Siri Mitchell - Chateau of Echoes

And if Cordon Bleu could have devised a degree by correspondence, I’m sure they would have done it by now! Frankly, I just didn’t want to do it. I needed an excuse. A better excuse. I thought of Sévérine and her magic charm; she should have been the one sitting at the foot of the table.

“Nonsense,” Cranwell scoffed when I presented my argument. “And we can’t have thirteen people at the table. It’s bad luck.”

Since when?

Sévérine saved me by appearing in the kitchen at that moment. I explained to her the situation and suggested that she could help me best by playing hostess.

Defying all my insight into her personality, Sévérine adamantly refused. At the time, it was mystifying. “But no, Frédérique. You are the chatelaine . Robert is correct. You must not serve. It is to me to do this.”

“But-” The rest of my words refused to follow when I saw daggers she was throwing with her eyes. Threatening and dangerous were the words I would have used to describe her at that moment. And suddenly, I no longer had any interest in refusing her.

Sévérine turned her back on me, took an apron from a drawer, and tied it around her waist.

At Cranwell’s prompting, I wrote the notes for Sévérine.

Then he spun me around, took my hand in his, and marched me up the stairs. He led me directly to my bedroom door as if, without his supervision, I might have tried to run away.

And I might have. I’ll never know.

As Cranwell pushed the door shut behind me and left for his own room, panic engulfed me. Looking at my wardrobe, I realized that I had nothing to wear.

People say things like that all the time, but for me at that moment, it was the truth. I wished the clothes Cranwell had bought me would have worked, but I had the feeling they would have been too casual. I hadn’t bought any new clothing for the previous three years; not since Peter had died and I had moved from Paris. To be in the presence of a collection of fashionistas, and to know that the average French woman buys thirty pounds of new clothes each year, meant catastrophe.

Not that I cared.

I must have stood in front of my armoire for at least ten minutes rationalizing why I could not be seen in any piece of clothing that I owned.

After glancing at my alarm clock, I abandoned that task and decided to direct my energies toward a shower. Fifteen minutes later I was standing in front of my mirror, towel wrapped around my body, agonizing over how to wear my hair.

There was a knock at my door.

Startled, I scampered across the floor and opened it a slit, hiding my body behind the stolid oak of the door.

Cranwell pushed past me anyway.

“Cranwell, you can’t just-”

“Why aren’t you dressed yet?”

“Because I have absolutely nothing to wear.”

“That’s ridiculous.” He strode across the carpet and threw open the doors of my armoire. He shoved a few hangers back and forth before seizing on a robe of steely-blue velvet. Just seeing it brought back skin-numbing memories of the night back in October when he had nearly kissed me.

“I am not wearing my bathrobe to dinner.” I tore it out of his hands and tried to replace it on its hanger. When my towel started to sag, I let the robe drop to the floor. But I did manage to glare at Cranwell while I refastened the towel around my chest.

“Why not? I need a muse.”

“A muse?”

“An inspiration. It isn’t enough to partake in a feast. I need to be able to imagine what the people would have looked like.”

“I will not wear a bathrobe.” Granted, it looked as if it had been purchased at a Renaissance costume shop. The Basque waisted skirt began well below my natural waist, in the style of late medieval fashion. The upper body was cut on the bias and it molded around my torso as if it had been tailor-made for me. In fact, I rarely used it because it hugged my body too tightly.

“Please, Freddie.” Cranwell had picked the robe up and given it a shake, holding it up by the almost nonexistent shoulders. The bodice had a two-inch roll of material that framed the neckline and covered the seam of the close-fitting sleeves. “Please.”

At least he had an idea. I could offer no alternative.

Shoving damp strands of hair behind my ears, I tried to hold up my towel with the other hand. “Fine.”

“Wonderful!” He leapt forward as if he were going to kiss me but then held himself back and thrust the gown into my hands instead. “Give me five minutes and I’ll be back to do something about your hair.” He slammed my door shut behind him.

Something about my hair . Of all the nerve! I decided to take care of that possibility myself. I spent the next four minutes bent from the waist, aiming all the ferocity of a high-speed, high-heat blow dryer at it. And I finished fastening myself into the robe only seconds before Cranwell burst into my room.

“D on’t you knock?”

“Do you have a comb?”

He took the one I offered, and then he slid a chair away from the wall and motioned for me to sit. He drew my hair up and over the back of the chair and began to comb it with gentle strokes. I closed my eyes and told myself to relax.

“You have beautiful hair, Freddie.”

“Thanks.” My scalp was beginning to tingle with pleasure. He followed each stroke of the comb with his hand.

After another minute, I felt him part my hair down the middle and he handed me the comb. I was disappointed he had finished so quickly. But he wasn’t done with me yet.

He ran his fingers through my hair, separating the locks, and began to twist them, strand by strand, along the side of my head.

“How do you know how to do this?”

“My sister. She liked to play Maid Marian when she was little. The only way I could get her to leave me alone was to ‘do her hair like a princess.’”

He twisted the other side too and then must have tied a lock of hair around the ponytail that hung down my back. He opened a sack I hadn’t realized he had; it was filled with ivy.

“From the chateau walls?”

“From the chateau walls.”

He tried at first to fashion a length of it into a crown, but the leaves were too large and the gaps between them too huge. He settled on pulling off leaves and pushing them into the twists of my hair.

When he was done, he took my hand, pulled me to my feet, and then stood back from me and stared. He stared for the longest time. And then he smiled.

It was a smile that made my legs turn to gelée .

“Go look.”

As I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, I was astounded. Cranwell had transformed me from a twenty-first-century chef into a fifteenth-century lady. He was right: The bathrobe was perfect. And what he’d done with my hair reminded me of paintings I’d seen by Botticelli. I was ethereal. I was celestial, graceful. I was… beautiful.

Cranwell appeared beside me in the mirror.

“You are perfect, Freddie.”

Looking at myself in the mirror, with him standing beside me, I believed it.

Cranwell escorted me to the top of the stairs and then offered his arm to me. It seemed natural to slip my hand around it.

I felt a muscle tighten. He hadn’t struck me as muscular before, but I could tell at that moment that I’d been deceived. He was wearing a black cashmere turtleneck with a black wool sports coat. His black pants were the kind I’d always associated with the wealthy: formed of the finest, lightest wool, they were impeccably draped and held in place by a slender belt with a discreet silver buckle. His hair was slicked back, and his glasses were sliding down his nose. The glasses ruined the picture, but I knew him well enough to know that he must have been sneaking in a few extra moments of work on his manuscript before he’d come to my aid. With my other hand, I reached around and pulled them gently from his nose.