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‘No, it’s fine.’
Marguerite swallowed.
The boy’s father looked at her curiously, and she ran a quick finger beneath her tearing-up eyes. ‘Forgive me, monsieur, just this is the first time she’s spoken since she came to live with me. I think your son, Jacques, might be sent from the fairies.’
His face softened and his lips twitched. ‘We always say the birds, as he is always with them.’
They watched as a crow came to settle on his shoulder. The boy encouraged the crow to hop from his shoulder to hers. Elodie’s smile when the crow landed on her made Marguerite catch her breath.
‘I was afraid she wouldn’t make any friends this summer.’
‘Ah well, Jacques will make friends wherever he goes, don’t you worry. It’ll be nice for one of them to be human for a change though,’ he admitted.
As the long summer days wore on, Elodie’s limbs turned tanned and strong from the gentle river swims and she began to put on some weight from the rich wholesome fare. Colour had returned to her cheeks and her long blonde hair was glossy.
Marguerite found that once Elodie started speaking she didn’t stop, rambling off a mile a minute about all the things that she had been dying to know about.
She would enter the restaurant kitchen like a whirlwind, carrying bunches of herbs, picked from the potager, Marguerite’s vegetable garden, and demand the names for everything, a large smile on her face.
‘This one, Grand-mère,’ she said, brandishing a twig, which she parried beneath the older woman’s nose like a knight with a sword, only to sniff it herself. ‘Isn’t it heavenly? What is it?’
Grand-mère, becoming used to these flights of fancy, smiled. But before she could answer a crow tapped on the window and Elodie looked up to see Huginn, and behind him, the boy. ‘Jacques!’ she said.
‘It’s lemon thyme,’ said Grand-mère. ‘It works really well with lentil stews.’
But the child was already out the door, and running after the crow and the boy who was waiting for her.
Marguerite rolled her eyes but she was smiling.
‘Elodie!’ cried Grand-mère. ‘Be back here at noon, to serve.’
‘D’accord!’ she called, and Marguerite laughed as she watched the two head off. The old cat, who used to belong to the former owner of the restaurant, Pattou, padded inside and Marguerite said, ‘We’ve been abandoned. I don’t suppose you want to help peel the potatoes?’
In answer, Pattou went to go sleep on the windowsill.
Jacques brandished the butterfly net as he explained. ‘So we’re going to catch them and put them in a jar with holes,’ he said, as Huginn hopped from his shoulder and walked down his arm to get a better look. His look was so human and curious that it seemed he was thinking the same thing she was… and was just as taken aback.
‘You’re going to kill them?’
She couldn’t disguise the shock in her voice.
‘No,’ he said, giving her a what do you take me for sort of look, his mouth in his familiar half smile. ‘I’m going to draw them,’ he said, taking out a sketchbook from his satchel, along with a canvas roll that had slots for his pencils. ‘But sometimes that does require catching them so I can get it right. After I’ve done a quick sketch and made a note of the colouring, I release them. Sometimes they linger and you don’t have to catch them at all… but mostly they fly off just as soon as you look at them.’
‘Oh,’ she said, breathing out in relief. It wasn’t so much that she was uncomfortable at the thought of killing insects, she could do it if she had to… thinking of a wasp she’d killed instinctively when it launched itself at Pattou a few days earlier. It had been the idea that Jacques, who appeared to love nature so fiercely, would hurt something so innocent, that made her feel that way.
It was hard catching butterflies, she found, especially if you didn’t want to kill them. You had to be careful not to damage them.
‘Whatever you do – don’t touch their wings,’ he warned. ‘They’re so delicate, they can tear easily.’
On her first attempt down by the river, when they spotted a small pale blue specimen, which Jacques said was called a Provence Chalk-hill Blue, he muttered something else in a different language. ‘Polyommatus hispanus.’
‘Pollytomato hiccup? What does that mean?’
He laughed, then said it slowly, ‘Polyommatus hispanus – it’s the Latin name. That’s the scientific name – they always use the Latin name for the natural world.’
‘Why do they use Latin for scientific names?’ she asked, and he explained.
‘It’s to simplify things – which sounds odd, because no one speaks Latin anymore – but that’s sort of why it works. So many plants and animals have lots of different names, but if we have a common name for things it’s understood all around the world. For instance, in German – butterfly is Schmetterling.’
