The next evening, when Sévérine came for her dinner tray, I remembered to ask her a question that had been on my mind. “Is this the year of your Catherinette?”
“Oui.” It was the first time I’d seen her blush. In fact, she blushed so badly, her cheeks matched the color of the scarf she’d wound around her neck.
“What’s a Catherinette?” Cranwell was looking at Sévérine with interest.
“Oh, Robert, it is nothing.” Sévérine waved a graceful hand at Cranwell as if to swat his question away.
“What is it, Freddie?” He fingered the collar of his moss green v-neck sweater the way he always did when he was curious about something.
“It’s the year of Sévérine’s twenty-fifth birthday. And because she’s single, we celebrate. And she pleads with Sainte-Catherine to send her a husband.”
Sévérine shushed Cranwell’s laughter. “It is not done so much any more.”
“Of course it is!” I’d had friends in Paris who’d celebrated. “Especially the twenty-five kisses.”
“The what?” Cranwell was getting into the idea. I could tell.
“It is an old custom. Very vieux jeu.” Sévérine had jammed her hands into the back pockets of her tight-fitting indigo jeans.
“Let us celebrate with you. It’ll be fun.” Cranwell’s eyes held a dangerous twinkle.
Sévérine looked from Cranwell to me; I could tell she didn’t quite trust us.
“Seriously. It will be fun.” I handed her a dinner tray. “Tell me what your favorite meal is and I’ll fix it.”
“Foie gras, homards, et croque-em-bouche.”
I lifted an eyebrow. Liver paté, lobster, and a pyramid of tiny puff pastries filled with cream and wrapped in spun caramel. Since I’d insisted on celebrating, she was going to make me work.
But she deserved a celebration. Especially since she had no one else to celebrate with.
Cranwell waylaid her on her route to the stairs. “I wanted to ask you about the grail.”
She stopped so suddenly that she lost her grip on the tray. It clattered to the floor. “Frédérique! I am so sorry.”
“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.” Nothing had broken and most of the food had stayed on the tray. I got out a new plate and began to reconstruct her dinner.
“You had asked me about the grail, Robert? What does this have to do with Alix?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably nothing. Just following a thought.”
“I am only an expert on Alix.”
“But surely you’ve studied the legends if you’ve studied medieval history.”
“Oui, oui, oui. Of course. In the context of the time period of Alix.”
“So it left Israel with Joseph of Arimathea and then came here? To Brittany?”
“This is one story. But there are many others.”
“What are the other versions?”
She blew air from her cheeks. “There is the one where it is not a cup or a chalice at all. This is a Celtic one. The grail is a graal or a cauldron.”
“A kettle?”
“For cooking? Yes.”
“And the quest for it was a search by Arthur?”
“By his knights. But it is more than a search. It is an obsession of all of his knights. But only Galahad succeeds. Because he is the most pure. And in the end, it kills him.”
“So it’s dangerous.”
“Obsessions are always dangerous. And this obsession takes away the best knights from the Table Rond.”
“And leaves it undefended?”
“Non. Not this so much as it lowers the moral.”
“Morale?”
“No. The moral. The character of the kingdom. But remember, it is just a fairy story, Robert.”
“Maybe. But then people still search for it, don’t they?”
“I have a problem.” Cranwell probed me with insistent eyes.
So did I. I’d given myself ten minutes to put dinner on the table, and the meat was taking longer to cook than I’d expected. “What?”
“It’s too cold in my room.”
Don’t start with me. “Generally, fourteenth-century castles were built for defensive purposes, not for warmth. Have you tried wearing a hat?”
“Really. I can’t type.”
Turning my head, I glanced at him over my shoulder. To his credit, he was wearing moleskin trousers and a heavy cream fisherman’s turtleneck sweater. “Did you try-”
“A fire doesn’t help. Opening the flue only creates a draft.”
I didn’t have time for his complaints. I checked the meat again. Almost done. “Do you have any solutions?”
“Can I work down here?”
I dropped the pan. It banged onto the stove. Thankfully, it didn’t fall to the floor. “Here?”
“It’s warm. You have an outlet. I could just set myself up right there.” He was pointing at my desk. My desk. He had invaded my house, captured my thoughts, and kidnapped my heart. Now he wanted my desk.
There are limits.
“Cranwell, you can’t have my desk. You can bring down a table from elsewhere in the house, but you cannot have my desk.”
“Great. I’ll do it right now.” I was finally in a position to turn around to talk to him, but all I saw was his back disappearing up the stairwell.
The next morning, when I made my way down to the kitchen before dawn, I discovered that Cranwell was already hard at work, sitting at the table he’d placed at the back of the kitchen, in his robe and silk pajamas.
Lucy lifted her head when she saw me, then sighed, and dropped it back on her paws.
“Has she been out?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“About-” he paused to look at his watch. “An hour ago.”
“You’ve been here since four?”
“Yes.”
He hadn’t turned from the computer since I’d walked into the kitchen.
“Espresso?”
“No. Already got it.”
Really? Good for him.
After making my espresso, I carried on with my routine, rolling out croissants and then folding them. By 6:15, I was taking them out of the oven.
I put together Cranwell’s normal tray, with an espresso and two croissants, accompanied by a small pot of confiture.
“Thanks.” He looked up from the computer long enough to flash me a smile. “They’re talking to me, Freddie. I have to keep typing.”
Two weeks later, I was in the kitchen and working on my breads by 5:30, but Cranwell and Lucy were nowhere to be seen. It looked, in fact, as if they hadn’t been down at all that morning.
After I had shaped all six baguettes, placed them in the oven, and baked them, I took a break and had an espresso. Happening to glance at the calendar above my desk, I was struck by how quickly November had passed. It was already the 24th, Sainte-Flora day, which seemed odd. If you were going to dedicate a day to a person named Flora, why not give her a day in the spring?
A chill suddenly passed through my shoulders and down my spine. I decided to run up to my room and get a sweater. I took the central staircase because it came out closer to my room.
As I came back down, Cranwell’s door opened. Something made me hold my breath and shrink into the shadows. I saw Sévérine slip out of his room, clad in a black lacy scrap of nothing, and climb the back stairs to her own.
I felt like I’d been hit in the heart with a sledgehammer. Oh, but I’d been stupid. I stumbled back up the stairs to my room and jumped into the shower. I stayed until I’d stopped shaking.
It didn’t take much debate with myself to decide to tell Sévérine that I was sick. She knew enough about cooking to scrape together the day’s meals. I knocked on her door and shouted the message at her and then sprinted back to my own room before she had a chance to respond. I climbed into bed, wet hair and all, and pulled the duvet over my head. I pretended not to hear when she came and knocked on my door.
I’d known it from the beginning.
Cranwell was exactly the type of man I didn’t trust. Men are weak; that’s what my mother always warned me. She was right.
Je suis bête. I was so stupid.
By the end of the day, I was beginning to imagine that I could be sick for the entire week. I found myself becoming very philosophical. It wasn’t that I minded Sévérine being his lover; I was humiliated at having let myself trust him.
In fact, I was glad they had found each other. It was obvious Sévérine needed a father figure in her life. And Cranwell was perfect for that role. He was old enough. He was forty-five.
That was the end of my crush on Cranwell.
I almost stayed in bed the next morning, but then I remembered what day it was: 25 November. Sainte-Catherine’s day. The day of Sévérine’s Catherinette.
What perfect timing.
A shower did little to rouse my spirits. I threw on my usual chef’s attire and then rooted around in the closet to find the bonnet I’d bought for Sévérine. It was tradition that a Catherinette receive one… and usually they were decorated in the worst Minnie Pearl style. This one was no exception.
After pulling back my hair into a ponytail, I slipped on my shoes and trudged down to the kitchen. Thankfully, Cranwell wasn’t there. I put some brioches in the oven and then made a plan of the dinner’s preparations.
The only thing I’d have to do for the foie gras was toast some of the brioche and make beef-flavored gelée. That was easy.
The lobsters I planned to cook at the last moment, although the tagliatelle I’d serve with them would need a little more preparation.
The croque-em-bouche, the pièce de résistance, would take the most time, so I decided to start it right after lunch.
With no sign of Cranwell, and although I had no desire to see him, I put together his breakfast tray and carried it up to his room.
He looked up with a smile, from buttoning his shirt, as I entered the room. He looked as if he’d just come from the shower. “Freddie, the book is really coming along! Did you know there was a love triangle?”
Not until just yesterday.
Cranwell jabbered on about the count and his cousin and Alix, but I had no interest in poor Alix and her love triangle. Triangles no longer seem so symmetrical.
“You’re feeling better.”
“Much. In fact, I’m making plans to go to Italy.” I set the tray on a chair and turned to leave.
“Can I come?”
I turned back to face him. “No. You’ll have to take yourself off to Paris and visit your friends.”
“What does Sévérine do when you leave?”
“Whatever she pleases.” And I could almost watch the thoughts work through that crafty mind of his. Some Christian he was. I was trapped. I couldn’t stay in my own home because I couldn’t stand to see them together, but if I went, I didn’t know if I could stand to think about them at the chateau… alone, while I was sipping limoncello on some shaded terrace in Sorrento.
I closed my eyes. Some bread dough to knead would have been perfect at that moment.
Cranwell came to stand behind me, and I felt his hands on my shoulders as he began massaging them. His voice, close to my ear, said, “You look tense.”
Is it possible to want to throw yourself at a man and kill him at the same time?
The dinner turned out perfectly. I would have served champagne, but Sévérine had been so moody lately that I didn’t want the evening to end in maudlin tears. And although I had envisioned a casual dinner, both Cranwell and Sévérine showed up dressed to the nines. They must have coordinated at some point. Why else would Cranwell have been wearing a tuxedo and Sévérine a floor-length designer knockoff? I wouldn’t have chosen pale green for Sévérine, but the shimmer of the material set off sparkles in her eyes and made her teeth even more white.
My own outfit was more traditional: I was wearing a very nice pair of faded jeans and a plain-Jane blue oxford button-down shirt. I had the sleeves rolled up for extra panache. I would have taken my hair down for dinner, but considering Sévérine looked like she’d spent hours getting hers just right, I decided to leave mine in its knot.
For several moments, I considered not giving Sévérine the bonnet. But then again, what would I have done with the hideous thing?
“Sévérine, I have a gift for you.”
As soon as she saw the hatbox, she knew what it was. “No, Frédérique. This is not necessary.”
Oh, but it was.
“Cranwell, maybe you can do the honors while I get the foie gras?”
“Of course.” He took the box from my hands, opened the lid, took the hat from the box, and burst into laughter.
Sévérine could not have made a more ugly face if she’d tried.
“Is this part of the tradition?” Cranwell asked through his laughter.
“It’s part of the tradition.”
Cranwell placed it on Sévérine’s head and ceremoniously tied the hot pink ribbons underneath her chin.
She pouted.
At that point I turned around to cut the foie gras. When I turned back, Sévérine was all giggles and Cranwell was whispering in her ear.
Okay then.
Somehow dinner passed. I don’t remember saying much. I can’t even remember how the food tasted, although I do know that the croque-em-bouche looked magnificent.
When Cranwell decided Sévérine needed twenty-five kisses, I excused myself to go to the bathroom.
When I returned, Cranwell was clearing the table, and Sévérine was untying her bonnet. “Thank you, Frédérique. This was very kind.”
“You’re welcome.” I tried to smile. I’m not sure if I succeeded. What I really needed was to be alone in my kitchen. “Cranwell, Lucy looks as if she needs a walk.”
She really did. I wasn’t lying.
“If you don’t need any help-”
“No. I’m fine. You and Sévérine should… let this be. I’ll clean up.”
Sévérine didn’t wait to hear another word; she made a beeline for the stairs. And Cranwell strolled out the back door with Lucy.
It’s the last I saw of either of them that night.