“I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s a painter. You can’t get away from us, can you?”
“It’s all I know,” he said, and I detected a forlorn quality in his voice.
“How long has she lasted?”
“Two weeks.”
“And how much longer will she last?”
“One week.” He laughed again. “She’s going back to Paris. At just the right time. She’s starting to wear on me. Now, you tell me your secret.”
“Mine doesn’t matter anymore. It’s in the past. I escaped.”
“Yes, you went to America, but now you are back. Are you still afraid?”
“Not as long as I’m in the south. But I would be if I went back to Paris. Now, don’t ask me anything else, because I won’t tell you.”
After a few more minutes of traipsing through the twisting streets, we arrived at an intersection.
“This way,” Sebastian said, and turned onto rue des Lombards, yet another lane lined with ancient stone buildings and a profusion of flowers, bushes, and vines.
Sebastian finally stopped at number 102. Purple and pink trailing verbena overflowed from window boxes. The front door was painted a pale green, framed with a wisteria vine heavy with perfumed blossoms.
I expected my brother to use the bronze hand-of-fate door knocker that reminded me of the one at my great-grandmother’s house in Paris. Instead, he took a key out of his pocket and inserted it into the lock.
“You rented a house here?” I asked, confused.
Ignoring yet another of my questions, he twisted the doorknob and flung open the door. “After you,” he said, with a flourish.
I stepped down into a small, cool room with a low wood-beamed ceiling and a stone floor. It was outfitted as an artist’s studio; two easels stood by the window, and a stack of canvases leaned against the whitewashed walls. A wicker chair much like the one my mother used in her studio sat before one of the easels. Positioned beside it was a taboret holding two wooden palettes, dozens of silver-foiled tubes of paints from Sennelier in Paris, and a plethora of fine sable brushes.
Fat brass hooks were spaced evenly on one of the bare walls, waiting for paintings to hang from them. The other wall housed floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with supplies and books. Books, I suddenly realized, that I recognized. They were my searching books. Why had Sebastian unpacked the trunk I’d stored at my parents’ house and brought all the occult, medieval, and mystical books here to someone else’s house?
“Now, come look upstairs.”
Sebastian took my hand and led me up a narrow, twisting staircase with a wooden rail worn smooth by hundreds of years of hands holding on to it.
The second floor contained a small but adequate kitchen with a round wooden table and four cane chairs, a bedroom just big enough for a bed and an armoire, and a bathroom with an old porcelain tub. Each room, including the bathroom, had a fireplace. The decor was whitewash with light blue accents, the same color as the Bugatti.
“What is all this?” I asked, turning to Sebastian.
“The color, Delphine, Don’t you know from the color?”
I focused on the color. Delphinium blue. My mother had told me the story so often. Usually, the tall bell-shaped flowers bloomed in June, but the year we were born, they’d bloomed early, in mid-May. She’d seen them in the garden that morning. Surprised and delighted, she bent over to cut some stalks and went into labor. And from the moment I’d seen them, I’d been obsessed with them, too. For a long time, I believed they had been named for me, not the other way around.
Understanding dawned. “The car, this studio, this all is for me?”
He held out the key. “To heal. To start anew. As your dealer”—he bowed—“I believe it’s time to get you painting again. As your brother, I know you can’t do it at home with Maman and Papa underfoot. This seemed perfect. And you’ll have the car to motor down to the sea or into town whenever you want.”
“Nothing will ever be perfect,” I said. I knew that wasn’t something I could expect, ever in my life. “But this is awfully close,” I told Sebastian, and kissed him on both cheeks.
Chapter 18
Book of Hours
June 27, 1920
With Mathieu’s invitation to visit my next secret spot—his workshop—I had visions of a windowless room somewhere in the bowels of the Librairie du Merveilleux. From the outside, the building hardly looked large enough to house a store, much less two apartments.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
“Uncle Pierre’s building was erected in the early eighteenth century, incorporating the remains of a small monastery,” Mathieu explained, as we climbed up and up the twisting spiral of worn stone steps. “We’re in the cloister that was once part of the original larger structure. All that remains was this aerie.”
We’d reached the first landing and started up the next twisting staircase.
“The first time I saw this place, I felt as if I’d finally found where I belonged,” he said, somewhat wistfully.
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen. I’d grown up in Rennes, where my parents owned a café,” he continued. “When I was twelve, my mother died, and without her, my father struggled. After a year of trying but failing to keep the business going, my father sold it, and we moved to Toulouse, where he had family. But he couldn’t find work, so we came here, to Paris, where my mother had family. My father had arranged a position at a restaurant, but he took sick and in less than six weeks died of influenza. That’s what the doctors said, but I think it was a broken heart. My father never recovered from my mother’s death. Never regained any of his joie de vivre, and without it, he was only half of himself. He was vulnerable to misery. If it hadn’t been influenza, it would have been something else. He had no reserves left.”
We’d reached the landing, which was almost too small for both of us to stand. In front of us was an imposing oak door, gnarled and stained. Mathieu withdrew a rusty key from his pocket and fit it inside the keyhole. The cylinders clicked, and as he pushed the heavy door inward, a loud creak sounded a kind of greeting.
Mathieu gestured to the room beyond, gave a little bow, and said, “Welcome to my refuge.”
I stepped inside. Light streamed in through dozens of leaded-glass windows that reached from the floor to the ceiling. Where there weren’t windows, there were shelves of books. Hundreds of volumes, lined up, like guardians protecting treasures.
“This room was once the monks’ scriptorium, and my uncle used it for storage until I came along,” Mathieu said.
“I can’t imagine anyone using a gem like this just for storage.”