by Lily Velez
Then he frowned.
Almost as soon as the recognition came, Camilla appeared at his side. She waited for their father to move forward to meet the guest halfway, and then, with a knowing smile, she said, “It would seem we left quite the impression.”
It was an understatement. Camilla had wasted no time before stringing her web the moment she and Genevieve had entered Jeremie’s bookshop.
“Oh, forgive us,” she’d said, making her cheeks pool red on cue as she pressed a hand over her heart. “We didn’t mean to interrupt you, Noah.” Then she’d looked to Jeremie with an apologetic but inviting smile.
Why did she do things like that? Noah had wanted to slink out the bookshop, climb up the dray-cart, and pretend he didn’t know the girl. Or better yet, continue home without her. His brothers had nearly done it once. Their patience tested by the length of time it’d taken her to select a fitting fabric for a new dress, they’d elected to abandon her in town for sport. Noah hadn’t been there to witness it, but he could picture his brothers laughing from the seat of the wagon, urging the horses on faster, Camilla stomping after them, screaming threats as her boots and hemline grew dirtier with mud.
Noah didn’t have it in him to attempt anything as excessive as that, though he certainly admired the effort. He would’ve simply ushered his sisters along, reminding them there were only so many hours of sunlight in a day.
But then the unthinkable happened: Jeremie, God help him, had returned Camilla’s smile, little knowing he’d signed his own death record with the gesture. Emboldened by this, Camilla had then taken command of the entire situation, asking Jeremie question after question as if interviewing him for the open position of husband, flirting in subtext, tucking an airy laugh into her sentences every so often, casting her spell. All the while, Noah had melted further and further into the walls and shelves and books around them.
“Papá,” Camilla said when their father returned to them. Jeremie had dismounted his horse but stayed behind, waiting. “Who is it?” The corners of her mouth twitched lest they assume a serpentine smile to match the self-satisfaction that swam in her eyes.
“His name is Jeremie.”
“And what has he come for?” She glowed at the mere notion of receiving the news, as if she might explode like a star into fire and light at any moment.
“He’s come to see Noah.”
A jolt flashed through Noah at the announcement. His eyes shot to Jeremie and then back to his father. Surely the man had mistaken Jeremie’s words.
Camilla beamed all the more brightly, her lips spreading wide to reveal her perfect row of teeth, but then she realized what their father had said, and it was as if she’d been struck. She stood stunned, blinking, the energy evaporating from her eyes.
Their father read the confusion on their faces and met it with a wrinkled brow. “He claims he made your acquaintance earlier this week in town?”
Genevieve, who’d silently joined them with a basket of freshly picked vegetables from the garden, edged her way into the conversation when it became apparent how much the circumstances had robbed Camilla and Noah of their words.
“Yes, that’s right,” she told their father. “He’s a friend of Noah’s.”
This lifted the man’s eyebrows. “Noah made a friend?”
Noah’s gaze swung in the direction of the open fields, trying to locate a ditch into which he might throw himself.
“You should speak with him, Noah,” Genevieve said. “It’s such a distance if he’s come from town.”
Quite a distance, yes, and a trouble, to be sure, but he hadn’t spoken a single word to Jeremie days ago and he couldn’t imagine what he’d say to him now. Besides, he wanted no part in Camilla’s stage show. Let Jeremie be honest about why he’d truly come and speak to Noah’s father directly. Noah had work waiting for him.
“The horses,” he explained to his father, gesturing toward the barn, appealing to the man’s responsible nature. The horses still needed to be turned out to pasture.
His father only waved him off. “I’ll see to it.”
Noah came up short at so quick a dismissal as that. He faltered, reaching for further excuses. He opted for another approach, saying he’d hoped to bathe each horse first. The humidity was stifling today, so thick it pressed in on a person from all sides like a heavy conscience. Surely the horses would appreciate a refreshing rinse.
“I’m sure they can wait.”
“But the stalls,” he tried. He’d need time enough to clean them out while the animals grazed. At this rate, he’d work straight through to evening.
Now his father laughed. “I have no doubt you’ll find the time. If this young man is a friend of yours, then I insist you meet with him. As Genevieve says, he’s come all this way, yes? Your chores will be perfectly content to wait on you.”
Noah opened his mouth to protest further but realized he’d run bankrupt on reasons why he was unavailable to play host. How could this be? He hadn’t even wanted to enter the bookshop earlier this week. Now he was condemned to entertain a guest for God only knew how long.
And the day had been going so well…
He remembered then how his brothers sometimes claimed they could just about strangle Camilla for all her annoyances. Noah was beginning to understand the concept with new depth. This was her doing after all. It made little sense why he should have to be the one to neglect his responsibilities.
He wanted to make a case for it, but then he caught his father’s smile and its warmth deterred him. The man was no doubt delighted that Noah had befriended another, one who didn’t tread with hooves, paws, or webbed feet. Noah couldn’t bring himself to disappoint him.
Grimacing as if swallowing medicine, he braced himself, and then he forced his feet forward to see what Jeremie Perreault could possibly want.
3
As it turned out, Jeremie wished only to present Noah with a book.
“A gift for being the shop’s very first visitor.”
Noah received it like it was a strange entity he wasn’t sure how to handle. Its covers were soft, leathery, warm. With a vast relief, he saw it wasn’t the skin-bound book from before and relaxed.
“I would’ve given it to you earlier, but you left so suddenly.”
He’d had to. Camilla’s web had evolved into far too complex a contrivance. A web…it was more fitting than he’d originally thought now that he considered it. And Camilla the widow spider lying in wait to wrap her prey in silk. She’d been uncomfortably close to inviting Jeremie to all but ride with them back home for supper, but Noah had thrown an exasperated look to Genevieve, and she’d helped to cut short the ordeal.
Surprisingly enough, the tyrannical creature that was his youngest sister was nowhere to be seen as Noah surveyed the farmland. He stood atop a hill with Jeremie, the dark shade of a sessile oak tree encircling them. The view from here was beyond compare.
His family’s pastures unfurled like emerald rugs and rolled on for what seemed like eternity toward the eastern horizon, the sunshine covering their lengths like a blanket over a sick child. Cows, goats, sheep, and donkeys grazed in the golden glow of the grass, flicking their tails and twitching their ears against pests. There was also a lake set into the fields like a giant looking glass that had fallen from heaven. Presently, it shimmered in the sunlight like a pool of stars. The pastures bordered a forest, from which the family obtained their firewood, and in the west stretched his family’s endless fields of wheat. The grain rippled in the breeze, a thousand voices whispering secrets.
At the center of it all sat the barn, which housed the horses, and the farmhouse. The farmhouse’s stone walls tipped in as if from old age, and its dark roof shingles overlapped each other like a spread of playing cards. Pale shutters with veins of cracked paint framed windows that wore boxed flowers for mustaches. A fruit and vegetable garden wrapped like a scarf around a corner of the farmhouse—rows of lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, and more striping the soil—and white trel
lises masked one face of the home, overrun with roses. At the front stood a porch, where Noah and his siblings often lounged, and leading to its short stairway was a path of stepping stones of various sizes and shapes, clearly marking the way home. All in all, the farmhouse had the look of something well-worn and full of love.
A bird with jewel-toned plumage cleaned its beak in the garden’s bird bath, and Noah’s eyes followed it as it shot away to join the other feathered troubadours in the trees. Their high, staccato notes were the only sounds now. It was one of the attributes Noah most loved about his home: the quiet. The clouds would hang low and move at a languid pace, changing form every so often as if heaven were writing coded messages to the earth, and one could have the sense of becoming lost in an endless, tranquil moment of time, as if a grain of sand within an hourglass had suddenly paused midair.
Noah visited the hill often to be with his thoughts, but he’d brought Jeremie there for a different reason: to evade eavesdroppers, spies, and unwanted company. By now, his father had no doubt shared the news of Noah’s having made a new friend with Noah’s mother. If Noah could hastily see Jeremie off, his guest would be gone long before anyone could make a fuss of it.
“You can read, can’t you?”
Noah blinked out of his thoughts and remembered the book in his hands.
Jeremie was dabbing at the perspiration on his face with a monogrammed handkerchief, his skin a touch red, as if he were unaccustomed to spending long periods of time outside. He certainly wasn’t dressed for it. He wore a high-collared, linen shirt tucked into fall front black trousers, with riding boots swallowing his feet. He smelled warm, too, like a stone that had baked in the sun all day.
“Please know I mean no offense,” Jeremie amended quickly.
Noah took none. As it were, tradesmen typically knew only what they had to know: farming, blacksmithery, tanning, butchery. Theirs was a simple life, informed by the vocation they’d pursued since adolescence. One didn’t need to be overly literate to shoe a horse, excise the choice cuts from a hog, build a wagon, or repair trousers.
His birth father, a struggling carpenter, had thought literacy a waste. “I’d rather a hard laborer for a son than a braggart who quotes useless philosophies.”
He’d kiss the mouth of a bottle, Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like a bouncing ball as he chugged the liquid inside in a rush. Then he’d slam the bottle’s bottom onto a table, its surface shaking as if frightened.
“The poor can’t afford such luxuries. And, make no mistake, the wealthy are glad for it. They wish for us to continue swimming in this cesspool of poverty. So long as they can keep the poor under their finely polished shoes, it will go well for them.”
“Mainard,” Noah’s birth mother would coo, using his name as a balm, moving the bottle out of reach.
He’d let her, and then he’d let her stroke his wild, graying hair and the shadow of whiskers that covered his jaw, but his eyes were always faraway, always in another place. Sometimes, he’d sit and stare into the emptiness of their squalid home, unmoving, as if he’d been stricken dumb. Other times, at supper, he’d suddenly bury his face into his hands and sob, and a young Noah would watch on, stunned, wishing he knew how to revive the man.
Noah hadn’t even known how to spell his own name until he came to live with the Capets. Almost immediately, they’d taught him his letters and words and sentences, encouraging him to write, to read, to expand his knowledge.
He looked down at the book, thinking on this. “I can read.”
The answer animated Jeremie. “Excellent.”
He opened the book in Noah’s hands, acting like a merchant who aimed to show off the best features of his wares. “It’s a collection of poems from various authors, including John Donne. Are you familiar with him? He was a cleric in the Church of England. He died in 1631. So these poems of his are nearly 200 years old. Extraordinary, isn’t it? How our words can go on living long after we’re gone?”
He continued flipping through the pages, pointing out this poet and that poet, these verses and those verses. Noah let him, taken aback, hardly able to keep pace with all the words.
It became increasingly apparent why Jeremie had established a bookshop in Avignon. To him, a world was simply not a world worth living in if it didn’t contain books.
4
The next time Jeremie came around, Noah was consumed by the monumental task of shearing the sheep. Lambing season would begin in mere weeks, and since today promised fair weather, Noah thought it best to get started with the process.
“You have quite the clientele.” Jeremie appeared, striding through the pasture toward Noah as he took in the mob of blathering sheep.
Grazing in the fields, they had an almost poetic look, cloudlets hovering low to explore the earth. At the moment, they’d combined into one irritated legion, a fuming storm cloud bent on attack.
Noah nearly dropped the shears at Jeremie’s greeting. Then his eyes darted to the farmhouse as he silently prayed his mother wouldn’t espy this sight. She’d otherwise descend upon them within seconds, receiving Jeremie with excessive warmth, insisting he stay for supper just as she’d done days ago.
Noah’s plan to easily rid himself of Jeremie back then had unsurprisingly failed. Try as he had, he couldn’t find a large enough lull in the conversation into which he might insert an “I should return to my work” or an “I’m sure you have other things to get to today.” Mostly because such lulls hadn’t presented themselves in the least. Jeremie had talked enough to dizzy Noah, and by the time he’d finally appeared to have drained himself of his words, Noah’s mother was already approaching them with a slice of apple pie for their guest and a smile like the rind of a waning moon hanging from ear to ear.
Noah didn’t know how he’d survived supper. There was such fanfare about Jeremie that one might’ve assumed him a soldier return home from war. All were curious over this Jeremie Perreault whom Noah had allegedly befriended. They asked about his family (they made their home in Paris but summered annually in southern France), his father’s work (early investments in steel and lumber had rewarded the man with success enough to now own several factories), Jeremie’s purpose in Avignon (“to find loving homes for old and rare books”—he planned to open his bookshop in mid-July, timed around a local festival honoring Saint Agricola, the patron saint of Avignon), and his life up to the present (he’d been educated at Cambridge—alma mater of many a prince, prime minister, and person of science—and had traveled frequently throughout Europe and Great Britain).
“I’m curious,” Noah’s father had said at one point. “There wouldn’t happen to be any relation to Claude Perrault, the architect behind the façade of the same name at the Louvre?”
Jeremie’s smile had been almost sheepish. “You have discovered me, monsieur. Despite the variation in the spelling of our surnames, he is in fact an ancestor of mine. He and his brother Charles, father of the fairy tale. It’s perhaps from Charles that I derive my love for stories.”
“How incredible. As I understand it, the Perraults were very accomplished across a vast array of fields.”
“I’m hardly surprised,” Camilla had inserted, lest she be forgotten. “From the moment I first saw you, Jeremie, I just knew there was something about you that distinguished you from others. That’s why I hoped the rest of my family would get to meet you one day.”
Noah’s brothers had rolled their eyes.
Back in the pasture, he tried to steady a fidgeting ewe between his knees as he thought about it. He wished he was as fast and skilled a shearer as his brothers, who often competed against one another to recognize their own speed. Last time, Elliot, the eldest of the brothers, had won the game, but Colin, second oldest, remained convinced he’d somehow cheated.
“I don’t mean to disturb your work,” Jeremie said as he made his way through the cluster of bleating wool, “but I absolutely had to know if you’d found occasion to read from the book I’d given you.”
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br /> Noah stared at him as the words sailed the short distance between them. Sheep hairs and motes of dust levitated as the animals continued marching to and fro, occasionally crowding around Noah to inspect the blades in his hands. He couldn’t help but notice how impossibly tall Jeremie was, taller even than Noah’s father and brothers.
“The book of poems?” Jeremie clarified, mistaking Noah’s silence for confusion.
Noah wasn’t confused, though. He was merely taken aback that Jeremie would follow up on such a thing, given his pedigree. Surely he knew there were others far more qualified at discussing poetry with him.
Noah had paged through the book, yes, but the majority of the words had been well beyond his grasp and comprehension. Not that this had surprised him, of course. He hadn’t been bred for poetry.
His birth father had exhibited better fluency with the alcoholic inventories of the local brasseries, especially when the man’s gambling debts had begun to mushroom. His remedy of choice had only caused his woodwork to suffer, losing him clients in a steady decline, which naturally led to a dwindling income and therefore more swims in whiskey. A cruel, unending cycle.
Noah remembered regularly taking refuge under his father’s worktable, playing with wooden figurines as a curtain of shavings showered down from his father’s handiwork above. But as the year had stretched on, the shavings had stopped falling. The workshop had become as quiet and still as the dead.
Then one evening in mid-July, his father had staggered into the house, a wild look in his eyes as if he’d been chased home by demons. His large, sweaty hand had snapped onto Noah’s wrist like the wet jaws of a starved beast, and without a word, he’d proceeded to drag Noah through the shadowy streets of Paris, ignoring the cries of his wife, who’d run after them, begging her husband to have mercy on their child.