement and whiff of danger of the hunt, none of that extraordinary and thrilling touch of wildness that he had felt when Laurent’s hawk had swooped to strike its prey.
“Can you show them around the château, Amélie?” Laurent asked. “I have to clean the mews and tend the hawks before I leave for dinner tonight.”
Bruno tagged along, more in the hope of hearing Amélie sing than from interest in the exhibits he had seen before. Jennifer and Hodge were clearly fascinated by the history of Josephine Baker, born into poverty in St. Louis in 1906, who went on to be the first black international superstar. Known as the Black Pearl, she became the world’s highest-paid entertainer after taking Paris by storm in the Jazz Age with her show at the Folies Bergère, dressed only in a tiny skirt that appeared to be made of bananas.
The original skirt, made of cloth bananas, had over the years aged from yellow to brown, as if it were real fruit. Hodge examined it minutely while Jennifer spent most of her time in the hall with many of Baker’s other, more decorous costumes. Bruno liked the way her years in the Resistance and the multinational family of children that she raised got just as much coverage as the nightclub years. He was still moved by the photo of her, old and broke and humiliated, as she sat on the steps of her château after she had been evicted for not being able to pay her debts.
“This is where I’ll be singing if the weather lets us down,” said Amélie, leading them into the great hall. “But if it’s a fine evening, we may put the chairs on the terrace, and I can sing on the balcony, with a backdrop of the château for the TV cameras. That means we can probably get more people watching from the gardens. Outdoor acoustics can be tough. In here, the sound is great.”
She stepped up onto a small bench, and her body suddenly seemed to contain an enormous force that projected her voice as she launched into “Sous les Ponts de Paris”—“Under the Bridges of Paris.”
As she continued the song, Bruno suddenly realized he’d never properly listened to the words before. What he’d always assumed was just another romantic tune of Paris was in reality an attack on poverty. She sang of the homeless mother with her children sleeping there, of a lover who could only afford to give his love some flowers plucked from a park, of a couple only able to make love in the shadows of the quay as the river flowed past. And the last lines were blunt—“If we could help just a little all the truly wretched, no more suicides or crime, under the bridges of Paris.”
And then she launched straight into the romantic “En Avril à Paris,” her voice changing from the somber to the playful as she sang of the city reawakening with springtime and the sun’s return from exile, the stolen kisses in the Jardin du Luxembourg, of the whole of France rushing to Paris, all blown away by love.
“She’s wonderful,” said Jennifer, standing beside Bruno, applauding as Amélie stepped down. Bruno glanced at Jennifer and saw her brush away tears with her hand. Amélie gave a mock curtsy as she grinned at them like a teenager, waved briefly and disappeared behind a door.
“Did you know she was this good?” Jennifer demanded of Hodge.
“Why do you think I told you we had to see her, listen to that voice?” he replied. “She’s got an amazing vocal range. I closed my eyes and I could be hearing Ella Fitzgerald, but then it’s another song and she could be Sarah Vaughan or Judy Garland. There are moments I’m tempted to throw in this job and become her full-time manager and conquer the world.”
“You’d have to compete with politics,” Bruno said. “That’s what she wants to do, and I think she’ll be pretty good at that, too. Having worked with her, I can tell you she’d also make a brilliant detective.”
Amélie came back, transformed. She was wearing a clinging robe of white silk, a white fur cape around her neck and big white earrings. Her hair had been plastered down with kiss curls on each cheek. Bruno heard Jennifer and Hodge beside him gasp at the sudden image before them of the woman who had bewitched a continent.
She closed the door behind her, and the voice that had been deep and sad and then light and seductive suddenly broke out in a much higher register, a soft and entrancing soprano in the exact same tone that Josephine Baker had sung her most famous song, “J’ai Deux Amours”—I have two loves, my homeland and Paris.
I close my eyes and it’s her, it’s La Baker, Bruno said to himself. It’s uncanny. This is the living image of a woman whose own mother was raised by former slaves; who fled her hometown after race riots in 1917; who gave up her American passport to become French; who hid Resistance documents in her underwear to get past Nazi checkpoints and wrote notes on Nazi troop movements in invisible ink on her sheet music; who refused to sing before segregated audiences in the United States; who marched beside Martin Luther King Jr.; who bankrupted herself for the dream of a multiracial family beyond racism.
Overcome, Bruno brushed away the sudden tears that gathered in his eyes, aware that Jennifer beside him was weeping openly now.
“It could be a ghost,” she murmured. “It’s her. She’s Baker. I have never seen anything like this.”
Suddenly he was aware of someone else at his side, Mademoiselle Neyrac, who had negotiated with him with such cold efficiency, taking off her own glasses to dry her eyes.
“Whatever we pay her, she’s worth it,” she said. “Bruno, thank you for bringing her to us.”
Chapter 29
Bruno drove back with only Balzac beside him on the passenger seat. Hodge and Jennifer were going back to their respective hotels and would see him at eight. Amélie would bring Laurent in Bruno’s Land Rover. The others would come separately. He stopped in Le Buisson to buy some bottles of Badoit, thinking his guests might prefer mineral water to wine. There was time to take Balzac on a trot through the woods and put the lamb in the oven before he showered and changed.
Now for the tarte Tatin. He scattered some flour over the small marble slab he used for his pastry, rolled it out to a size that would fit his baking dish, made the pastry and put it into his fridge to cool.
He changed into his tracksuit and took Laurent’s rabbit from the back of his van, skinning and gutting it before washing it in the sink and putting it in his pantry. Balzac watched him hopefully, but Bruno knew small rabbit bones could be dangerous for dogs, so he sealed the guts and paws in a bag and distracted Balzac with a quick jog. On his return, he picked two heads of lettuce and dug up some new potatoes, young carrots, and then chose the plumpest of his spring peas. He lit the wood-burning stove, peeled his red onions, took a quick shower and dressed in khaki slacks and a favorite old woolen shirt. It had once been dark green, but over the year
s and after many washings and drying out on the line in the sun, the color had faded to something almost autumnal.
He looked around the room and at the dining table to be sure all was ready for his guests, the wineglasses shining, the napkins in place. Then he thought that with ten diners, he should put out place cards so people would know where to sit rather than dithering around. He used his business cards, bent double, and wrote down each name, putting Jennifer and Amélie beside him in the middle of the table, where he could serve more easily. Pamela and Jacqueline were on either side of Hodge, Florence and the mayor at the head and tail of the table and Laurent between Florence and Jacqueline. The baron was between Florence and Amélie.
In the kitchen, Bruno washed and shredded the green salad. He’d leave making the vinaigrette until it was needed, but he shelled the peas and washed the carrots and new potatoes. Then he set the oven to a hundred and seventy degrees centigrade, sliced his red onions in half, melted about a hundred grams of duck fat in a heavy-bottomed but shallow pan and stirred in two teaspoons of sugar when it began to sizzle. He laid the onions, cut side down, closely together and chopped the last half onion into quarters to fill the gaps between them.
He covered the pan and let the onion brown gently for fifteen minutes before lifting the cover and sprinkling over the pan a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper and the leaves from six sprigs of fresh thyme. He used the time to make the syllabub, whipping a hundred grams of fine sugar into the half liter of cream until it stiffened and rose in soft peaks. Then he stirred in a generous glass of white wine and the juice and half the zest of a lemon. He spooned the mixture into glasses, topped them with the remains of the zest and put the glasses into his fridge to cool.
The Body in the Castle Well Page 24
