“The cottage of flowers?”
“It belongs to Monsieur Philippe. He goes there often.” Michel drew her close to the edge of the cliff and pointed in the other direction. “There’s the sea. You can just see it today. I’ll have to bring you back someday when it’s clearer.”
Catherine turned immediately in the direction he was pointing, her hand shielding her eyes. It was true the haze misting the mountains and the town of Cannes softened and muted the view of the coastline, but the blinding sunlight on the sea was breathtaking, turning the cobalt blue of the Mediterranean to a shade closer to polished steel. “It’s still beautiful. How Juliette would love to paint it.” She realized suddenly that whenever she had thought of Juliette of late, the memories had come gently, lovingly, not with the urgency of need but with the pang for the absence of a dear companion. “I wish she’d come to Vasaro. There’s so much we could show her, Michel.”
“Juliette is your friend?” Michel picked up a branch and tossed it like a javelin over the cliff. “I have many friends.”
“I know you do. I have only one.”
He smiled. “You have me.”
She smiled back at him. “That’s true. I have two friends.”
“And the rest of the pickers would be your friends, only they know Monsieur Philippe wouldn’t like it.”
Catherine knew that was true. “It’s not that he doesn’t want me to be friends with them. He thinks it’s not proper for me to work in the fields.”
“He doesn’t understand the flowers.”
“He’s a good man,” she protested. “And he loves Vasaro.”
Michel nodded. “I didn’t say he wasn’t a good man. All the pickers think he’s a kind and just man. I only said he enjoys the flowers but he doesn’t understand them.” He grabbed Catherine’s hand. “Come on, I want torun.”
She started to laugh helplessly as she let him pull her down the other side of the hill toward the manor house at a dizzying speed. Somewhere along the way he released her hand but she kept on running, enjoying the exhilaration of the warm sun on her face, the wind tearing through her hair, the scent of bergamot in her nostrils.
She hadn’t run like this since that night at the abbey when she’d—Her pace faltered as the memories of that last night came back to her. The muscles of her stomach clenched, knotted, and then suddenly eased. That night of horror was gone. Nothing could be more different from this lovely afternoon on Vasaro. That hideousness could never touch Vasaro and its people.
And if it did, she would deal with it. She would destroy it.
The fierce emotion accompanying that last thought startled her.
“Catherine, you’re falling behind,” Michel called, glancing mischievously over his shoulder.
“No, I’m not. You’re wrong. I’m forging ahead.” She sprinted toward him feeling young and strong enough to run to Paris and back. “I’ll race you to the geranium fields!”
“I told you that you’d be sad.” Michel’s anxious gaze searched Catherine’s stricken face as she watchedthe man empty the basket of bois de roses into the soupy mixture in the large caldron. “There’s nothing to be sad about. You don’t understand.”
“They’re dying.”
“It’s the maceration,” Michel said gently. “They’re giving up their souls. Don’t you see that it’s better this way? If the flowers had died naturally in the fields, they would have returned to the earth immediately, but this way they live longer. The perfume can survive a long time. Not always, of course, but Monsieur Augustine says some Egyptian perfumes have lasted for a thousand years and I myself have seen perfumed leather treated forty years ago that still has a strong scent. The blossoms die but their souls live on.”
The delicate pink blossoms lay quivering on the gray-white surface of the mixture in the pot and then lost all color immediately as the brawny woman minding the caldron stirred them beneath the surface with her long wooden spatula. Catherine had never really thought of the picking of the flowers as killing them, but here the destruction was clear.
Michel tugged at her hand. “I’ll show you.” He led her across the long shed to a table where a row of stoneware crocks brimming with the thick mixture had been set. “This is the pomade. Smell.”
Catherine bent her head and breathed deeply. Bois de roses, alive again, fragrant with the same scent they had borne in the fields.
“You see?”
He seemed so full of anxiety that Catherine quickly nodded and smiled. “I see.”
He looked relieved. “Now, you can sit over there and watch me work. You don’t want to do this, do you?”
She shook her head as she sat down on a low stool by the window. She could accept the need for the maceration but she had no desire to change those fresh, lovely blossoms into bleached, wilted corpses.
All the windows were thrown wide, but it was still suffocatingly hot in the long work shed. Four separatecaldrons steamed over wood fires in the room. Beside every caldron lay a huge pile of blossoms, and each pot was attended by a man or a woman with a wooden spatula.
“What is that soupy mixture?” she asked Michel as he shoveled more blossoms into the caldron.
