Cranwell had already made himself at home in the kitchen by the time I arrived. He was deep in conversation with Sévérine, who was seated on a stool next to his at the island. She had her arm resting on the countertop with her chin propped in her hand. She was looking at Cranwell as if he were the only man left in Brittany.
Spare me.
While they talked, I made espressos and placed a basket of breads in front of them.
He laughed at something she said and then glanced at me.
Turning my back on him, I poured the espresso shots into their demitasse cups.
He laughed again and she joined him, her melodic giggle joining his baritone chuckle.
Chancing to look at him when I set the cups in front of them, I found his brown eyes gazing at mine.
“Sugar?”
“Please.”
As I took the new sugar bowl from the cupboard and set it in front of them, my toe hit something under the island. I bent down to investigate and found myself nose to nose with a dog. A slobbering, pug-nosed Boxer. It was fawn-colored with a jaunty white blotch that covered its nose and curved into its muzzle. The sturdy chest was marked with a blaze of white.
“Ms. Farmer, Lucy.” Cranwell made the introduction with great aplomb.
Lucy was a dog! She licked my face with her large wet tongue, and I couldn’t help myself from grinning, but I managed to wipe it, and the slobber, off my face by the time I straightened to face Cranwell.
He was looking at me innocently, as if finding stray dogs in kitchens was a normal occurrence.
“If she barks-”
“She doesn’t bark.”
“If she tries to chew my furniture-”
“She won’t.”
“If she even starts to go-”
“She doesn’t. Not in the house.”
We stared at each other for a long moment before being distracted by Sévérine, who had climbed off her stool and was down on all fours making cooing sounds at Lucy. Dogs or babies-the French will go crazy for either. But apparently, Lucy wasn’t crazy about Sévérine. She growled and pushed herself farther beneath the island.
“Fine. She can stay.”
“She prefers beef.”
“Really.” I scowled at the beast. “I only make one meal. The rule for her is the same for you.” I fixed Cranwell with my most withering glare. “You eat what I cook, or you go hungry.” I gathered my dignity and stalked up the stairs to my room.
Sévérine’s voice floated up the stairs behind me. “You are not to worry. She is really very good cook.”
Sévérine knew enough about my routine to be able to find lunch for Cranwell in the refrigerator and warm it for him. My other two guests would be out of the chateau until the evening. For myself, I decided to skip the noon meal. I just didn’t feel hungry.
I did, however, feel like a run. I’ve never been accused of being wiry, but I’m slender. And running every other day ensured I stayed that way. I changed into a jogging top and shorts, cinched my shoes on, and galloped down the stairs and out the front door. I jogged slowly down the drive, my feet sliding slightly backward as I pushed off the gravel with every step. But as I turned right, toward the forest, onto my well-trod path, I found my stride. I ran, savoring the scent of the forest and the soil. I wound through the trees and then burst out into a meadow. Alix’s meadow. My halfway point. I’m an out-and-back runner. The meadow was at exactly 1.5 miles.
As I pushed through the grasses toward its middle, a sparrow-hawk streaked out of the forest from the opposite side. I saw its gray wings flap once. Twice. Its white and brown mottled body torpedoed toward the ground. It snapped up a mouse without even slowing its flight and rose, triumphant, into the cornflower blue sky.
Having jogged a wide loop in the middle of the meadow, I sped back toward the chateau. With a mind refreshed, I looked forward to an afternoon of working in my garden and cooking. As soon as I saw a glimpse of the drive, I increased my speed, breaking into a full sprint once I touched the gravel. At the front gate, I slowed down and did three circles around the chateau, gradually easing into a walk. On my last circle, I heard a call from above. I looked up to see Cranwell leaning out his window.
I waved and made sure I didn’t slow a step.
That was the third time the man had intruded upon my life that day.
It was a bad sign.
Without changing clothes, I went straight from my run to the garden. I was merciless with the weeds that afternoon. Just before 2:00, when I usually started working on dinner, I turned to my border of flowers to decide what to cut for the front entry. I had already taken several stalks of aster and was debating what to take next. Again, I sensed that irritating, gentle presence. I was hoping that at some point God would just give up and leave me alone. “Would you leave?”
He didn’t.
“Please?”
“Okay. Sorry to disturb you.”
I screamed, and the lavender blooms fell to the ground.
Lucy barked. Once.
“I’m sorry!” Cranwell bent to pick up the asters. “I was just trying to let you know I was here.”
Must the man surprise me every time he happened to be in my vicinity? “It’s just that sometimes…”
“I think the rudbeckias would look nice with these.” The suggestion was gently offered, so I rudely rebuffed it.
“Perovskia.” I hurriedly clipped three stems and grabbed the asters from his hands and began to speed-walk up the flagstone path.
“Don’t forget your spade,” Cranwell called from behind me.
Detouring back into the garden, I found it sunk into the earth beside a row of peas. I must really have been daydreaming to have left it like that. It didn’t occur to me until later to ask how Cranwell had seen it there, covered as it was by the leaves and tendrils of the plant.
Cranwell and Lucy sauntered to the chateau behind me and watched as I arranged the flowers in the vase. He was right. The rudbeckias really would have been the best choice.
Later that afternoon, as I climbed the stairs to my room to rest before dinner, I noticed that someone had added several stalks of Lythrum and a branch or two of spirea. It looked much better than it had before.
Cranwell and Lucy appeared as I was setting the table in the dining hall. He silently armed himself with the forks and knives I’d brought out and followed me as I laid out three plates. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not eat up here.”
That comment surprised me. “Why?”
“It seems as if the other couple staying here is rather…” He grinned.
“Rather.” I nodded in agreement. “I’ll have Sévérine bring your dinner up to your room.” I couldn’t blame the man for feeling like a third wheel.
“We-Lucy and I-could always just eat with you.” He looked at me from under his dark eyebrows, imploring.
How come brown eyes can’t be just brown? Why do they have to include such fascinating shades of honey and amber, fawn and walnut?
“In the kitchen?”
“Isn’t that where you eat?”
“Yes.” But it’s also where I unwind. I put on a CD, read a book, enjoy my food. I have a routine. A routine that I like. Even Sévérine eats in her own room.
“You could explain to me what the chateau was like when she lived here.”
She. Alix. It defied explanation how a centuries-dead person could have continued to cause so many complications in my life.
“I need to know so that I can start to write.”
Anything to get him out of my life as quickly as possible. “Of course. Come down at seven.”
My reward for surrender was a wink.
I hate men who wink.
Cranwell and Lucy appeared promptly at seven. He’d just taken a shower: His hair was slicked back and he emanated a masculine scent of soap and woodsy aftershave. In spite of myself, I breathed it in as hungrily as the scent of fresh-baked bread.
He smiled what I might have labeled a shy smile had I not been better informed of his character.
On a stool, at the island, he watched as I took plates of eggplant bruschetta out of the oven, and napped them with Mediterranean vinaigrette.
Bending down, I set a bowl of raw cubes of steak in front of Lucy. She eyed me, then leaned toward the bowl and swallowed them whole. She must have, because she could not have chewed them in the thirty seconds it took the meat to disappear.
“Do you have a cup? I’ll give her some water.”
After handing him a heavily leaded crystal tumbler, I watched in amazement as he tipped it for Lucy and as she daintily lapped it up.
“If I give her water in a bowl, she slops it all over the place.” He put the glass in the sink and resumed his place.
Lucy walked slowly to the stairs, sighed, and then walked her paws out in front of her until her belly touched the floor; she lifted her head regally. Then she rolled out her hip, stuck out her back legs, and crossed them, as delicately as any lady, at her ankles.
We both smiled as we watched her.
“I call her Queen Lucy. You know: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”
No, I didn’t know, but it irritated me that he had read my thoughts. The plates had absorbed the heat of the oven, so I used oven mitts to place them on the marble.
Cranwell pulled at the tips after I’d finished and drew them from my hands. Then he stacked them together and laid them on the counter.
Half an hour before, I had opened the wine, a Chinon, to allow it to breathe, so I poured two glasses and handed one to him. We clinked our glasses together. “To Alix,” he ventured.
“To Alix.”
Wondering just how much he knew about wine, I watched him take the first sip. I was impressed.
He took a small sip, and opened a crack in his lips, to draw in air. I saw his lips purse as he exhaled through his nose, knowing that the berry notes would be filling his sinuses, as they were filling mine.
“’90?”
“’95.”
“Cassis, cherries, violet.”
Okay, so I wouldn’t be serving him macaroni and cheese while he was at the chateau.
“Bread?” I held a baguette in one hand and a bread knife in the other.
“Please.”
I sawed off a generous slice for him and another for myself. And then it was time to eat.
“Is Frédérique a family name?”
“In a sense. I have my father, Frederick, my mother, and my grandmother to thank. Mother was so sure I was a boy that she’d decided that I was going to be Frederick Jr. She never even picked another name. When I came out as a girl, my grandmother, who is French, suggested Frédérique.”
“So did your friends call you Ricki when you were growing up?”
“No.”
He ate several minutes in silence, and then lifted a piece of bruschetta. “This is excellent.”
It was excellent. The olive oil-based vinaigrette had sweetened the eggplant, and I’d broiled it to perfection. I thanked him for the compliment. It had been so long since I’d been in a social situation that I had no idea what to say to him. I talked to Sévérine every day, but it was a vocabulary limited to the inn. I felt like a person coming into a warm house from the frigid cold: My cheeks were stiff; my mouth wouldn’t work right. I tried to make words; I tried to say phrases, but they came out haltingly, as if I hadn’t spoken in years.
Cranwell, bless him, ignored my false starts and stutters, orchestrating the conversation.
“And how did you come to be here?”
“I bought the chateau in 1999, spent a year renovating it, and opened up the inn. I had some good publicity-”
“I saw. In à La Mode magazine.”
“Yes. That was good for business.”
“I can imagine. But how did you come to France?”
And there it was. Would he pity me? “With my husband, Peter. He worked at the Embassy.”
“In Paris? State Department?”
I nodded; it was just easier than explaining. Although diplomatic work is the purview of the State Department, there are many other federal agencies with staff at embassies-some of them with a higher profile than others. “It was a three-year assignment. He was asked to go to Tanzania the month before we were to leave.”
“Tanzania. I’ve been there on safari. The Serengeti is like nothing I’d ever seen.”
“It was August of ’98.”
He was quick. It took only a moment for him to realize the significance. He absorbed the information faster than I had. At the time of Peter’s death, the bombings at U.S. embassies in East Africa had seemed like a disturbing dream. Disturbing and disconnected from anything real. It took weeks for me to connect the rubble of those ruins to my own grieving heart.
Cranwell glanced down at my hand. His gaze lingered on my wedding band; then he lifted his head and looked at me. “And you decided not to return to the U.S.?”
A wave of relief buoyed me. There would be no pity. No awkwardness. Just a simple acceptance that, as I had fought to claim, life moved on. “No. I mean, yes. I couldn’t go back. Too many things had changed. I wasn’t the same person, and I didn’t want the same things I’d wanted before.”
“Did you cook before you came to France?”
I shook my head. “Peter was so busy at the Embassy that I needed to find something for myself. I decided on Cordon Bleu.”
“Sounds glamorous.”
“It wasn’t. I spent two weeks just learning how to use a knife. When it came to actual cooking, I made recipes over and over, memorizing them. Sometimes we ate the same thing for a week and a half.”
“If it tasted anything like this, I can’t imagine he would have complained.”
“He didn’t. Ever.”
At that point, I got up and removed the plates from the table. Then I quickly sautéed three chicken breasts, adding melon jam at the last moment. I took a breast from the pan, arranged it on a plate and reached for the next. Cranwell had anticipated this and was already at my side, offering the plate. He did it easily, smoothly, fitting himself into my rhythm of work but not invading my space.
I heard a familiar shuffle on the stairs and arranged a tray of food for Sévérine.
Lucy growled and moved from her position by the stairs to take refuge underneath the island.
“Excuse me. I do not mean to interrupt.” Sévérine stopped at the foot of the stairs when she saw Cranwell; then she came forward to collect her tray.
Cranwell did what every man does when they see Sévérine: He got to his feet, saying, “Please. No. That’s quite alright.” And then he managed somehow to touch her. Sometimes men touch her arm, sometimes her shoulder. Sometimes they even clasp her hand and pull her closer. The magic of Sévérine is as old as Eve. And it never fails.
“I see you later, Frédérique.”
Nodding, I confirmed, “At eight.” She would serve dinner to my guests.
Cranwell followed her with his eyes as she left the room, and with his ears long after she had disappeared from sight.
Waiting until he was done goggling, I tried to restart the conversation. “And how did you hear about Alix?”
“A lecture in L.A. ‘Feminism in Medieval France.’”
I bent to pick up a scrap that had fallen on the floor. I eyed Lucy and then decided against tossing it to her; she was definitely too high-class for scraps. “How enlightened of you.”
As I set a plate in front of him, he looked into my eyes. “A prospective girlfriend.”
“It didn’t work out?”
“She wasn’t any fun. But the lifestyle of medieval women was fascinating.”
How typically male. “Maybe for you, but I’m sure it wasn’t for them.”
He had been cutting his chicken but waved a hand as if to brush away my remarks. “I asked for a list of references and did some research. I came across an article by-”
“Let me guess: a Ms. Dupont?”
“You know her?!”
“You do too.” The thing that is most irritating about Sévérine is how smart she is. It really is not fair. “Sévérine.”
“Sévérine-?”
It was impossible not to catalogue the emotions as they crossed his face. “That’s perfect.”
Just perfect.