The Lost Carousel of Provence

by Juliet Blackwell

  She dressed and headed for the side kitchen door of the main house, where Jean-Paul had brought her in before.

  Cady raised her palm to knock but hesitated at the sound of raised voices.

  “Elle est une intruse,” said a voice she thought belonged to Johnny’s father, Andres. “She’s an interloper, probably wants to make a fortune on that carousel.”

  “She was helping,” came Jean-Paul’s ever-patient voice. “In addition to taking care of Fabrice, she’s finally gotten him to allow her to unearth the carousel—and yes, it will be worth a lot of money if we can fix it up. It could help with raising funds to properly restore the château. And she might even have discovered some photos from Yves Clement that shed light on our family history.”

  “My point is, she’s not family,” said Gerald. “She should go spend her energy on her own family and leave ours alone.”

  “Jean-Paul tells me she’s an orphan,” said Louise. “She doesn’t have any family.”

  “That’s her problem, not ours.”

  “It might be one reason she doesn’t understand how family works,” said Louise gently.

  “Cady told me herself that she has some problems recognizing boundaries,” said Jean-Paul. “Sometimes she can seem . . . pushy, or forward. But that’s probably the reason she’s gotten so far with Fabrice.”

  “Family is family,” said Gerald.

  “And she’s not family,” said Andres.

  This was what they thought of her. Cady couldn’t listen anymore.

  After she lost her baby and apartment and then Maxine passed away, Cady had found herself stunned at how quickly things could change. And now she felt that way again. Just yesterday she had been restoring antique French carousel figures, listening while Fabrice confided his darkest stories, making love with Jean-Paul, feeling like a part of things. But the truth was this: She wasn’t wanted here. She didn’t belong.

  Cady returned to Jean-Paul’s apartment and penned a brief note thanking him and saying good-bye. On the kitchen table, as before, sat the rolled-up blueprints and hand-drawn sketches of Château Clement. But alongside them was a formal letter from an auction house, pertaining to the approximate value of “one Bayol carousel, circa 1900.”

  Fabrice had repeatedly accused Jean-Paul of wanting to cash in by “selling the place off for parts.” Had he been right all along? Had Jean-Paul been helping with the carousel restoration only because it would be worth a lot of money?

  Or was she becoming like Fabrice, seeing disloyalty around every corner, allowing one betrayal to taint everything else?

  None of it mattered anymore, anyway. The time had come for her to leave. After a moment of internal debate, she decided to leave her exposed film cartridges with the photos she had taken of Lucy, Fabrice, and the carousel during her stay at Château Clement. Let the family do with them what they would. That way, at least, Fabrice wouldn’t worry that she had shared them with anyone.

  Then she grabbed her bags and slipped out into the early evening.

  She was dry-eyed now, beyond tears. But the problem with a small town was that even though she’d been here only a short time, people recognized her. What she wouldn’t give to be back in Paris this instant, walking those streets, reveling in her anonymity.

  Anonymity.

  Olivia used to say that, historically speaking, “Anonymous” was a woman. Anon.

  What if . . .

  What if the “apprentice” who stayed at the château wasn’t Léon Morice at all, but a woman? The woman. The one in the photograph—the secret kept in the rabbit’s belly.

  She dropped her bag and took the envelope of historic photos she had developed out of her satchel. In the photos where she was working on the carousel, the woman had looked a little chubby to Cady. But now Cady saw it: The woman wasn’t chubby.

  She was pregnant.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  1901

  CHTEAU CLEMENT

  Josephine and Maëlle

  The camera feels awkward in her hands, and she has to squint to see through the tiny hole. How did Yves manage to keep the lens so steady? Was it the result of practice, or was it his resolute way of doing everything he did?

  “You stand right there,” Josephine tells the mother of her baby. “With the carousel behind you.”

  “Here? Like this? At least let me take off my apron.”

  For many months, Maëlle has worn increasingly looser clothing to accommodate her swelling belly as she carves the lintels, mantels, newel posts, and doorways throughout the château. Josephine, for her part, has gained weight and, in the end, resorted to placing a small pillow under her skirts. Yves is ignorant of the ways of women, and so over the moon at the thought of Josephine having his child that he does not notice the obvious details. Some of the more astute housemaids have their suspicions, and Josephine can only pray that they hold their tongues. But no one else pays attention to the quiet carver who fills the halls of the château with the scent of freshly sawn wood and the scrip-scrape tink-tink of her work, her passion, her joy.

  The truth gnaws at Josephine; she cringes at the thought of deceiving her dear husband. She would have confessed a thousand times already, but Yves is such an upstanding man that if he discovered the truth, he would step aside and allow his brother to take over the château. It would break his heart. Their infant son, Marc-Antoine, named for Yves’s father, has already brought them such joy that she prays her husband will understand, in the long run.

  “No, no,” Josephine tells Maëlle. “Stay exactly as you are, right this moment. This is how I will always remember you; this is how your son should know you. You are an artist, a sculptor.”

  “He will never know me,” Maëlle says, in the saddest voice Josephine has ever heard.

  She lowers the camera. “He will, Maëlle. When he is old enough to understand, he will know of the apprentice who came to stay at Château Clement. I will make sure of it. I will tell him to look inside the rabbit on his eighteenth birthday. He will know he was loved by the Aspiring Apprentice from Angers.”

  Maëlle nods.

  Her son will grow up a Clement. He will never want for anything, or know the acid rejection of being an illegitimate child.

  Josephine has been writing letters, securing commissions for Maëlle all over France. Soon she will move on to the next château; a family who lives outside of Nice had already offered her a commission. She will be able to sculpt. Even though she is a woman. Even though she must remain anonymous.

  Maëlle has carved a single, stand-alone carousel figure. She has created him, from start to finish, all by herself. He is a rabbit with a sweet expression, every inch of him fashioned with whispers of love and hope and encouragement. She allows herself to dream that her tender endearments will infuse the very wood of the figure, reaching out across the years to comfort and console her son and future generations.

  Maëlle lifts her chin, and Josephine snaps the picture.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  PRESENT DAY

  PROVENCE AND PARIS

  Cady

  There was no taxi service in town, but Hubert knew a man who drove people to the train station for a set fee, so Cady got a ride into Avignon. She had planned on catching the next train to Paris, but then reconsidered and asked him to drop her at a decent hotel near the Gare d’Avignon, which turned out to be a beautiful Best Western.

  There was one more thing she wanted to do before she left Provence.

  Cady had intended to rent a car the next morning, but wound up staying in her hotel room for two full days. She snuck out to a corner grocery to buy a bottle of wine, a bag of chips, and a package of Petit Écolier cookies, and tried to re-create the debauched retreat that had helped soothe her wounds in Oakland, but was disappointed to discover that there was no French version of Hoarders showing on the television. She didn’t
have the heart to watch anything, anyway. But neither was she ready to face the outside world.

  Cady looked again and again at the photograph and the note that had brought her to Château Clement: Je t’aime toujours, et encore. Souviens-toi de moi.

  I love you always, and still. Remember me.

  As she lay on her bed, becoming far too well acquainted with her hotel room ceiling, she reviewed her recent actions in her head.

  And realized something.

  What had she done in Saint-Veran that was so awful? She’d helped an old man, however briefly, and befriended a troubled teenager. She had even made a few inroads with some of the villagers, enough to think that, with time, she could have built some relationships. At least she had made an effort.

  Cady had always been an awkward kid, unlikable. But . . . was she really all that bad? She might be gruff or abrupt, she might have a few boundary issues, but she wasn’t malicious. She had never deliberately set out to hurt another person.

  And after all, who said a bad seed couldn’t sometimes grow into a decent tree?

  * * *

  • • •

  The next morning Cady rented a car and drove to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse. She wanted to see the home of the dragon for herself.

  The village was located in a dead-end valley, closed in by an enormous limestone cliff. Parking was plentiful and a lot of the shops and restaurants weren’t yet open for the season; clearly this once-sleepy town had become a tourist destination, but it was probably overrun with visitors in the height of the summer. She thought about Fabrice’s suspicions regarding his family’s motives concerning Château Clement; did they really want a similar fate for their sweet little village of Saint-Véran?

  It’s none of your business, Drake, she told herself. Not anymore. It never had been, actually, but at this point . . . it was depressing to realize that Cady’s sojourn in Provence would be relegated to a tiny footnote in her life. Before long the complex interwoven web of stories, of Fabrice and Paulette, Marc-Antoine, Yves and Josephine, Johnny, Léon, and the anonymous woman who worked on the carousel—and of Jean-Paul—would recede in her memory, as surely as the tide on a moonless night.

  Still. Olivia had been right. Coming to France hadn’t been running away, but running to something. And Cady would carry it with her the rest of her life.

  She walked past the crude stony bulk of the tenth-century Church of Saint Véran, complete with a rough-hewn statue of the dragon at its entrance. A man at a crepe stand directed Cady to walk up a trail called the Chemin de Gouffre, beside the river Sorgue, to find the source of the water—and the supposedly fathomless home of the mythical beast. She passed bistros and ice cream vendors, most still shuttered, awaiting tourist season. Sun filtered through the leaves, dappling the scene with a kaleidoscope of light and shadow.

  The air still held a cool April crispness, and church bells chimed eleven as she climbed. Mallards quacked and warblers flitted through the overhanging plane trees. Despite her misery, Cady felt a kind of peace manifest in the calming murmur of the Sorgue and the stillness of the giant ferns along its banks. The waters were crystal clear, a beautiful bright green over waving weeds and a brilliant turquoise when pooling in eddies over white sands. As she progressed up the hill, huge white streams poured over boulders down toward the valley.

  Higher up, the river disappeared under rock and brush, but Cady kept going, determined to find the famed well from which the Sorgue sprang.

  Finally she arrived at the mouth of a cave in a dramatic granite escarpment, at the base of which was a swirling green pool. The font, the source.

  The home of the dragon.

  “Unfathomable,” Cady said aloud.

  “But beautiful,” replied a man’s voice.

  She turned around to see Jean-Paul.

  “What—what are you doing here?” she demanded. “How did you know where I was?”

  “The man who drove you to Avignon is a Clement cousin. He told me the hotel he dropped you at, and the woman at the front desk let me know when you were leaving and told me you asked for directions to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse.”

  “Let me guess—she’s yet another Clement cousin?”

  He shook his head. “But I can be convincing when I put my mind to it.”

  “You’re quite the detective.”

  He inclined his head, just slightly. “Somehow I knew you wouldn’t just run away. Not like that.”

  Their eyes held for a long moment. Cady searched for a response, but finally looked back to the pool without speaking.

  “I have something in the car for you,” said Jean-Paul.

  “What is it?”

  “Someone named Olivia Gray sent you a large, heavy package from the U.S. There’s a rabbit drawn next to the address.”

  Her heart sank. Thanks a lot, Olivia.

  “It must be my rabbit. My friend knew I was working on the Clement carousel.” She blew out a frustrated breath. “Okay, I’ll get it from you and take it back with me. But . . . you tracked me down to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse just to give me my package?”

  “Not exactly, no,” he replied. “Fabrice is here. He couldn’t make the climb with his ankle, but he’s sitting on a bench by the Sorgue. Waiting.”

  “Waiting for what?”

  “For you.” Jean-Paul put his hand out to her. “Trust me?”

  She shook her head. “I saw the carousel estimate on your table, Jean-Paul. You kept telling me you weren’t interested in selling the château for parts, but you were planning on cashing in on the carousel?”

  He blew out an exasperated breath. “I told you that I’ve been trying to come at the château restoration from several different angles. Yes, the carousel could offer us a special kind of attraction; it might give a bank the confidence to give us a loan. And it turns out that Fabrice has some money set aside that he’d like to put toward restoration, and my mother and even my grandfather have agreed to go in on it with me. We’re still talking . . . but it just might happen. And you’ve been part of that. I can’t believe that you ran away just because of this, without talking to me about it. Especially not after what happened between us.”

  “It wasn’t that.”

  “Then what?”

  “I overheard you and your family talking. I know I’m . . .” She shook her head, trailing off, looking down into the dragon’s cauldron. Even after her revelation in the hotel room, it came to her, almost like a mantra: “I know I try too hard. I’m too much. People don’t want me.”

  “Cady, I wish you would believe this: You’re not too much. You’re a little . . . different, but different doesn’t have to mean bad. We French enjoy a more rarefied taste in many things.”

  She managed a smile. “But your family’s right when they say that Château Clement isn’t my home, and the Clements aren’t my family.”

  “That doesn’t always have to be the case.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that sometimes these things can change.” He held his hand out to her again. “Please take my hand, Cady, and let me bring you to Fabrice. In a very rare move, he has an apology he would like to offer you. It’s only fair to let him give it to you in person, and if you still want to leave, then I will give you your rabbit, and you can go.”

  They descended the hill and found that Fabrice had moved from the bench to a nearby café, where outdoor heaters kept the terrace warm. Just the sight of his tousled gray hair and hawk eyes filled her with a sense of nostalgia, as if he really were a long-lost grandfather.

  He hoisted himself to his one good foot as she approached. On the table was a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape and three glasses.

  “I ordered oysters,” Fabrice said before she could even sit down.

  “I . . . to tell you the truth, I’ve never had oysters.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Ne
ver? This is a scandal. You are in France, so you must try them now, fresh from the Mediterranean. You will love them, as I loved your garlic bread. And Jean-Paul insisted that Châteauneuf-du-Pape is your favorite wine, though red doesn’t usually go with oysters.”

  “Fabrice, didn’t you want to apologize to Cady?” Jean-Paul suggested, his voice gentle.

  Fabrice nodded, but looked away. When he spoke, his voice was low and gruff. “Cady, it’s possible I overreacted. I’m sorry.”

  “I hadn’t agreed to do the book project, Fabrice,” Cady said. “I did pitch the idea, but I wouldn’t have gone through with it unless you granted me permission. And I was pretty sure I would never get your permission. I just got so excited. . . . I liked the idea of including photos of the château, and restoring the old carousel, but I wasn’t going to expose you.”

  “I think I knew that. Afterward, when I thought about it. And then Jean-Paul told me you left your film rolls at his place. I just . . .” His voice trailed off with a shrug. “I guess I always expected another betrayal. Jean-Paul here tells me I need to change my way of thinking.”

  As Jean-Paul poured the wine, Cady decided she was sick to her soul of secrets.

  “There’s something else,” she said carefully. “I think Gerald’s side of the family is right. At least, partly.”

  She told Fabrice and Jean-Paul what she suspected about the woman in the photographs.

  “You’re saying she’s Fabrice’s grandmother?” Jean-Paul asked. “The woman you found in the photograph in your rabbit?”

  She nodded but glanced at Fabrice. “I don’t know . . . I mean, I know there were rumors about your father’s legitimacy as heir, and I hate to add to them.”