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“Then why the shiver?” And then he followed the direction of my gaze, and said quite simply: “Ah.”
I turned around. “What do you mean, ‘Ah’?”
“Just ‘Ah.’”
He saw things rather more clearly than I liked, I thought. More clearly, sometimes, than I myself could see. I felt the color stain my cheeks and turned my head away again, looking back toward the bay tree and the man who sat beneath it.
He was sitting comfortably stretched out against the outer wall, one leg drawn up on which to rest his injured hand. The hand hung stiffly, as though it hurt him, and I remembered Harry telling me how Neil had climbed the château walls to get inside. Actually climbed the walls. They must have been a good twenty feet high, even at their lowest point around the gates. Less than that on the inside, naturally, where the ground level was higher, but even so. He simply hadn’t wanted to wait, so Harry said, for the main gates to be unlocked. It must have been a different Neil Grantham, I decided, who’d shown such a lack of patience.
It could not have been this quiet man, lost in a serenity so deep he scarcely seemed to breathe, with the faint light trickling through the bay leaves turning his hair a pale and softly radiant gold. He might have been Christ contemplating the sunrise over Gethsemene. All else was darkness compared to him, and though he neither moved nor spoke his very stillness drew the eye more effectively than motion—drew it and held it until I felt myself being pulled into the glowing center of its reverent, breathless peace.
Harry watched me, eyebrows raised. “I like him, if it matters.”
I faced him with a flat expression. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Right.” My cousin turned to Christian, with a smile. “Sorry to have kept you from your bed, but I really am grateful for this. And for these.” He patted the lumpy parcel wrapped with care inside his jacket.
Christian shrugged. “It is no trouble. And now,” he announced, brushing his forehead with one hand, “I will make for everyone some coffee, yes? So much excitement in one night, it makes the head ache.”
“Coffee,” Neil agreed, “sounds wonderful.” He rolled his head against the stone wall to smile at us, and moved to stand up, wincing a little. “It isn’t so much the excitement,” he explained, “as the drink. Bloody Calvados. I feel like there’s a herd of horses dancing on my skull.”
My cousin laughed. “That’s age for you. You ready, Em?”
No, I thought, I wasn’t ready. That was the whole problem, wasn’t it? I trailed along the cliff path after them, too busy with my own confusing thoughts to join the conversation. I had some vague memory of passing by the house where Harry had kept hidden, and of brushing through the fragrant clutch of pine, and then of starting our descent into the town, but I was still surprised to find myself upon the pavement outside Christian’s house, with all the houses round still shuttered tight against the pale and spreading light of day.
I looked at Harry, and at Neil, and suddenly I felt a little stifled. “Actually,” I said, “I don’t feel much like coffee. I’d rather get some sleep.”
Harry’s eyes were gently skeptical. “Oh, yes?”
“Yes. I think I’ll just go back to the hotel.”
Neil smiled at me, faintly, seeing too much, as he always did. I tried my best to make a graceful exit, but in truth it took all my effort not to break into a run as I wound my way through the narrow sleeping streets. Each window seemed to stare at me, accusing me of cowardice, and even when I reached the fountain square the elegantly entwined Graces looked less than approving. I wrapped my arms around myself defensively, moving across to stand at the fountain’s edge.
Splendour, Joy, and bloody Beauty—they looked as stern as ever, those three faces. Unless… was that a quirk I saw, just there? I squinted through the tumbling rain of water droplets, glistening like diamonds in the slant of morning sun. No, I decided, it was nothing. And yet, I had the feeling that the statues were trying to tell me something.
“It would never work,” I answered them aloud. I wanted to tell them that the fairy tales were lies, all lies, but it was difficult to say the words when above me Château Chinon rose resplendent in the sunshine, looking every inch the castle of a fairy tale. Difficult, too, to deny the existence of Prince Charmings when one had just last night come charging to my rescue. Damn, I thought. And happy endings? A sweet wind whispered through the leaves of the acacias, and I thought I heard Jim Whitaker’s voice asking me a second time, “Is happiness a thing we choose, I wonder?”
I wondered, too, and found no answer.
My hands were cold. I rummaged in my handbag for a pair of gloves and saw a flashing glimmer at the bottom, in amongst the jumbled clutter. Gloves forgotten, I reached in deeper, and closed my fingers round the two-toned coin. Not a French coin, but an Italian one—five hundred lire, to be exact. I seemed to see Neil’s eyes before me, watching me, quietly urging me to make a wish. Whenever you’re ready, he’d told me. Whenever you’re ready.
It had been years since I’d performed the tiny ritual, yet in the end it came so naturally. I took a deep breath, kissed the coin, and sent it tumbling with a wish into the icy water of the fountain.
I was so intent on watching it fall that I didn’t notice the cat, at first. The little creature had rubbed past my legs twice before I surfaced from my thoughts and looked down. The cat blinked up at me. It came into my arms without hesitation when I bent to pick it up, and nestled underneath my chin, purring like a motor-boat.
Behind me, Neil’s voice warned: “You’ll get fleas.”
I stiffened, then relaxed, not looking back. “I don’t care.” How long he had been standing there, I didn’t know—I hadn’t heard his footsteps. But I heard them now, crisp and even on the pavement as he came across the square to join me at the fountain’s edge. I went on looking at the water, and my hands upon the cat were almost steady.
Almost.
Neil glanced into the water, too, then turned his quiet gaze on me. “I see you’ve used your coin,” he commented.
“Yes.”
“You didn’t wish for the cat to find a home, did you?”
I looked at him then, and saw that his eyes weren’t quiet at all. They were alive, intense with some unnamed emotion, and a question lurked within their midnight depths. Slowly, I shook my head.
