“I am a rube,” said Phoebe. “And I’m not ashamed.” After she said it, Phoebe realized that sounded like an introduction for Rube-aholics Anonymous.
“You are not a rube, you are a naïf, and there’s a difference.”
* * *
J.J. had ordered baked camembert, buckwheat crepes filled with something she couldn’t identify, soupe à l’oignon, sole meunière, and cheese soufflé. For dessert, the waiter left an array of beautiful fruit tarts. The strawberry and raspberry were Phoebe’s favorites. “Thanks for ordering the tarts,” she said. “I could live off tarts and milk.”
“I’ve noticed your sweet tooth.”
“You notice a lot of things,” Phoebe said. “You’re a different kind of man than the ones I’m used to.” His observational skills were even more unexpected because he couldn’t see, but Phoebe didn’t say that.
* * *
Every time things slowed down, Phoebe had to struggle to catch up with where she was and what she was doing. It was like something out of a fantasy. Except she didn’t have the concepts for any of it before she actually saw it, so she couldn’t have dreamed it up on her own. She couldn’t wait to get back home and tell her friends about everything. She knew they’d find it entertaining, but not particularly enviable. People in White Oak enjoyed living simply.
“Now I understand about the warming room in the pavilion and the tunnel from the kitchen in the Petit Trianon. I mean I get it now, about wealth and luxury in connection to food service,” Phoebe said. “It’s wonderful. This is the best meal I’ve ever had.”
* * *
Sometime in the middle of the meal Phoebe realized that J.J. had wanted to eat in the room so he could relax. She hadn’t understood how difficult it was for him to eat a formal meal in a strange place. He had beautiful table manners, but on account of his blindness he often needed to touch what he was eating in ways that weren’t considered strictly polite, and he dropped food more frequently than a sighted person would.
She guessed he’d been worried that his style of eating would embarrass her in a fancy restaurant. Not for the first time Phoebe marveled at how cruel the world could be.
In the medical world your attitude needed to be it is what it is. The impracticality and self-centeredness of having an opinion about a person, or their injury or ailment, or about how they got it, was obvious. It was a stupid waste of time and an impediment to getting on with an important task that had to be done in a timely fashion, no matter what you might think about it. Having an opinion was so absurd you had to either get over the tendency or get out of the profession.
Phoebe could see why Caterina and the Boss had impressed on her that the most important aspect of religious training was learning to drop all subjective opinions and judgments. They were counter-productive.
In fact, it was the source of much of the evil in the world. Phoebe thought about the wars over culture or religion, genocide, oppression, jihads, and crusades. It was endless. And J.J. apparently had reason to know that it went all the way down to the pettiness of, I paid a lot of money to eat in this restaurant and I don’t want to have to look at a blind man spilling peas off his fork while I’m trying to eat.
People.
* * *
Phoebe slept on a super-comfy rollaway bed near the fireplace. She insisted that J.J. take the bed. She went to sleep almost immediately after lying down. When she awoke many hours later she was startled to find herself looking up toward a high ceiling that was round. At first she didn’t remember where she was and was frightened. Only after she sat up and saw J.J. sleeping across the room did she remember.
It was strange to share a room with a blind man. She had to constantly remind herself that he couldn’t see her. It didn’t matter what her pajamas looked like or her hair. Nothing about her looks mattered. She would never have wished for him to be blind, but it certainly added a handy dimension to a close working partnership.
Phoebe got up as quietly as she could and peeked between the long curtains. It was dawn and there were two swans floating on the moat below. A light mist hung over the grounds. The scene was heartbreakingly beautiful.
* * *
She went into the bathroom and got ready for another day. When she came out. J.J. was sitting up in bed. He didn’t have his sunglasses on and she saw the scars from his accident. It wasn’t a happy sight, but it wasn’t terrible either. She knew the doctors would’ve done the best that they could for the little boy.
With his sunglasses on you saw only a handsome, well-built man. Without them, you saw his vulnerability. It was like a brave soldier sitting up in bed before putting on his prosthetic legs.
“The bathroom is yours now,” she said.
“Did you fog the mirror?”
“Yes.”
“Well, don’t worry, I can shave without it.”
She laughed at his joke.
He got out of bed and stood in an old t-shirt and a faded pair of pajama bottoms. He went to his suitcase and pulled out a bag for toiletries, clean underwear, jeans, and a fresh shirt.
When he came back out he asked, “Do I match?”
“Yes,” Phoebe said, “You look perfectly respectable.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” he said, “At least I hope not. That would mean I’ve gotten old.”
“Well, you looked a lot more rakish before you shaved. You know the style now is to have a stubble.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“You can try it while you’re away if you like. No one will ever know. My lips are sealed.”
He smiled. “Maybe I will. Remind me tomorrow morning, do not shave.”
“It’s a deal.”
* * *
They checked out of Esclimont and attempted to pay for the room and the meal, but were told their bill was zero. All efforts to pay were politely refused.
J.J. asked the man at the reception desk if he would mind writing a note to Mr. Brissac for him. He dictated a thank you note in French, which Phoebe could mostly follow. He thanked him and invited him to visit Hawaii and offered him the use of the Lanai house.
On their way out they took the time to tour the exterior of the château. Phoebe described the brickwork and the turrets and the swans in the moat. There was a small pond in the middle of one of the lawns. As they approached it Phoebe got a feeling of horror and halted their approach.
J.J. could tell something was wrong from the stiffness in her arm. “What are you looking at?”
“It’s a little pond.”
“And?”
“At least one person has drowned in it, maybe more. It wasn’t an accident either. Someone or maybe several people were dragged out of the house and pulled down here and drowned on purpose.”
“Ah….”
“I can’t see any of it, but I can feel it.”
“With a house this old, so close to Paris, unless you have some specific indication of the date, it’s hard to pinpoint when such a thing could have happened,” J.J. said. “It might’ve been during World War II, or the Revolution, or any number of times before that. This land is in an area prone to conflict and the house would’ve inspired great avarice.”
“It’s so strange to me,” said Phoebe. “I can’t help but know these things and be affected by them, but apparently other people aren’t. They can come out here and enjoy the view. I don’t understand how or why I know it and they don’t. They can go places and have fun, but I can’t always do that.”
“Any trait we have is always a double edged sword,” J.J. said, “a gift and a burden at the same time. Everything’s like that—intelligence, physical beauty, wealth, poverty.”
Or blindness, she thought.
“Our life is one long opportunity to learn to become wise enough to stay in the middle of the road, so we don’t get swept away by any one thing. Easy to say, hard to do.”
They walked back the way they came and with every step away from that pond Phoebe felt more optimistic about human nature.
Since they’d found nothing at Versailles, J.J. suggested they try Chambord next. CR was said to have been given rooms there for his use. There were all sorts of crazy rumors about him creating flawless gemstones and manufacturing precious metals in a laboratory in the château. More than one 18th century account mentioned seeing him in possession of remarkable jewels and making gifts of expensive stones to Madame P.
Phoebe started the little Kia to let it warm up and pulled out her map to plan the route to their next stop. It was a little over a hundred kilometers, or about sixty miles, to Chambord. They could take a big road that went through Orleans or smaller roads that went via Blois. They decided to use the smaller roads through the more rural areas.
Phoebe was shivering as she consulted her guidebook. The Kia was not putting out any heat yet. “Chambord is the biggest château in the Loire Valley,” she read. “There are 440 rooms, 282 fireplaces, and 84 staircases surrounded by a 13,000 acre park enclosed by a twenty-mile-long wall. It’s the largest enclosed forest in Europe. The area inside the walls is the size of the City of Paris!
“Good grief,” she marveled, “can you imagine building a wall around your house that’s twenty miles long?”
“If you’re a king, it’s a job’s program,” J.J. said.
“The name Chambord comes from Cambo-Ritos which means the ford at the bend in the Celtic language. The guy who built it, King François I, or King Francis of the Large Nose, stayed here several times for hunting, but all in all, he occupied the place for a total of seventy-two days.
“That’s so pitiful,” Phoebe said, “he only got to stay in his big new castle for two and a half months.”
“Maybe after he saw it, he didn’t like it.”
“I wonder if anyone ever called him King Francis of the Large Nose to his face?”
“Probably not,” J.J. laughed.
“If you were a king, what do you think they’d call you?” Phoebe asked.
“That’s too easy,” he said. “Jean-Jacques the Blind. What would they have called you?”
“I don’t know,” Phoebe lied. She was glad she hadn’t been a queen because she was pretty sure her title would’ve been Queen Phoebe of the Large Buttocks, to put it politely. Before he could press her for an answer she resumed reading from the guidebook. “During World War II, the art from the Louvre and Compiègne museums was stored here, including the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo.”
“That’s interesting,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. “So the place is apparently very big and extremely sturdy and yet not the kind of place you want to live.” She put the little rental car into gear and headed south.
Chapter 13.
She drove along narrow well-paved roads at a reasonable clip. An hour later she knew they had to be getting close to the château. Then, gradually, in the distance, she could make out a town. She could see a hazy skyline on the horizon. It was a fairytale jumble of fanciful shapes. How pretty, she thought. As she got closer, the charming illusion began to resolve into what it really was.
“Oh. My. God.” Phoebe gasped. She pressed on the brakes and pulled the car to the side of the road and shoved the gearshift into park. It wasn’t a town she was seeing, it was the roof, just the chimneys, of a single building.
Obviously, they’d found Chambord. Phoebe couldn’t cope with what she was seeing and had to sit there for a couple of minutes, looking at the place from half a mile away, trying to calm down from the shock. What was it with these French kings? Megalomania didn’t go far enough to describe it.
She explained the situation to J.J. She pulled out the guidebook and thumbed through it. “Listen to this, ‘There are lanterns, gables, dormer windows, 800 columns, and 365 chimneys, spires and pinnacles intermingled’ and that’s just on the roof!”
It was like Versailles. All the pictures in the world couldn’t prepare you for the scale of these places. They were utterly disorienting to Phoebe’s way of thinking. When you saw them, you quailed into a quivering blob of jelly at the implications of anyone with the nerve to envision such a structure and the money to actually build it!
If Versailles was transcendent delicacy and refinement, Chambord was eternal stability and power. Both were well off the charts with regard to labor and expense and artistic talent.
As she drove closer she could see people riding horses across the stone bridge that spanned the moat. When a man on horseback got close to the walls, it helped make sense of the place. The proportions somehow fitted with a line of men on horseback.
So this was how medieval architectural scale was calibrated. A line of men on horseback mattered, a man on foot, even a crowd of them, didn’t register.
Phoebe pulled into the parking lot of a hotel and restaurant that stood close to the castle. It was a bright sunny day without a cloud in the sky. But it was cold and there was a brisk wind.
They got out of the car and adjusted their clothing as well as they could to stay warm. The cold wind made tears come out of Phoebe’s eyes. “Yowee,” she said. “Let’s get out of the wind.”
She led J.J. toward the massive bulk of the château. She could see parts of a high wall that enclosed the castle and the deer park. Unfortunately it stood well away from the castle and wasn’t much help in blocking the wind. A wide moat protected two sides of the château, so they had to walk all the way past the monstrous building and curve around to the back to find an entrance.
They found a gate in the thick wall that formed a courtyard on the backside of the château. Somehow they’d have to penetrate that wall to get inside and out of the wind. They decided to take the easy way. They bought two tickets.
They passed into the open-air cour d’honneur. It gave scant protection from the biting wind, so with hunched shoulders and bowed heads they continued across the graveled courtyard and on to the château. From the courtyard you could see the layout of the building. Phoebe described it to J.J. as they went toward it.
“We’re in a courtyard with a castle ahead of us and a wall around the other three sides, maybe thirty feet high. The castle side of the courtyard is taken up with an enormous building about three stories tall, but with the biggest, craziest bunch of chimneys and gables on the roof I’ve ever seen. I doubt there’s anything else like it on earth.
“The living area of the château is a central square block, a donjon or a keep, with a round tower on each corner. The wall on the fourth side continues on out to two more tall round towers on either side that define the outer boundaries of the courtyard.
“The main living quarters for the rich people, the keep and the four inner towers, are much taller. I guess they’re over a hundred feet high if you include the astonishing array of chimneys,” Phoebe said. Her teeth were chattering.
They made it into the main part of the château before being frozen solid. Phoebe led them immediately to a massive fireplace that housed a roaring blaze of logs, each of which would’ve taken two men to carry. It was fabulously atmospheric. She and J.J. were the only people in the huge room. A sign identified it as a guardroom.
It was beautiful. There was not a stick of furniture in the place, but, just like the tiny garden pavilion, it didn’t need mobile decoration. The proportions of the space, the high ceilings, the triple runs of leaded glass windows, terra cotta floor tiles, and deeply carved stonework were more than sufficient.
The whole place appeared to be nearly empty. For good reason. The chill from the mass of masonry went bone deep. Phoebe tugged on her hat, tightened her scarf, and pulled her coat around her. She leaned toward J.J. for warmth.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You must be in shock coming from Hawaii to below freezing temperatures.”
“I’m fine,” he said, with his teeth clenched. “But let’s keep moving.”
* * *
Phoebe described the layout of the interior to J.J. from what she could see for herself and from the illustrations in the brochure they’d been given with their tickets.
The central block was laid out in the shape of a cross, with a stupendous, open spiral stairway in the center. There were large open areas, guardrooms, facing onto the staircase on each level. Each of these big rooms was lit by tall clear leaded windows with functional heavy wooden shutters for the lowest section of the glass.
It didn’t take long to understand why François didn’t stay in the place much. Living here in the winter would’ve been seriously uncomfortable. The interior, even with fires blazing in each of the great fireplaces, was bitterly cold. Whenever they slowed down Phoebe stood as close as she dared to the flaming wood, but it didn’t help very much.
This was her first lesson in medieval life. A big fire provided far too much warmth to the front of you, on the level of literal roasting—which was great for cooking but not for hanging out with a good book—while the backside of you froze. You had to spin around continuously, rotisserieing yourself, to make the situation even moderately tolerable.
Chambord was exquisite in a polar opposite way from Versailles. It was austere, empty, except for the beautifully carved stone mantles and wonderful cream-colored barrel vaulted stone ceilings. The doors and shutters were of sturdy golden oak. Everywhere you looked there were intricate stone carvings of F for François I, and salamanders which were his personal emblem.
Phoebe and J.J. walked around the ground floor of the main block without Phoebe noticing anything pertinent to their task, so they decided to try the upper levels. The great central stairway was extraordinary. It wasn’t simply a beautifully carved spiral staircase made of stone, it was designed as a double helix. It was two entirely separate staircases entwined with each other.
François I had persuaded Leonardo da Vinci to come live in France near the end of his life. There were sketches and rumors indicating that Leonardo had participated in designing Chambord. A glance at the staircase convinced Phoebe that Leonardo da Vinci had designed it.
Carolyn Jourdan - Nurse Phoebe 03 - The School for Psychics Page 8