Siri Mitchell - Chateau of Echoes

It was in the middle of my jam week that things began to rearrange themselves. At first I assumed it was Cranwell, so I mentioned it at dinner on Wednesday evening. We were enjoying filets de pintade aux cèpes et aux girolles -so much that I’d almost decided to let Picard do my cooking more often. The fowl was perfectly moist, and the sauce that accompanied it, studded with mixed mushrooms, was divine.

Between courses, I got up to check on a batch of jars and happened to realize how stained my white tank top and pants were; at that point in the evening, it wasn’t worth changing clothes. And besides, Cranwell didn’t care. And that was what reminded me.

“Cranwell? If you need to move my boxes when you take Lucy out, could you remember to replace them afterward?”

“What boxes?”

“The ones by the back door. The fruit. I lined them up in the order I’ll be needing them.”

He turned on his stool to take a look at them. “We haven’t been going out that way. I didn’t want to interfere in your production line.” He turned back around to face me. “What’s been going on?” The color of his burgundy crew-neck sweater was echoed by the color of the wine we were drinking. As he took up his glass and put it to his lips, the color was reflected by a glint in his eyes.

I swallowed. “Nothing. It’s probably just me.” I picked up the baguette and sliced a piece for myself. But the problem was, it wasn’t me. I knew myself, I knew my work habits, and I knew exactly how I had laid out the boxes. They were no longer in the same order I had placed them.

“Maybe Sévérine cleaned down here and moved them around.”

My brow couldn’t be stopped from wrinkling into a frown. “She never cleans down here. The kitchen is my responsibility. She helps me serve meals and clean up after them, but that’s it.” But even as I was speaking I remembered that I had come upon Sévérine in the kitchen at an odd time earlier that day. It had been in the mid-afternoon, long after lunch had been put away and hours before she was due for dinner. I had gone out into the garden to do some weeding but then decided to snip some basil for dinner while I was thinking about it. I gathered some leaves and returned to the kitchen to put them in the refrigerator.

As I came through the back door, I saw Sévérine crouched along the bottom of the kitchen wall by the stairs.

Pausing in my step, I almost lost my balance and cried out. Sévérine whirled around and came up to her feet, a dinner knife in her hand.

She’d said something about wanting a baguette and dropping the knife when she had been buttering it. At the time, I remember being surprised: The French only butter their baguettes at breakfast. Now that I’d remembered, I decided to ask her about it.

But when she came down for dinner, Cranwell plied her with questions. She was still responding as she made her way back up the stairs.

“How broad was education during Alix’s time? I know that she was a scholar. Would she have read books in Latin, French… Arabic, Hebrew, Greek?”

She paused on the staircase. “We know she read Latin and French. Arabic is not popular. With the Crusades, the church is not so pleased with the Arabs. All their knowledge is thought stained by their religion, and so they keep their sciences and their maths to themselves. Hebrew is difficult. The Jews of course know Hebrew, but they have been chased from France in the fourteenth century. Before this, there have been many in this region. But they must leave and settle in the Kingdom of Provence and in Spain and Italy. There are no official Jewish populations in France during the fifteenth century. There are people in France who are Jewish who pretend that they are not. Understand? But we have no documents written in Hebrew and no schools of Hebrew because they are not allowed. And Hebrew is difficult whatever is the case because at that time it is used as both alpha and numeric. Each letter represents also a number. I will show you this.”

She came back down the stairs, set her plate on the table, and took a pad of paper and pencil from my desk. “By example, the letter Y and the letter A. The tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Yod , may be used like our letter J or like Y. And Aleph , like our A, is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet.” She drew what looked like an N with a wavy line on top of it. “In Hebrew these are also the numbers ten and one. So you might add them together and make eleven. And the fun is that an eleven such as this might be just the number eleven or it may be a symbol.”

“A symbol?” Cranwell looked thoroughly confused.

“Yes. The ancient language is read on many different levels. Some numbers were special and some were not. Twelve by example is a complete number and very significant. Eleven misses one, and because it is not quite twelve, it symbols for not complete. You see?”

“I think so.”

“ Bon . As for Greek, according to her journals, Alix did not know this. I have answered your question?”

Cranwell nodded.

As Sévérine continued her ascent, my eyes dropped to the place I’d seen her crouching earlier. The mortar between the stones looked as if it were crumbling. Either that or I had mice. I grabbed a broom and swept up the debris. As I was sweeping, I thought of Sévérine picking up that dropped knife and then using it to cut and spread a pat of butter. My nose wrinkled. After dumping the crumbled mortar in the wastebasket, I decided to throw away the butter Sévérine had used. No point in contaminating food with what might be mortar mixed with mice droppings. I opened the refrigerator, found the butter dish, grabbed it, and took it to the sink. When I took off the lid, I was surprised to see that it was still wrapped in paper. It had never been used.

Why would Sévérine have lied to me? And what had she been doing with the knife?

The next week brought a conference to my chateau. It was sponsored by the French Ministère de la culture et communication and it was meant to address the significance of Alix’s journals to the current record of late-medieval French history. Mostly it was a chance for six professors from the University of Rennes II and the University of Paris IV (the Sorbonne) to come together and debate their interpretations of the journals.

The significance to me? It was the first conference I’d ever hosted.

During the restoration of the estate, I had made the decision to put off restoring several of the outbuildings as well as the stable that I currently used as a garage. I could have easily added another six guest rooms to my total, but I wanted instead to narrow the scope of my efforts. I had also been tempted to close off the council room on the bottom floor. There was no real need for it; I’d already placed a library on the third floor and had a pseudo-office in my kitchen. Besides, the room was huge, stretching the entire width of the chateau, with the towers flanking it on either end. It might have been used as a ballroom in an earlier period of history. The windows had retained their integrity, and the fireplace was functional; no immediate work was necessary. It had been my first guests who had inquired whether I had any meeting facilities. At that point, starting my business, I’d had no idea of the ridiculous fees I could charge, and so I was interested in anything that would bring in more money.

The conversion of the space to a conference room had been easy. It necessitated the purchase of modern amenities such as a large screen that could descend from or roll up into the ceiling; an overhead projector; a VCR and a computer hooked up to a ceiling-mounted one-gun projector; a printer; a copier; a fax machine; a telephone; blackout shades for the windows. And also pieces to lend the room atmosphere, like a huge, respectably faded and worn carpet, purchased from Drouot auction house in Paris; a large, long reproduction table in the best Renaissance style; a dozen comfortable folding leather arm chairs of a sort of medieval “director’s chair” model; a map desk filled with paper, tape, scissors, and paper clips; a long, waist-high, hand-carved cabinet on which I had placed a coffee maker, a thermos for hot water, and a selection of teas, demitasses, and cups and saucers. I even had the ceiling’s beams painted in rust, green, and gold with coats of arms and trophées de guerres , military trophies.