The house was sprawling. They polished their way through room after room of peeling paint, antiques, dusty chandeliers, porcelain basins on claw-footed stands, armoires filled with china sets, cracked ceilings with extravagant molding, side tables displaying old brass lamps with fringed lampshades beside Virgin Mary statues, shelving units lined with old books, maps, and children’s games, wooden crosses on the walls, hidden passages in the wallpaper that opened to secret servant quarters, grand hallways with worn Persian carpets and still-life oil paintings in carved wooden frames, and rows of closed, unused bedrooms.
Up a circular set of stone stairs with a rope for a banister just like Marlow’s was a huge attic, which Madame Belleville called agrenier, filled with rubbish and old planks of wood.
Down a ladder was a basement with low ceilings, a dirt floor, and an old bread oven.
Madame Belleville had been one of nine children; her parents were dead, all her siblings had moved away or died, and no surviving family member wanted the house. She couldn’t bear to leave it, but it was too much to manage.
She spoke to them entirely in French. To her surprise, Marlow understood almost all of it. They got out of there with enormously full bellies and casserole dishes of food.
“She likes you,” said Luc.
“How can you tell?”
“You were the recipient of, how do you say, the leftovers.”
Yves had to edit the footage from the shoot. It was good he was out, because Sabine didn’t want to explain that she’d lied to her mother about where she was, or that she’d had an epic fight with her the night before. She paced the apartment and couldn’t settle into anything.
“What if my mum calls him?”
“We’ll deal with it,” said Aubin. “It’s understandable why you’d come to Paris under the covers.”
“I think you mean undercover. Under the covers means something else.” She smiled cheekily at him. His eyebrows raised as he got the picture.
“Marlow doesn’t like Yves, but you’re allowed to have a relationship with him. And you suddenly find yourself in the same country as him. It was, I don’t know, fate to visit him, no?”
“I don’t want to hurt her. It’s true that he was never around. But she hates him so much. I have to wonder how much of that was him and how much was her, you know?”
She looked out the window. The city was alive. “You OK if we stay a few more days?”
He smiled. “We’ll need clothes.”
For the next week, Marlow distracted herself from wanting to reprimand Sabine in an obnoxious but warranted series of five hundred texts or hauling ass to Paris to let loose on everyone. Inthe mornings, she worked to get Mirabelle back to rights. It had been so run-down when she’d arrived five weeks ago, and like any good camper, she was determined to leave the campsite in better shape than she’d found it. Luc was all in.
Their attempts to get the electricity up and running were fruitless. Their village had been all but forgotten, and it took repeated phone calls from Luc, Lali, and Marlow, standing in the Mirabelle square for its spotty service, to get someone out to repair the wiring that had been torn down by a fallen branch. That was a test of Marlow’s French, complaining to a call center representative. She wrote down the appropriate vocabulary Luc gave her and kept saying the same phrases over and over, remembering to kill with kindness.Merci, Monsieurthis, andBien sûr, Monsieurthat. It took telling a call center supervisor that poor Madame Belleville, the only one in the village whose house was big enough to have a chest freezer, had had to cook every frozen piece of meat she had, because it was all thawing. She was in her eighties, Marlow pleaded. What would she eat after all this food was gone? The supervisor promised to send someone by the end of the week. Marlow pumped her fists in the air and told Luc that, at this rate, she was powerful enough to get them internet and cell service in Mirabelle, too.
“If you manage that,” he said, “I will bow at your feet and kiss them and perhaps every other inch of you, and I will never let you leave this place, ever.”
“Tempting,” said Marlow. And it was. With each tiny victory, she could feel herself adhering to the village and its five other inhabitants.
Day after day, they were fed by Madame Belleville, who just kept cooking on her gas stove, no electricity needed, with food from her freezer and with whatever risked spoiling in everyone else’s fridge as well. They restored order in Mirabelle and fixed things that were broken: some that weren’t working as a result of the storm, some that hadn’t worked in years.
She and Luc fixed the shutters. They painted two more coats in every room in Maison Perdue. The fruit seller’s awning had been further torn to shreds by the storm, so they took it down and covered the places that the pigeons had been roosting. They cleaned up the broken stained glass around the tiny church. They pulled weeds from between the square’s stones. They repainted the bicycle rental store’s racks, rusted through from disuse. They repaired and repainted the town sign, which made Mirabelle look like a place where people lived instead of the ghost town it had become.
Madame Belleville supervised it all in her floral apron, socks, and sandals.“Bravo, Madame le maire de Mirabelle, bravo!”
Marlow eyed Luc. “Did she just call me the mayor?”
“You’re in trouble now.”
Madame Belleville rewarded them with a flourless chocolate cake and liqueur made from mirabelle plums in an old Maison Fortin champagne bottle. This, of course, was where the village’s name had come from—and Madame Belleville, a twinkle in her eye, shared the secret of how the making of Mirabelle liqueur had been the village’s greatest illicit market. It didn’t start out illicit, it started out as something people made in their kitchens from the harvest of mirabelle plums from family orchards not too far away. The “fruits d’or,” or golden fruit, she said, had to beun peu croquants, bien sucrés, avec un parfum un peu vanillé(a little crunchy, sweet, with just a hint of vanilla flavor). They could be pitted and macerated, or softened, with gin, vodka, rum, or brandy—Madame Belleville preferred brandy herself, drinking the resulting liqueur alongside ice cream with the delicious, soft, liqueured fruit dolloped on top.
And the illicit market part of the story, Marlow had asked?
Well! About fifteen years ago, a group of intrepid twenty-somethings from nearby Neufchâteau had stolen two dozen bottles out of her cellar and had made off with the haul downone of the hilly footpaths from Mirabelle to Nenier where they’d parked their getaway car. Madame Belleville used old Fortin bottles to make her liqueur, so the fraudsters made up counterfeit Fortin labels on their color printer, called it a once-in-a-lifetime run of award-winning, vintage Fortin mirabelle liqueur, and charged a thousand euros a bottle. They actually managed to sell a baker’s dozen before getting caught. Madame Belleville told this story with great pride, given it was her own recipe that was earning top dollar on the black market. Marlow loved hearing these fabulous stories about the village and didn’t have the heart to tell her she’d be leaving soon.
They hauled all the rubbish down to the Nenier bins. It took a dozen trips up and down the stairs. Marlow’s thighs had gotten toned and strong. Every time she went down those stairs, she looked for Rémy’s Audi to see if she could get the Maison Perdue transfer papers. Rémy kept remarkably inconsistent hours, often not even appearing in the prescribed time slot. This business of being afonctionnairewas looking pretty good: make your own schedule, invent your own rules, change them when it suits, and seemingly report to no one.
In the afternoons, Marlow rode the moped to Guillaume’s and worked for the festival.
