Siri Mitchell - Chateau of Echoes

“I’m sorry!” Cranwell bent to pick up the asters. “I was just trying to let you know I was here.”

Must the man surprise me every time he happened to be in my vicinity? “It’s just that sometimes…”

“I think the rudbeckias would look nice with these.” The suggestion was gently offered, so I rudely rebuffed it.

“Perovskia.” I hurriedly clipped three stems and grabbed the asters from his hands and began to speed-walk up the flagstone path.

“Don’t forget your spade,” Cranwell called from behind me.

Detouring back into the garden, I found it sunk into the earth beside a row of peas. I must really have been daydreaming to have left it like that. It didn’t occur to me until later to ask how Cranwell had seen it there, covered as it was by the leaves and tendrils of the plant.

Cranwell and Lucy sauntered to the chateau behind me and watched as I arranged the flowers in the vase. He was right. The rudbeckias really would have been the best choice.

Later that afternoon, as I climbed the stairs to my room to rest before dinner, I noticed that someone had added several stalks of Lythrum and a branch or two of spirea. It looked much better than it had before.

Cranwell and Lucy appeared as I was setting the table in the dining hall. He silently armed himself with the forks and knives I’d brought out and followed me as I laid out three plates. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not eat up here.”

That comment surprised me. “Why?”

“It seems as if the other couple staying here is rather…” He grinned.

“Rather.” I nodded in agreement. “I’ll have Sévérine bring your dinner up to your room.” I couldn’t blame the man for feeling like a third wheel.

“We-Lucy and I-could always just eat with you.” He looked at me from under his dark eyebrows, imploring.

How come brown eyes can’t be just brown? Why do they have to include such fascinating shades of honey and amber, fawn and walnut?

“In the kitchen?”

“Isn’t that where you eat?”

“Yes.” But it’s also where I unwind. I put on a CD, read a book, enjoy my food. I have a routine. A routine that I like. Even Sévérine eats in her own room.

“You could explain to me what the chateau was like when she lived here.”

She. Alix. It defied explanation how a centuries-dead person could have continued to cause so many complications in my life.

“I need to know so that I can start to write.”

Anything to get him out of my life as quickly as possible. “Of course. Come down at seven.”

My reward for surrender was a wink.

I hate men who wink.

Cranwell and Lucy appeared promptly at seven. He’d just taken a shower: His hair was slicked back and he emanated a masculine scent of soap and woodsy aftershave. In spite of myself, I breathed it in as hungrily as the scent of fresh-baked bread.

He smiled what I might have labeled a shy smile had I not been better informed of his character.

On a stool, at the island, he watched as I took plates of eggplant bruschetta out of the oven, and napped them with Mediterranean vinaigrette.

Bending down, I set a bowl of raw cubes of steak in front of Lucy. She eyed me, then leaned toward the bowl and swallowed them whole. She must have, because she could not have chewed them in the thirty seconds it took the meat to disappear.

“Do you have a cup? I’ll give her some water.”

After handing him a heavily leaded crystal tumbler, I watched in amazement as he tipped it for Lucy and as she daintily lapped it up.

“If I give her water in a bowl, she slops it all over the place.” He put the glass in the sink and resumed his place.

Lucy walked slowly to the stairs, sighed, and then walked her paws out in front of her until her belly touched the floor; she lifted her head regally. Then she rolled out her hip, stuck out her back legs, and crossed them, as delicately as any lady, at her ankles.

We both smiled as we watched her.

“I call her Queen Lucy. You know: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe .”

No, I didn’t know, but it irritated me that he had read my thoughts. The plates had absorbed the heat of the oven, so I used oven mitts to place them on the marble.

Cranwell pulled at the tips after I’d finished and drew them from my hands. Then he stacked them together and laid them on the counter.

Half an hour before, I had opened the wine, a Chinon, to allow it to breathe, so I poured two glasses and handed one to him. We clinked our glasses together. “To Alix,” he ventured.

“To Alix.”

Wondering just how much he knew about wine, I watched him take the first sip. I was impressed.

He took a small sip, and opened a crack in his lips, to draw in air. I saw his lips purse as he exhaled through his nose, knowing that the berry notes would be filling his sinuses, as they were filling mine.

“’90?”

“’95.”

“Cassis, cherries, violet.”

Okay, so I wouldn’t be serving him macaroni and cheese while he was at the chateau.

“Bread?” I held a baguette in one hand and a bread knife in the other.

“Please.”

I sawed off a generous slice for him and another for myself. And then it was time to eat.

“Is Frédérique a family name?”

“In a sense. I have my father, Frederick, my mother, and my grandmother to thank. Mother was so sure I was a boy that she’d decided that I was going to be Frederick Jr. She never even picked another name. When I came out as a girl, my grandmother, who is French, suggested Frédérique.”

“So did your friends call you Ricki when you were growing up?”

“No.”

He ate several minutes in silence, and then lifted a piece of bruschetta. “This is excellent.”

It was excellent. The olive oil-based vinaigrette had sweetened the eggplant, and I’d broiled it to perfection. I thanked him for the compliment. It had been so long since I’d been in a social situation that I had no idea what to say to him. I talked to Sévérine every day, but it was a vocabulary limited to the inn. I felt like a person coming into a warm house from the frigid cold: My cheeks were stiff; my mouth wouldn’t work right. I tried to make words; I tried to say phrases, but they came out haltingly, as if I hadn’t spoken in years.

Cranwell, bless him, ignored my false starts and stutters, orchestrating the conversation.

“And how did you come to be here?”

“I bought the chateau in 1999, spent a year renovating it, and opened up the inn. I had some good publicity-”

“I saw. In à La Mode magazine.”

“Yes. That was good for business.”

“I can imagine. But how did you come to France?”

And there it was. Would he pity me? “With my husband, Peter. He worked at the Embassy.”

“In Paris? State Department?”

I nodded; it was just easier than explaining. Although diplomatic work is the purview of the State Department, there are many other federal agencies with staff at embassies-some of them with a higher profile than others. “It was a three-year assignment. He was asked to go to Tanzania the month before we were to leave.”

“Tanzania. I’ve been there on safari. The Serengeti is like nothing I’d ever seen.”

“It was August of ’98.”

He was quick. It took only a moment for him to realize the significance. He absorbed the information faster than I had. At the time of Peter’s death, the bombings at U.S. embassies in East Africa had seemed like a disturbing dream. Disturbing and disconnected from anything real. It took weeks for me to connect the rubble of those ruins to my own grieving heart.

Cranwell glanced down at my hand. His gaze lingered on my wedding band; then he lifted his head and looked at me. “And you decided not to return to the U.S.?”