The Lost Carousel of Provence

by Juliet Blackwell

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve seen carousel pieces, here and there, over the years,” he said. “Junky pieces you could pick up cheap, redo, and add to the menagerie.”

  Cady thought back on the wood carvings she had noticed in the antiques shop display in Avignon, and the carousel horse she had admired in Maxine’s window so long ago. Jean-Paul was right—there were random carousel animals to be found, especially those in need of restoration. But did she have the time? How long could she impose on Fabrice? His ankle was improving, and knowing him, she realized he might ask her to leave again if she displeased him in some way. And besides all that, she had a life in California she should be getting back to. Didn’t she?

  “Think about it,” said Jean-Paul, warming to the theme. “You could adopt figures and add them to your set.”

  Over the years, Cady had photographed carousels that contained a menagerie of animals, carved by different artists. The children didn’t mind; in fact, they loved the variety. Who said Château Clement’s carousel animals had to be a matched set?

  She thought back to Maxine adopting broken, misshapen, unwanted items, cleaning them up and loving them and finding them a home.

  Making them whole again.

  * * *

  • • •

  After a pleasant lunch with Fabrice—Jean-Paul and Cady held up most of the conversation, but Johnny and Fabrice put in a comment here and there—Johnny left for the day, and Jean-Paul and Cady headed to Guido’s place.

  “His family from Italy came after the war,” explained Jean-Paul as they drove. “A lot of Italians, and Spaniards, immigrated into France following World War II.”

  “I thought France took a while to recover after the war.”

  He nodded. “It did. But Italy and Spain were hit even harder.”

  Given the small-town feeling of Saint-Véran, Cady had expected to find a very small shop. But Le Bricolage de Valenti turned out to be an impressively large store, providing not only tile but other floor coverings and installation supplies to the entire region.

  Guido greeted Jean-Paul with enthusiastic kisses on the cheeks, and was charming to Cady. He apologized for being too busy with customers to show them to the darkroom, but assured Cady that she should help herself and that she would find everything she needed.

  Guido wasn’t exaggerating; his darkroom was well supplied. Most darkrooms were extremely orderly. So much of the work was done in the dark, or near-dark, that it was essential to have all the items close at hand and in their right place. Dozens of neatly labeled bottles and jars lined the shelves: DEVELOPER, STOP BATH, FIXER.

  “I’ve never done this before,” Jean-Paul said. “Put me to work?”

  Cady smiled. “This is more a one-person job. But you can keep me company.”

  She showed him how to uncoil the rolls of film, using only the sense of touch in the absolute dark, loading them onto reels to produce negatives. These needed to dry for a while before she and Jean-Paul could examine them on the light table to see whether there were any photos that were salvageable, and worth printing.

  In the meantime, they went back to the Bricolage and perused Guido’s floor-covering selection, amusing themselves by finding old-fashioned-looking ceramics and stone that would look good in this room or that of Château Clement. Guido kept a portfolio of historic homes he had helped to supply in renovation. Cady watched as Jean-Paul flipped through the laminated pages, pointing to a hallway here, a set of bay windows there, speaking of which elements might work in his family’s château.

  “I thought you said you weren’t planning on renovating it,” Cady teased.

  He gave her an enigmatic smile and a subtle shrug.

  Guido joined them. “I keep telling him, he has to work on that place himself, with his own hands.” He held his own meaty hands up as examples. “That’s what will bring a place like the château back from the brink.”

  Jean-Paul kept his eyes on the book, a thoughtful look on his face.

  When they returned to the darkroom to study the negatives, a surprising number of the images seemed to have come out.

  “Now comes the fun part,” Cady said. “Hit that light switch, will you?”

  The red light came on. Using the enlarger, she projected the images onto photographic paper.

  The pans were all laid out in order, their appropriate chemical baths within. Cady showed Jean-Paul how to use tongs to gently dip the first page in the developer, and watched the magic of the photograph appearing.

  The first several images were of workers in the fields. The edges had been compromised, but the imperfections added to the sense of history.

  “This reminds me of playing with lemon juice when we were kids, and calling it ‘invisible ink,’” said Jean-Paul, as he brought another print out of the bath.

  “It really is astonishing. It still takes my breath away. In early photography they figured out how to make the images appear, but not how to keep them fixed. So photos would appear only briefly before fading away. Imagine how frustrating.”

  She hung the photos up on the wire overhead, where they dripped into a shallow pan.

  “Memories from a hundred years ago, or more,” Jean-Paul said, perusing them. “Merci beaucoup, Yves Clement.”

  “Check out this one,” Cady said. She held a print of a handsome, dark-haired man leaning back against a carousel cat.

  “That must have been the apprentice named Léon Morice,” said Jean-Paul. “He was identified in some of the other photos we have, though this is the only close-up I’ve seen.”

  “I thought it was a young Fabrice, at first,” said Cady.

  “Fabrice was blond—that’s one thing that saved him in World War II.”

  “I don’t mean in coloring, but in facial structure.”

  Jean-Paul studied the photo over her shoulder. “I don’t see it.”

  “It’s not the way he looks now, of course,” she said, trying to ignore the electric feeling of Jean-Paul pressing, just barely, against her back. “But the photo on his book jacket looks a lot like this. I’ve got the book at the château; I’ll show you when we go back.”

  The next several photos showed half a dozen workers laboring over the carousel, including a woman who looked like a chubbier version of the woman in the photo Cady had found in Gus-the-rabbit.

  “I wish there could be a way to figure out who she was. It’s driving me crazy.”

  Jean-Paul shook his head. “There was no listing of a woman working for Bayol. I checked. She might have been a servant of some kind, or a maid at the estate who pitched in.”

  “Maybe,” Cady said, still wondering as she moved on to the next picture, which was taken from a different film cartridge.

  “Oh, look, do you suppose this is Marc-Antoine as a teenager?”

  “That’s Josephine, for sure, so it probably is. These must have been photos from much later.”

  They were smiling, and the first few looked like they were fooling around; the last two were more formal portraits of mother and son.

  “These are great,” said Jean-Paul. “Up until now we only had earlier portraits of Josephine, and none of Marc-Antoine past the baby stage.”

  “Maybe these will interest Fabrice; they’re his father, after all.” Cady slipped the next piece of paper into the chemical bath. “Jean-Paul, check this out. It looks like a fire in the carousel building.”

  Three sequential photos seemed to have been taken from an upper-floor window of the château, looking down over the building. The first showed just a subtle glow, but in the next two the fire had grown.

  “But why would Yves have stopped to take photographs?” Cady asked. “Wouldn’t he have run to help his wife?”

  “Maybe he didn’t realize she was there,” he said. “Yves was an artist; he probably thought it was beautiful. And it is,
in a dark sort of way.”

  “If he was taking these photos, does that prove that he wasn’t the one to set the fire?”

  “Does it matter, at this point?”

  “I suppose not. When did the fire occur?”

  “I’m not sure of the exact date, but it was after Marc-Antoine had gone to fight in the First World War.”

  “So these photos of Marc-Antoine must have been taken soon before he left. He looks like such a baby, doesn’t he?”

  Jean-Paul stood near her. The red light made them both glow; the quiet, enclosed room felt a thousand miles away from the rest of the world.

  “So, have we gone through all the negatives?” asked Jean-Paul.

  “I think that’s about it. Darn it. I was hoping to find something more about the mystery woman. Why was her picture inside my rabbit?”

  “You are such a curious woman,” he said. “What is it they say in English? ‘Curiosity killed the cat’?”

  “Does that mean you’re going to kill me for diving into your family secrets?”

  He laughed. “Not at all. But I can’t vouch for my grandfather.”

  They gathered their things, went into the store to thank Guido for his help, and then Jean-Paul drove Cady back to the château. She asked him to come in so she could show him Fabrice’s author photo.

  Fabrice wasn’t in the kitchen or his sitting room, so they went straight to Cady’s chamber off the red hallway. Along the way, Jean-Paul checked out the empty rooms, the ruined plaster, the water stains. Cady remembered he had said he hadn’t been allowed past the kitchen in years; she hoped he wasn’t becoming even more discouraged about the state of the manor.

  “I’ve noticed that there’s a strong family resemblance with many of you Clements,” Cady said. “The shape of your eyes, the bridge of the nose, the cheekbones. But not Fabrice—or even Marc-Antoine, now that I think about it. Check this out.”

  She handed him her copy of The Château, turning it over to display the author photo. Then she put the photo of Léon Morice next to it.

  He nodded slowly. “So you think my grandfather is right? Josephine had an affair with Léon Morice?”

  “He was very handsome.”

  Jean-Paul smiled. “And would that be enough reason to go outside her marriage?”

  “No, of course not. And clearly, I’m in no position to judge her. It’s just that . . . her husband was so much older than she, and they had tried for years to have children, but couldn’t. And then a handsome apprentice comes along and . . . ?”

  “And stays in the house for months, carving.”

  “Sounds like a romantic setup.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  Cady stood by the doorway, running her hands over the swoops of the wood carvings: the flowers and berries, a little wren. The wood had a velvety finish, not a varnish but similar to what Maxine always called a “French polish,” accomplished through a many-layered buffing process. It was slick and inviting under her fingertips.

  Jean-Paul’s hand settled over hers. She tilted her face up to his.

  “This is probably a bad idea,” he whispered.

  “I know.”

  You’re a terrible judge of character, Drake, she told herself. Nonetheless, she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled his lips down to hers. The kiss was the gentlest she had ever experienced, the brushing of a butterfly wing, the softness of the dawn.

  But then it deepened. The kiss caught fire, and swept them both along with it.

  Cady had forgotten this sensation: the wildness, the wantonness, the yearning. How long since she had felt such reckless ardor? The stolen moments of that long ago one-night stand, fueled by alcohol, didn’t count. This was liquid, uninhibited passion, desire coursing through her veins. This was the feeling of Jean-Paul’s chest under her palms, his whiskers tickling her cheek, his mouth moving down to nibble her neck.

  She wanted this. She wanted Jean-Paul. She wanted more.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  PRESENT DAY

  CHTEAU CLEMENT

  Cady

  Afterward, Jean-Paul had to leave for a commitment with his mother. They had spoken little as they picked up their discarded clothing and dressed, both apparently avoiding discussion of what had just happened, not to mention the future.

  Her body felt deliciously sated, but her mind was frenetic. Unable to shake her restlessness, Cady went back outside to the carousel.

  She had to run a cord from the nearby garage to power a work lamp, but she liked the feeling of being with the carousel at night, alone. The shadows somehow seemed part of it. She could practically hear the tinks and clanks of the workers she had seen in the photographs earlier in the day; again, she wondered about the lone woman in the group, working alongside the men.

  Souviens-toi de moi.

  And Cady envisioned Josephine, riding her custom carousel alone at night. Round and round.

  “Paulette was sitting right there, on that horse,” said Fabrice, appearing in the doorway, looking a bit like a ghost himself.

  “Oh! You startled me.”

  “Sorry,” Fabrice replied, though he didn’t look particularly sorry. His eyes never left the carousel horse.

  “I thought you said you never found her.”

  “I didn’t find her—she found me. The war was over, but it was a . . . difficult time for everyone. We were overjoyed at first, of course. But the repercussions were cruel.”

  “The country was devastated.”

  He nodded. “Rationing went on for years afterward. But it was more than that. It’s . . . it’s a terrible thing to be invaded. I suppose it’s only natural, only human, that alliances are formed, betrayals made, revenge taken.”

  Cady remained silent, running her hands over the curves and divots of the horse’s mane.

  “It turned out she had given me her real name, after all: Paulette Olivier,” Fabrice continued. “But she wasn’t from Fontaine-de-Vaucluse per se; she was from a little farm in the countryside.”

  “You found her?”

  “More than that. I killed her.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  1945

  CHTEAU CLEMENT

  Fabrice

  Fabrice had been staying in the château, derelict as it was, for several days. His many cousins in town, to whom he had introduced himself for the first time, didn’t have much after the war. Still, they had offered him a warm bed to sleep in, and a place at their tables, but Fabrice declined their offers. He had heard too many stories from his father about their vicious rumors against his grandparents.

  They appeared to be generous, but if there was one thing Fabrice had learned from the war, it was the wretched sting of betrayal.

  Besides, he preferred the desolation of his father’s once-beautiful childhood home. It suited his own bleak interior. The remnants of old leather-bound books and Turkish rugs underfoot—marred by rodent droppings and mold—seemed to embody the faded aspirations of his soul. The useless ticking of the massive grandfather clock, missing its hands, reflected the crooked, rancid beating of his heart.

  The château had been looted, anything of value that was portable having long since been stolen. Still, many papers and photos remained. Fabrice spent untold hours looking through old wooden toys in what had been his father’s boyhood room; reading his grandfather Yves’s journals; and examining stacks of his grandmother Josephine’s correspondence, bound together with tattered blue silk ribbon.

  And of course, there was the carousel.

  His father had told him about joyous festivals when the children from the village were invited to ride the carousel. That was before the rumors and innuendo had finally estranged the family from the villagers, before things fell apart.

  A few of the carousel figures were still intact, as was most of the actual mechanism, though
all were covered in soot and grime. Still, the ruins drew him out in the evenings; he liked to smoke there in the dark, when the silvery light of the moon filtering through the dirty windows lent everything an air of ghostly nostalgia. He could practically hear the raucous music, could see his father as a boy, whirling round and round with the other village children. His former friends.

  And one night, this was where he stumbled upon Paulette.

  Her hair had been shorn, like that of a prostitute; her dress was fashioned out of a burlap sack. Her cheeks were wet with tears, but she cried silently. She sat on a once-whimsical carousel horse, unmindful of the soot. A gun in her lap.

  “It was you?” Fabrice finally managed.

  She nodded.

  “They took my family.”

  “I know. . . . Fabrice, I’ll never be able to tell you how sorry I am. I’ll never be able to explain—”

  “They took my family!” he raged, running toward her.

  She held up the gun with both hands, training it on him. He paused, coming to a stop right in front of her, trying not to heave, to vomit. Wanting to kill her; wanting to kill himself.

  “Listen to me! Please, Fabrice, just listen.” The tears kept flowing, but her voice was steady. “I had no choice. They threatened my family. My mother, my brother and sisters . . . The Gestapo threatened such terrible things. . . .” Finally, she started sobbing aloud. “I’m so sorry, Fabrice, I am so sorry.”

  “Stop saying that! It doesn’t matter how sorry you are. It doesn’t matter, don’t you understand?” He glanced down at the gun, still trained on him. “Go ahead and shoot. It seems fitting that I would be murdered by the woman I loved.”

  “It isn’t for you,” Paulette said, her voice now quiet, calm. “It’s for me.”

  She lifted the gun and placed the muzzle to her temple.

  He lunged, grabbing her hand. A shot rang out.