The Cruelest Month

by Louise Penny

  Clara took a deep breath of the fragrant spring air and looked over at the home she shared with Peter. It was brick with a wooden porch and a fieldstone wall fronting the Commons. A path wound from their gate through some apple trees about to bloom to their front door. From there Clara’s eyes wandered around the houses surrounding the Commons. Like their inhabitants, the homes of Three Pines were sturdy and shaped by their environment. They’d withstood storms and wars, loss and sorrow. And emerging from that was a community of great kindness and compassion.

  Clara loved it. The houses, the shops, the village green, the perennial gardens and even the washboard roads. She loved the fact that Montreal was less than a two-hour drive away, and the American border was just down the road. But more than all of that, she loved the people who now spent this and every Good Friday hiding wooden eggs for children.

  It was a late Easter, near the end of April. They weren’t always so lucky with the elements. At least once the village had awoken on Easter Sunday to find a fresh dumping of heavy spring snow, burying the tender buds and painted eggs. It had often been bitterly cold and the villagers had had to duck into Olivier’s Bistro every now and then for a hot cider or hot chocolate, wrapping trembling and frozen fingers around the warm and welcoming mugs.

  But not today. There was a certain glory about this April day. It was a perfect Good Friday, sunny and warm. The snow had gone, even in the shadows, where it tended to linger. The grass was growing and the trees had a halo of the gentlest green. It was as though the aura of Three Pines had suddenly made itself visible. It was all golden light with shimmering green edges.

  Tulip bulbs were beginning to crack through the earth and soon the village green would be awash with spring flowers, deep blue hyacinths and bluebells and gay bobbing daffodils, snowdrops and fragrant lily of the valley, filling the village with fragrance and delight.

  This Good Friday Three Pines smelled of fresh earth and promise. And maybe a worm or two.

  ‘I don’t care what you say, I won’t go.’

  Clara heard the urgent and vicious whisper. She was crouching again, by the tall grass of the pond. She couldn’t see who it was but she realized they must be just on the other side of the grass. It was a woman’s voice speaking French but in a tone so strained and upset she couldn’t identify her.

  ‘It’s just a séance,’ a man’s voice said.

  ‘It’ll be fun.’ ‘It’s sacrilege, for Christ’s sake. A séance on Good Friday?’

  There was a pause. Clara was feeling uncomfortable. Not about eavesdropping, but her legs were beginning to cramp.

  ‘Come on, Odile. You’re not even religious. What can happen?’

  Odile? thought Clara. The only Odile she knew was Odile Montmagny. And she was –

  The woman hissed again:

  ‘Each winter’s frostbite and the bug

  That greets the spring will leave its mark,

  As well as sorrow on the mug

  Of infant, youth and patriarch.’

  Stunned silence fell.

  – a really bad poet, Clara completed her thought.

  Odile had spoken solemnly, as though the words conveyed something other than the talent of the poet.

  ‘I’ll look after you,’ said the man. Clara now knew who he was too. Odile’s boyfriend, Gilles Sandon.

  ‘Why do you really want to go, Gilles?’

  ‘Just for fun.’

  ‘Is it because she’ll be there?’

  There was silence, except for Clara’s screaming legs.

  ‘He’ll be there too, you know,’ Odile pressed.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know who. Monsieur Béliveau,’ said Odile. ‘I have a bad feeling about this, Gilles.’

  There was another pause, then Sandon spoke, his voice deep and flat as though making a huge effort to smother any emotion.

  ‘Don’t worry. I won’t kill him.’

  Clara had forgotten all about her legs. Kill Monsieur Béliveau? Who’d even consider such a thing? The old grocer had never even short-changed anyone. What could Gilles Sandon possibly have against him?

  She heard the two walk away and straightening up with some agony Clara stared after them, Odile pear-shaped and waddling slightly, Gilles a huge teddy bear of a man, his signature red beard visible even from behind.

  Clara glanced at her sweaty hands clutching the wooden Easter eggs. The cheery colors had bled into her palms.

  Suddenly the séance, which had seemed an amusing idea a few days ago when Gabri had put the notice up in the bistro announcing the arrival of the famous psychic, Madame Isadore Blavatsky, now felt different. Instead of happy anticipation Clara was filled with dread.

  THREE

  Madame Isadore Blavatsky wasn’t herself that night. In fact, she wasn’t Madame Isadore Blavatsky at all.

  ‘Please, call me Jeanne.’ The mousy woman stood in the middle of the back room at the bistro, holding out her hand. ‘Jeanne Chauvet.’

  ‘Bonjour, Madame Chauvet.’ Clara smiled and shook the limp hand. ‘Excusez-moi.’

  ‘Jeanne,’ the woman reminded her in a voice barely audible.

  Clara stepped over to Gabri who was offering a platter of smoked salmon to his guests. The room was beginning to fill up, slightly. ‘Salmon?’ He thrust the plate at Clara.

  ‘Who is she?’ Clara asked.

  ‘Madame Blavatsky, the famous Hungarian psychic. Can’t you just feel her energy?’

  Madeleine and Monsieur Béliveau waved. Clara waved back then glanced over at Jeanne who looked as though she’d faint if someone said boo. ‘I certainly feel something, young man, and it’s annoyed.’

  Gabri Dubeau vacillated between delight at being called ‘young man’ and defensiveness.

  ‘That isn’t Madame Blavatsky. She doesn’t even pretend to be. Her name’s Jeanne someone-or-other,’ said Clara, absent-mindedly taking a piece of salmon and folding it onto a pumpernickel. ‘You promised us Madame Blavatsky.’

  ‘You don’t even know who Madame Blavatsky is.’

  ‘Well, I know who she isn’t.’ Clara nodded and smiled at the small, middle-aged woman standing slightly bewildered in the middle of the room.

  ‘And would you’ve come if you’d known she was the psychic?’ Gabri gestured with the plate toward Jeanne. A caper rolled off the end, to be lost on the rich oriental carpet.

  Why do we never learn? Clara sighed to herself. Every time Gabri has a guest he organizes some outlandish event, like the time the poker champ came to stay and took all our money, or that singer who made even Ruth sound like Maria Callas. Still, horrible as these socials Gabri threw together turned out for the villagers, they must have been worse for the unsuspecting guests, roped into entertaining Three Pines when all they wanted was a quiet stay in the country.

  She watched as Jeanne Chauvet gazed around the room, rubbed her hands on her polyester pants and smiled at the portrait above the roaring fireplace. Before Clara’s very eyes she seemed to disappear. It was actually quite a trick, though not one that spoke highly of her psychic abilities. Clara felt badly for her. Really, what was Gabri thinking?

  ‘What were you thinking?’

  ‘What do you mean? She’s a psychic. She told me when she booked in. True, she’s not Madame Blavatsky. Or from Hungary. But she does readings.’

  ‘Wait a minute.’ Clara was getting suspicious. ‘Does she even know you’d planned this evening?’

  ‘Well, I’m sure she divined it.’

  ‘Once people started showing up, maybe. Gabri, how could you do this to her? To us?’

  ‘She’ll be fine. Look at her. She’s loosening up already.’

  Myrna had fetched her a tumbler of white wine and Jeanne Chauvet was drinking as though it was water before the miracle. Myrna looked over and lifted her eyebrows at Clara. Much more of this and Myrna would have to conduct the séance.

  ‘Séance?’ Jeanne asked a minute later when Myrna asked what they could expect. ‘Who’s holding a séan

ce?’

  All eyes turned to Gabri, who very carefully placed the platter on a table and went over to stand beside Jeanne. Gabri’s bulk and natural exuberance seemed to make the nondescript woman shrink even further until she looked like clothes on a hanger. Clara guessed she was somewhere around forty. Her hair was dull brown and looked as though she cut it herself. Her eyes were faded blue and her clothing was bargain-bin K-mart. Clara, who’d lived in poverty as an artist most of her life, recognized the signs. She wondered fleetingly why Jeanne had come to Three Pines and paid to stay at Gabri’s B. & B., which while not ruinous wasn’t cheap either.

  Jeanne no longer seemed afraid, just confused. Clara wanted to go over and put her arms round the little woman and shield her from what was coming next. She wanted to give her a good hot dinner and a warm bath and some kindness, then maybe she’d become substantial.

  Clara too glanced around the room. Peter had flatly refused to come, calling it hogwash. But he’d held her hand an instant longer than necessary as she’d left, and told her to be careful. Walking under the stars round the village green to the cheery bistro Clara had smiled. Peter had been raised a strict Anglican. This sort of thing repulsed him. It also terrified him.

  They’d had a small discussion over dinner, with Peter taking the predictable view that this was nuts.

  ‘Are you calling me nuts?’ Clara had asked, knowing he hadn’t but loving to see him squirm. He’d raised his head, full of lush grey curls, and looked at her angrily. Tall and slender with aquiline nose and intelligent eyes, he looked like a bank president, not an artist. And yet that was what he was. But an artist who seemed unconnected to his heart. He lived in a deeply rational world where anything unexplainable was ‘nuts’ or ‘silly’ or ‘insane’. Emotions were insane. Except his love for Clara, which was complete and all-consuming.

  ‘No, I’m calling the psychic nuts. She’s a charlatan. Contacting the dead, predicting the future. Bullshit. It’s the oldest game in the book.’

  ‘Which book? The Bible?’

  ‘Don’t start with me, Clara,’ Peter had warned.

  ‘No, really. Which book talks about transformations? Of water into wine? Of bread into flesh? Or magic, like walking on water? Of parting the seas and making the blind see and the crippled walk?’

  ‘Those were miracles, not magic.’

  ‘Ahh.’ Clara had nodded and smiled and gone back to eating.

  So Clara found herself with Myrna as her date. Madeleine and Monsieur Béliveau were there, not quite holding hands but they might as well have been. His long sweater-clad arm was just touching hers, and she didn’t shy away. Once again Clara was taken by how attractive Madeleine was. She was one of those women other women wanted as a best friend and men wanted as a wife.

  Clara smiled at Monsieur Béliveau and blushed. Because she’d caught them in an intimate moment, seen feelings best kept private? She considered for a moment, but realized the blush had more to do with her than him. She felt differently about Monsieur Béliveau after overhearing Gilles that afternoon. The gentle grocer had gone from being a benign and kindly presence in their lives to a mystery. Clara didn’t like the transformation. And she didn’t like herself for being so susceptible to gossip.

  Gilles Sandon stood in front of the fireplace, rubbing the warmth into the back of his substantial jeans with vigor. He was so big he almost blocked the entire hearth. Odile Montmagny brought him a glass of wine which he took absent-mindedly, preferring instead to concentrate on Monsieur Béliveau, who seemed oblivious.

  Clara had always liked Odile. They were much the same age and both were in the arts, Clara a painter and Odile a poet. She claimed to be working on an epic poem, an ode to the English of Quebec, which was suspicious since she was French. Clara would never forget the reading she’d attended at the Royal Canadian Legion in St-Rémy. All sorts of local writers had been invited, including Ruth and Odile. Ruth had read first, from her searing work, ‘To the Congregation’.

  I envy you your steady blaze

  fed by the Book of Common Praise.

  I envy this, believe I do,

  that you can be, together, you,

  And understand you may not see

  that I must, on my own, be me.

  And then it had been Odile’s turn. Up she’d sprung and without pause launched into her poem.

  Spring is coming with its girth,

  And breezy breath of balmy warmth

  And burbank, bobolink, and snearth,

  Shall banish winter’s chill and dearth,

  And luscious joy shall fill the earth.

  ‘Wonderful poem,’ Clara lied, when everyone had finished and they were crowded around the bar, feeling some urgency for a drink. ‘I’m just kind of curious. I’ve never actually heard of a snearth.’

  ‘I made it up,’ said Odile with glee. ‘I needed a word to rhyme with dearth and earth.’

  ‘Like mirth?’ Ruth suggested. Clara shot her a warning look and Odile seemed to consider it.

  ‘Not powerful enough, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Unlike the juggernaut that is snearth,’ said Ruth to Clara before turning back to Odile. ‘Well, I certainly feel enriched, if not fertilized. The only poet I can think to compare you to is the great Sarah Binks.’

  While Odile had never heard of Sarah Binks she knew her cultural knowledge had been stunted by an education that only admitted fran-cophone genius. Sarah Binks, she knew, must be a very great English poet indeed. That compliment from Ruth Zardo had fueled Odile Montmagny’s creativity and in quiet moments at their shop, La Maison Biologique in St-Rémy, she’d pull out her worn and worried child’s notebook to write another poem, sometimes not even pausing for inspiration.

  Clara, a struggling artist herself, identified with Odile and cheered her on. Peter, of course, thought Odile was nuts. But Clara knew differently. She knew that what often distinguished great people of the arts wasn’t genius, but perseverance. Odile persevered.

  Eight of them had gathered in the cozy back room of the bistro to raise the dead this Good Friday, and the only question seemed to be, who would do it.

  ‘Not me,’ said Jeanne. ‘I thought one of you was the psychic.’

  ‘Gabri?’ Gilles Sandon turned on their host.

  ‘But you told me you do readings,’ Gabri said to Jeanne, pleading.

  ‘I do. Tarot cards, runes, that sort of thing. I don’t contact the dead. Not often anyway.’

  It’s funny, Clara thought, how if you wait long enough and listen, people will say the oddest things.

  ‘Not often?’ she asked Jeanne.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Jeanne admitted, taking a small step back from Clara as though from an assault. Clara put a smile on her face and tried to appear less assertive, though a chocolate bunny would appear assertive to this woman.

  ‘Could you do it tonight? Please?’ Gabri asked. He could see his party going south fast.

  Tiny, mousy insubstantial Jeanne stood at the center of their circle. Clara saw something then, something pass over the face of this gray woman. A smile. No. A sneer.

  FOUR

  Hazel Smyth bustled through the comfortable, cramped house, keeping herself busy. She had a million things to do before her daughter Sophie got back from Queens University. The beds were already made with clean, crisp linens. The baked beans were slowly cooking, the bread was rising, the fridge was stocked with Sophie’s favorite food. Now Hazel collapsed on the uncomfortable horsehair sofa in the living room, feeling every day of her forty-two years, and then some. The old sofa seemed to be covered in tiny needles, pricking into anything that sat on it, as though trying to repulse the weight. And yet Hazel loved it, perhaps because no one else did. She knew it was stuffed with equal parts horsehair and memories, themselves prickly at times.

  ‘You don’t still have it, Haze?’ Madeleine had laughed a few years earlier, when she’d first walked into the cramped room. Hurrying over to the old sofa Madeleine had climbed right onto it, leaning over the back as though she’d forgotten how people sit, her slim bottom waving slightly at Hazel, who watched dumbfounded.

  ‘What a riot,’ came Mad’s muffled voice from between the sofa and the wall. ‘Remember how we used to spy on your parents from behind this?’

  Hazel had forgotten that. Another memory to add to the overstuffed sofa. Suddenly there was a hoot of laughter and Madeleine, like the schoolgirl she’d once been, bounced round and sat facing Hazel, holding her hand out. Moving forward Hazel saw something in the delicate fingers. Something pristine and white. It looked like a small bleached bone. Hazel paused, a little afraid of what the sofa had produced.

  ‘It’s for you.’ Madeleine carefully placed the small offering in the palm of Hazel’s hand. Madeleine was beaming. There was no other word for it. A scarf covered her bald head, her eyebrows were inexpertly penciled in so she looked a little astonished. A slight bluish tinge under her eyes spoke of a tired that went beyond sleepless nights. But despite all that, Mad had beamed. And her extraordinary delight filled the drab room.

  They hadn’t seen each other in twenty years and while Hazel remembered each and every moment of their young friendship, she’d somehow forgotten how alive she’d felt around Madeleine. She looked down at her palm. The thing wasn’t a bone, but a note, all rolled up.

  ‘It was still in the sofa,’ said Madeleine. ‘Imagine that. After all these years. Waiting for us, I guess. Waiting for this moment.’

  Madeleine seemed to carry magic with her, Hazel remembered. And where there was magic there were miracles.

  ‘Where’d you find this?’

  ‘Back there.’ Mad waved her hand behind the sofa. ‘Once, when you were in the bathroom, I slipped it into a little hole.’

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