Beast (35 page)

In general, there was less gadgetry, though, not more. And what gadgetry there was had a wholly different face. The French seemed partial to buttons and gewgaws on things. There was a huge contraption in the basement of the house with dials and switches and coils of piping that led to another machine-ish looking gadget that connected to a boilerlike container with a lid bolted down by a dozen huge wing nuts. The whole display was nothing more than a water heater, as it turned out. One switched it on half an hour before a bath; one planned one's hot water—having it was not a given. Louise was warned by Uncle Tino of "waste" that morning as he showed her how-to conserve hot water like everyone else, by operating the "simple" piece of basement machinery.

The word
simple
did not translate directly. He pointed and gesticulated as he explained, "You turn this dial here and push this button there, while you monitor this gauge, watching the needle to see how fast it goes up. If it gets to here, shut the whole thing down and stand back; call for help."

She suspected Uncle Tino of wanting to blow her up. "Is it dangerous?"

"But no," he said, "it is a fine thing." He meant. But yes. He accepted the dangers of his nephew's hot-water heater as normal concession to practicality.

Louise stared at the contraption, wondering how much she was going to like cold baths. "Is this a common piece of equipment?"

"Oh, yes, many neighbors have one just like it. A local man makes and installs them. They are quite good."

"Wouldn't it have been smarter to send for one from Paris."

Uncle Tino's eyes widened. "Paris? Do you know how much such a thing would cost? They take advantage"—milk you like a cow, he said—"in Paris."

"But doesn't it break a lot, with so many parts?"

"Of course, it breaks." Then he winked and said, as if it were an unconsidered advantage she had stupidly missed: "But the fellow is right here in town who can fix it." He added, "Not like some
Parisieng"
—he used a disgusted nasal—"who is too busy eating croissants to fix anything."

Lah-de-dah, she thought, a Frenchman who smugly hated the French.

Uncle Tino, who was not actually her husband's uncle but rather a cousin somewhere several times removed, did not stand on ceremony. He hated, equally and democratically, Parisians as much as he hated debutantes from New York who "stayed in their nightclothes till eight in the morning, then took an hour and a half to get dressed."

With total irreverence, he told her that he couldn't understand why a woman as pretty as she should spend an hour and a half arranging herself. He wasn't being mean. He wasn't angry. And he certainly wasn't attempting to flatter. It was merely an observation offered with gloomy resign, part of the sad state of the world, or that portion of it not run by Tino Harcourt himself.

With the prince attending to business, this glum relative was the man with whom Louise was to spend her first day of married life. He had been assigned the duty of guiding her through the house, of explaining its running and maintenance, and suggesting what part she might play in this. She could do as little or as much as she wished. Tino had also been given the task of opening up the south bedroom. With a lot of
làlàing
and head-shaking disapproval, he set the maid and housekeeper to making it habitable.

After griping over her manner of naming her dog, Charles Harcourt had left. He apparently came through at lunch again, but she missed him when Tino took her to the house of a seamstress who made draperies.

When she got back, Charles had "gone to the factory."

By late afternoon, when Tino gave her the choice of his helping her to unpack or his taking her to the factory laboratory where Charles was working, Louise asked instantly, "Would you stay with me?"

"Only if you need me. Charles can bring you home."

"I don't need you," she said brightly, "and I'll be ready in five minutes."

The factory was plain and square and brown, a two-story edifice that covered more than a square block. It was a typical product of industry, dingy but practical. Louise stopped on her way to the front door to look through a dirty window. She spied women inside a long room seated at large tables, the surfaces piled with flowers—no, just the petals and some sort of frames. The women were sorting the flowers or cleaning them or something. Young men pushed wicker baskets of more petals, rose petals, she thought; they were pink. The boys dumped these into various mounds about the floor. At one place, the spartan room was waist-deep in pink petals. It was rather pretty and strange, the mechanized taking of fragrance from nature.

Charles was in a laboratory in back, a place of copper tubing and percolating vials. He was just putting on his frock coat as they came in. And here Louise was brought up short by a smell. Jasmine. The room reeked of it, in a generic sense, the way a small room—though this long, white room was by no means small—could be overpowered by a woman wearing too much perfume. It didn't matter what kind; too much was too much.

As he buttoned his coat, Charles said, "I was just leaving for the fields. Maxime says we have a fungus on the lavender on the west-most plat. I thought I should take a look before the sun goes down."

"I should like to go with you," Louise offered immediately.

"The carriage can't make it. I have to take a horse."

"I can ride."

"We have no side saddle."

"I can tuck up my skirt and ride astride. I have done it before."

Her husband glanced at Tino. He looked at her. "Are you good enough to keep up a canter or gallop?

It's fairly straight across a plateau."

"I'm sure I can."

And she was free of Tino, the king of sentimental pessimism, at least for the rest of the afternoon.

It was unexpected to realize she preferred Charles Harcourt's company not just to Tino's, but to anyone else's she had so far met in France. Yet she did. She was comfortable with him. Even today, after his and her tangle last night. Even though they said nothing, just rode like the blazes. The wind blew in Louise's face, making her eyes tear. The pace, the horse knocked the breath out of her. Yet she loved their ride across the plane that spread out just below the south hills of Grasse.

Her husband flew on his horse like he was a part of it—a centaur intent on getting to where they were going before the light faded. Though she kept up, barely, he was by far a better rider than she. He rode, of course, with his good side to her. She wanted to laugh. Still, it was nice to admire him from a distance and at some speed. He looked almost… dashing with his wild hair caught in the wind, shining black, his long, dark coat flapping over his legs.

Louise was out of breath when they finally pulled up over a small rise and looked down into a valley of bright purple.

Lavender. In full, profuse bloom. It ran in rows, spreading in every direction out to the horizon.

They walked the horses down a steep bank, at the bottom of which he dismounted. "Be careful," he said as he offered his hands up to help her from the saddle. "The hives are just over there."

Bees. Louise could hear a faint, irritable buzz as she swung her leg around. "Are they dangerous?"

"Not at all. Unless you swat at them or let them get in your clothes."

Then she placed her hands on Charles's shoulders and dropped into his grasp. He caught her up against him, letting her slide down his body—that had all the give of a mountainside—as nonchalant as you please. She pushed away when he released her, feeling maneuvered, annoyed, as if the bees buzzed in her stomach.

They tied the horses under a low tree and walked down into the lavender, with Charles Harcourt still steering her, necessarily, by the elbow. The last thirty yards were rocky and sloping. She had meant to help
him
: He was one who had retrieved a walking stick from under a strap in his saddle. Yet she was the one having trouble. He would whip the cane up under his arm or brace both of their weights against it as he offered assistance.

What became obvious was that he was used to handling a woman. By the elbow, by the waist, by her fingers, then letting go with a light stabilizing brush of her back as Louise traversed level ground for half a dozen paces. This simple, physical facility, the way he paired himself with her balance, did not jibe with her perceptions of him.

What was it he said last night? That he, his shirt, something had been ruined for love? Louise wondered what he could possibly know about the subject. Certainly, his taste in women was suspect, given that his last woman was roughly as easy to endure as stomach poisoning. Women. It occurred to Louise that there had been women. Despite her husband's drawbacks, it was not out of the realm of possibility that he frequently attracted the females he wanted. She glanced sideways at him, surreptitiously watching his gamboling, companionable progress.

She was surprised anew each time she realized how strangely appealing he was.
Beau-laid
, the French called it. Handsome-ugly, alluring in the way that charmed against one's will. In a way that played upon conflict, opposition, something that Charles Harcourt felt himself: He was proud; he was hostile to his own appearance. He dressed it up, calling it to notice, while he carried his massive frame—so restrained and overtly polite—in a state of tension, poised between a complex and developed gallantry and a self-aware rage against fate.

The result was a kind of energy, dark, and edgy, held in check. Brutish. Broodish. The sort that could make women faint. Louise suddenly understood what Mrs. Montebello was all about, her barbs and jealousies. Louise didn't share her appetite but she could appreciate her taste.

At her side, this contradictory man told her, "The most abundant and prolific lavender grows near Nîmes. but I don't use much lavender, so this is fine for my purposes."

Louise raised her head. She had so been concentrating on the terrain of their progress, she had not realized where it had taken them. They had walked down into the lavender. And she could not imagine anything more abundant or flowering than the field that stood on all sides.

Symmetrical row upon row of gray-green shrub sprouted straight, bright purple stalks. Oh, it was wonderful, more wonderful than she could have ever imagined. The sun was low but bright, lighting up rolling rows of purple, knee high, like a sea of it. The lavender grew so uniform, it looked combed. Its stalks grew long-spiked, the spikes naked but for a dense growth of small purple flowers, delicate little blossoms that were a pale violet outside, a deep royal purple within. The grayish-green foliage, long and thin, curled where the new growth shot forth.

Louise walked into this, enrapt. Between bushy plants, there was just enough room for a woman in a narrow dress. She held this dress up somewhat immodestly—the terrain was stony. Rocks moved underfoot. She had to be mindful where she set her feet or risk turning an ankle. Yet it was all so pretty: bright, colorful. As she made her way deeply into trie rows, the air grew fragrant with clean, floral scent and, everywhere, buzzed with the sound of insects turning this to honey.

She watched Charles bend to uproot a weed from their path—the occasional row was broken up by weeds that had gotten the upper hand, bushes themselves here and there. Louise walked behind him, up and down this breathlessly pretty flush of purple in the midst of arid land the color of straw.

They finally paused at a plant that wasn't blooming as much as the rest, and her husband squatted. He pulled a piece of it off, looked at it, then pushed the bushy branches back and dug at its base for a moment. "Damn it. We had this last year, and here it is again with the damn rainy season coming."

"Your fungus?"

"Mine, yes. Unfortunately. Though I would like to give someone else a turn. I'm sick of—"he said a Latin name she missed.

They began moving again. Louise decided she had married a kind of gentleman farmer, who cultivated and harvested plant extract, which made him a chemist of sorts, too, she supposed. Then he turned out to be a botanist as well.

"Look," he said. He stripped a handful of lavender off its stalk and offered it out on his palm. He looked down, engrossed by his own flowers. "See?" He lowered his hand to her, then used the tip of his finger to manipulate a small single blossom. "Here is the perfume of the plant. Every little flower, its top and its base, is covered in starlike hairs, and here—" He delicately dissected the flower with his nail. "See the shine? Oil glands are imbedded among these. This oil is what I distill."

He took her hand, crushing the flowers into it, against her open palm. "Smell," he commanded.

She did. It was divinely fresh and clear and sweet. He stroked her hand a minute longer, till she took it back. Her hand tingled where he had pressed the lavender. Rubbing it on her skirt, she looked at him, the ferocious-faced man with a love of flowers.

He continued. "English lavender commands a higher price, but I prefer this. The English stuff is sterile, propagated by slips and root division; no seeds. Mine"—he drew his loose fist lovingly up a whippy purple stalk—"is wild. It seeds itself in rocks. And I can smell the difference. It's less forced, more savage…" He said
sauvage
, which could have meant
wild-growing
again, but this didn't seem to be what he was saying. "More potent," he said and laughed. "In every sense."

An open smile. His face lit. bad eye and all. It was a tine smile, though crooked, displaying white, slightly uneven teeth. It was warm, direct, like the Provençal sun.

Louise was charmed by the sight, disturbed by the man. He liked her. He treated her well. And she wasn't sure why. He liked her even after last night, which seemed almost a brand of black magic itself, considering how impossible she had made it for him to have what he wanted.

Before they left, he pressed more lavender into her hand, saying, "The ancients used it for their baths.

Some think the name comes from the old Latin,
lavare
, to wash. Here. We will have a handful for your bath tonight." Stooping, he plucked whole stalks, so fragrant, bright, pretty. He made a regular bouquet.