Wild Rose (30 page)

Her dizziness had retreated, but she could feel colour rising in her face, wanted to protest, to refuse firmly, but some wiser self prevented her, knowing any protest now would only harden him in his resolve. And he had to deal with grandmother.

“Yes, grandfather.”

When he didn’t speak, she went to the door and, her hand on the knob, suddenly, angrily, trying to find a way to hurt or even just startle him so that he would have to acknowledge that she was a person too, “Why did you call the Hippolytes
mes cousins?”
She could feel some strange emotion coming from him, his hand arrested for an instant on the piece of paper he held.

“You had better sit back down.” She moved back to his desk, stood instead of sitting, her vision suddenly hyper-clear, dizziness gone. “They are not exactly cousins,” he began. “But your grandmother Julie –”

“What?” Surely grandmother’s name was Henriette.

“My first wife,” he said slowly. “She was named Julie. Julie Roland. She was the mother of my sons Emanuel and Honoré.” Emanuel was Sophie’s long dead father, the other was his brother, Sophie’s uncle, dead at fifteen of a fever. “You didn’t know?” She shook her head, no, then sat down before him, staring. “Someone should have told you.” He was speaking to himself, it seemed, but then he gave the faintest shrug to his heavy shoulders, and not looking at her, went on. “Julie was a distant cousin of M. Hippolyte’s father. She lost her parents and having nowhere else to go, came as a young girl to stay with the Hippolyte family, when M. Hippolyte was only a little boy.” He paused, seemed disinclined to go on, sighed heavily, and spoke. “We met long before any of you were even thought of. We married. Some years later…” here he paused again, then drawing in a long breath, went on. “She died giving birth to a child.”

Sophie wanted to ask, who was the child? But her grandfather said, “The child died too.” He didn’t seem to want to look at her. “She was…your grandmother.”

Sophie said, finally, “The Hippolytes…”

“Not really relatives,” he said. “I choose to remember.” She couldn’t quite make sense of this. For a long moment both were motionless and silent. Then, without even murmuring thanks, Sophie went out into the hall, closing the study door softly behind her. She half expected to find grandmother waiting, but there was no one there and as she listened, no sound on the stairs or in the
salon
assailed her. She kept on moving down the hall to the wide front door, opened it, and went outside onto the
véranda
and out onto the street. No one seemed to be about, all still at their after-Mass meal or perhaps having
un petite somme
.

She could not think what this news meant; something beyond having had a different grandmother once; something beyond grandfather’s relationship to the Hippolytes. She began to run, her confusion spurring her until she remembered how unseemly this was, and slowed to a fast walk. At one point she stopped dead, half-turned, looked back over her shoulder as if to see if she were being followed, but in reality, because she thought she would go back, ask someone, anyone, to tell her what this news meant. Then, re-thinking this impulse, forcing herself not to run, she walked rapidly the rest of the short way to the churchyard. From a few feet away, she saw Pierre emerge from the shadows under the trees as if he had deliberately been keeping out of sight, and was surprised, having for the last few seconds forgotten he was the reason she was here.

She didn’t even slow, not remembering they hadn’t walked together before, or that she was engaging in an activity that would be utterly forbidden if her guardians knew of it. Pierre seemed now someone she had always known, someone she might trust. The absurdity of this didn’t strike her until hours later.

“Come,” he said, smiling in a delighted way as she reached him. He took her hand in his, how warm and thick it was, and led her quickly down the side of the church where a high hedge prevented anyone in the nearby houses from seeing them. Down the tight passage they went, Sophie having to run to keep up with Pierre’s strides, then through the back lot behind the church that ran along the edge of the cemetery, through the gate, across another empty lot overgrown with waist-high grass but in which there were narrow walking paths, and then they were on a country trail. He pulled her a few steps further so that they were both leaning, panting, against an oak whose trunk was so wide that both could lean side by side on it and not be seen by the eyes of the village behind them. He started to laugh, but seeing her face, stopped at once.

“Sophie, what is it?” He grasped both her hands in his.

“Grandfather is arranging a marriage for me,” she told him. Then grew embarrassed, thinking, it is nothing to him. She wanted to say something clear and strong, but she couldn’t yet even separate all the parts of this development, knew only that it was as if a hurricane or a flood threatened her and she could do nothing to save herself. And yet, how was it that it seemed as if she and Pierre had known each other forever?

“Who?” was all Pierre said. He moved to stand in front of her, fixing her eyes with his two flashing dark ones so that she couldn’t look away.

“He…has…choices,” she said, and began to draw a line in the dirt with her boot. This made Pierre laugh out loud.

“Then I’d better stake my claim, eh?” he said, teasing her. She dropped her head, didn’t answer and he put his fingers under her chin to lift it again. “Let’s walk,” he said. They stepped back onto the road, so little used now that a newer, wider road ran into town from this direction, and now thick grass grew between the wagon ruts, and rivulets of rain had cut finger-wide channels here and there at right angles across it. The ditches were choked by flowering honeysuckle, tall grasses and weeds, a riot of colour. She felt only the heat of his hand covering hers, heard only the sound of his boots on the soft loam of the trail. Bees and flies buzzed in the ditches and mosquitoes
stung now and then. She kept finding herself back in grandfather’s study, the air thick with old cigar and pipe smoke, the dull, padded silence of it, and grandfather, a dark shadow looming
across the desk, deciding her fate.

In the afternoon sun the leaves of elms and ashes shimmered, and the dark blue-green boughs of the many firs seemed for once airy and buoyant with light. Fat white cloud ships perched in the blue above the
yellow fields, seeming docked, although she knew that in a couple of hours their bottoms would darken and fill, then open to drench the countryside with a warm rain before the sun came out again to heat the ground so that in places steam would rise from the wet earth and cloud the surface of the pools of warm water. As they strolled she felt herself beginning to regain a sense of normalcy and, looking to the left and to the right as they topped a low rise and could see around them, beginning at once to descend, she stopped walking.

“I know where we are!” she declared, studying the stone wall, parts of which showed either above and occasionally between the exuberant growth that otherwise hid it.

“Where?” he asked, as if to test her.

“That must be Uncle Henri’s land – grandfather’s, I mean.” She pointed to their right.

“C’est exact,”
he said, and waited while she gazed up the stone fence ahead of them and then backward along its face, what little of it she could make out. A few small trees had fought their way up through the heavy growth of the ditch, but on the opposite side of the wall someone had either thinned the natural growth into a neat row, or had planted trees as a boundary – someone a long time ago as they were mature trees.
‘Beech’
came into her mind:
a beech tree
. Who had told her that? Ah, Violette, some years ago. Uncle Henri was buried on the other side of this fence.

“I want to see his grave!” She looked at Pierre, thinking he wouldn’t know what she meant, opening her mouth to explain. What is the matter with me, she asked herself, feeling she had lost something today, some line of sense that had been her life until now, the end of which she couldn’t catch so that she felt herself bouncing from subject to subject, and emotion to emotion like a runaway ball in the schoolyard.

“It is further down,” he said, reaching again for her hand. At its touch, this time she felt a shock –
Pierre is holding my hand
– and instead of pulling away, moved closer to his side, panting a little at her own daring, and at some other, new excitement. He gave her fingers a squeeze, didn’t look down at her, yet she could feel the small touch of joy that had leaped inside him at her movement, and feeling it, was calmed. They walked on, their bodies touching now and then in answer to the uneven ground, slowly up and down the hills and troughs of the rough trail. She remembered running here with her school friends, caught between smiling and frowning in perplexity at how they had once behaved, and how good it had felt. She didn’t know why they had done that. She and Pierre didn’t speak, but once in a while he would shift his light grip on her hand, just slightly, and a thrill would go up her body. They walked on.

She had rarely been allowed to go for walks through the village or out in the countryside without an adult, and she could remember fairly clearly the few times she had gone with only school friends. Once, on such a walk with Rose-Claire and Yvonne, perambulating the village one Sunday afternoon, arm in arm, they had met three English boys walking together down the road and, as no adults were present, had smiled at them, and the boys had smiled back, and Rose-Claire, Yvonne and Sophie had all given small bobbing curtsies, while giggling behind their gloved hands.

The boys had said, perhaps mockingly, “A lovely afternoon,
mademoiselles,”
and
“Comment allez-vous,”
and Sophie had laughed aloud. She wanted to learn English then, had wanted to for a long time.

“’
ow are you?” she had dared to ask aloud, her voice perhaps a bit strained in her amazement at what she had ventured, and the boys, one tall one in particular with a smooth cap of pale yellow hair, had laughed, and replied in an imitation of her stilted greeting, although in a not-unfriendly way, “I-am-well.” Then they had passed on, and the girls had sobered and grown silent. So much of the village still English, descendants of the British who had run from the American States a long time ago, before even grandmother was born, and who led their own lives entirely in English, girls their own age also out on afternoon strolls, and in that moment of sobriety, their voices still lingering in the damp, sunny village air, Sophie had glimpsed another world, bright and gleaming, beckoning her.

Suddenly Pierre stopped, pointing. She saw nothing, only an enormous old beech tree, its lowest branches stretching out far on every side. Since the time before her birth, farmers had swelled the area clearing acre after acre of the finest trees, from yellow birches to aged oak to mottled sycamores, so there were not that many great old trees left in the immediate vicinity of the village. How was it she didn’t know of this one?

Already he was wading through the thick growth in the ditch, looking for an opening in the fence.

“There.” He pointed to their left, some distance down the stone line. They kept walking, and when they reached the point he took her hand again and helped her. Waving her handkerchief about with the other hand to ward off insects, she crossed through the tall grass that bounded the trail into the space between fence and road clotted by wild rose bushes and the full branches of late-blooming red and yellow columbine interspersed with mauve-flowering bergamot over which butterflies, bronze and gold, fluttered and wheeled.

She said, “I wanted to come, but grandfather wouldn’t allow it. He said that grandmother would disapprove.” She suspected that grandfather came here, perhaps even often. He would have come by road, through the farmer’s yard, she supposed, then down the fence line to his brother’s grave. They waded through the prickly, entangled shrubs as if through deep water, pushing them aside, until they came through the gap into the field to stand, panting – at least Sophie was – under the spreading, thickly-leafed canopy of the ancient beech.

The now-speckled grey granite gravestone, slightly aslant after years in the rich soil of the field, sat under the tree, a rough stone cross polished only on the side facing the field, on which was carved,
Henri Émile Charron, 1820–1871
. No carved angels, no Bible verse, or line of poetry. But wait, a closer look revealed one simple word, nearly smoothed from view despite the relatively few years it had been there:
Loved
. The letters more crudely made than the others, and cut less deeply. Pierre said nothing while Sophie traced the word with her finger, hoping to confirm that the word said what she guessed it to say. Only grandfather, surely, would have done this. Who else might have loved Henri Charron so much? She knew of no one.

And yet, how very beautiful the setting, the roughly-textured wall behind it nearly chest-high on Sophie, the branches of the beech spread over it, its shade keeping down the growth on the grave itself. She crossed herself, without noticing she had, as the memory of the grim horror that permeated the household at the time of his death came back to her. How long had it been since Violette had told her that her uncle was a suicide? A long time, she thought, and she had failed to think of it again because it was too terrible; she could not comprehend it. Now, she would have knelt to pray, but the ground was damp, in places downright muddy, there was nothing about
she could use to keep her knees dry, so she stood, tears dripping off her nose and cheeks, using a handkerchief from her reticule to sponge them away. Pierre scuffed his boots in the earth, waiting,
reached to touch her arm, then came closer to put his arm around her shoulders so that she turned her face into the coarse cloth of his sleeve.