Once Upon a Rose

by Laura Florand

  Colette just gave him one of her gentler smiles, struggling with the lock on the chest. “Give her roots. Look how hungry she is for them. She started trying to sink herself into the earth—into you—the second she got here.”

  Matt frowned at his aunt. “Did you give her my land as some kind of planting soil? Thanks a lot.”

  “First of all, Matthieu, it was my land. To give to whom I chose. And second of all, she’s single, and there are five of you boys the right age for her, and four of you have persistently failed to find the right woman up until now.” Matt liked the way his Tante Colette always used the number five, as if Lucien was still there. “I thought the odds were good that one of you would be her type.”

  Hey. Matt scowled. “Damien or Tristan?”

  “If it worked out that way. I hadn’t met her yet, Matthieu. Or seen how you reacted to her.”

  Heat touched his cheeks. But he said, “Damien or Tristan would probably be a better fit for her. They’d be able to fit in that world of celebrities and performers. Be better able to travel with her on tour.” Well…actually Damien and Tristan both had a lot of responsibilities, themselves. Maybe the need to tour was a challenge for any couple to figure out.

  Colette made that little moue of hers that said, Kids these days. They have no brains but I’ll try to be patient. “Interesting, then, that she went for you. Almost as if she felt you fit best with her.”

  Matt smiled and gently brushed his aunt’s hands aside to open the lock for her and lift the lid, revealing layers of women’s clothes, laces and silks. So many old scents came off it—dust and cedar and hints of lavender water. The essence of a long life. He wanted to be like Tristan and bury his head in that scent, take deep breaths of his aunt before she was gone from his life.

  “Layla would love this,” Matt said. And he thought, She really would. She wouldn’t dismiss it or be impatient with it. She’d be delighted. Tante Colette was right. Layla had embraced everything he showed her, everything about his land, his family, himself, as if all of it was exactly the nutrient-rich earth she needed, in order to bloom.

  Hey. That was…an interesting way to think about it.

  She needed him? In order to flourish?

  It was probably utterly ridiculous to actually like the idea of being planting soil, but…he’d always been good at that. Solidity. Dirt. Growing things. It made it seem as if she needed him for exactly who he was.

  “I do have something I think Layla would like,” Colette murmured, reaching into the folds of clothes. “A good thing to pass on to a great-granddaughter.”

  “Is it something of Élise Dubois’s? You made her cry with those stories.”

  “She’s got a soft heart.” Colette focused on the chest. “She might need someone else to take care of it for her.”

  Matt smiled involuntarily. People rarely remembered this about him, but he was actually pretty good at taking care of soft, delicate things.

  Colette glanced up at him, her smile a touch ironic but not in a mean way. “You like it? When she buries her head in your chest?”

  “Yeah,” Matt said, embarrassed. It made him feel…strong. As if he could fix her problems just by existing. As if she trusted him with her weaknesses.

  Colette shook her head, a little amused, a little rueful, and focused back on the chest. “I do have some things of Élise’s to pass on to her descendants.”

  Wait—what? Descendants? Had she just used the plural?

  “Humble things, really, that were precious to her. Sentimental value only. Remember, Élise’s father worked in our factories and her mother worked our fields, so hers wasn’t a family of means. She was the first in her family to become a schoolteacher, to ‘make it’, so she didn’t have the kind of accumulation of things and land the Rosiers did.”

  “Layla will like them,” Matt said quietly. He knew that about her already. She respected what others offered her. She challenged his grandfather because his grandfather loved the challenge, and she bent her head over photos with Tante Colette, and when a man handed her a rose, she almost cried.

  A man could trust a woman like that with what he had to offer. Himself.

  It was funny, because she told this story about herself as the wanderer who was hard to hold, who didn’t want any demands on her, and it wasn’t even true. That story was more like her defense mechanism. Her response, maybe, to being the daughter of a father who had wandered off on her when she was two and a mother who had herself fled a war-torn country when she was nine with only what she and her parents could fit in a small suitcase. Hell, maybe her “I am a wandering minstrel” story was like the way he folded his arms and growled so people would quit the hell telling him he had a damn mushy heart.

  Which he totally didn’t.

  But Layla did. She cared, and she needed someone to hold her—to give her roots. Maybe she was almost starting to trust him for that job.

  “But this is something from my side of the family.” Colette withdrew a pair of stockings from the chest—the kind of thing that would have been precious back in the war, when women had had to paint on fake stockings. She unrolled one of the stockings and shook it. Something metal slid out, followed by a chain that slithered down into her palm.

  Matt gazed at it. The gold chain had curled on top of some kind of pendant. Through the chain, he could make out enamel on an oval about the size of a small coin. Enamel that seemed to depict a…his breath caught. “Tante Colette. Is that…the seal?” The family seal, the patriarchal seal, the symbol of power over his valley, of the head of the family. “J’y suis, j’y reste?”

  “Niccolò didn’t put J’y suis, j’y reste on his seal,” Tante Colette said and slid the pendant into his palm.

  “What?” Her words made so little sense that Matt couldn’t even look at the precious pendant yet. He had to stare at her to make sure she wasn’t finally going into dementia.

  “Your grandfather really took to that motto, when we were fighting the Germans. Carved it on those cliffs. I am here and here I’ll stay. ‘You can’t budge me.’ But the only place Niccolò himself ever used it, that we know of, was here.”

  She shook another stocking, and a gold ring slid into her palm. Real gold, but simple, no jewels, only a twining rose symbol. The wedding ring, Matt thought with a shock. That simple ring that must have been all Niccolò could afford, when he first married Laurianne. “Tante Colette, you did take all those heirlooms. Pépé was right.”

  “They’re mine as much as his,” Colette said flatly. She angled the ring so that he could make out the inscription on the inside. J’y suis, j’y reste.

  Matt took it from her. Everything inside him hushed. Four hundred years ago, his rough, dangerous, mercenary ancestor out of Italy had sworn his fate to such a little, little hand. He could barely squeeze it on the tip of his pinky.

  “He was talking to her,” Colette said quietly. “When he said that. Not making a vow on behalf of all his descendants to tie them to some chunk of land. He was making a promise to her, his ring on her finger: I am here and here I’ll stay.”

  It moved him so much, so suddenly, that his eyes stung, and he took a quick breath to get that under control, since he would never live it down if he let it show.

  Colette watched him a moment, letting him look at the ring, and then eased it out of his hand. “This one’s not for you, Matthieu,” she said quietly. “I hope you understand. I think one of your cousins will need it more.”

  He wished they could give it to Lucien. Just hand it to their long-lost cousin like a weight, like a vow, like a thing that reeled him home and anchored him here: J’y suis, j’y reste. It’s the person that matters, not who your father was.

  Niccolò had been illegitimate, too.

  “The seal Niccolò created,” Colette said, after she’d hidden the ring away again, “says something completely different.”

  Matt looked down at it again in his left palm. With his thumb, he stroked the chain away to reveal that exqu
isite enamel, so clearly his valley, although empty of roses—just the shape of the hills, the river running through it.

  He turned it over to show the gold seal on the other side. Two rose bushes growing out of the ground, twining together, reaching higher and higher, escaping the mountains that framed them, up into the symbolic heavens of the edge of the seal. They twined together to make one bloom, in the center of the upper half of the oval. Along the bottom edge, where the bushes grew out of the ground, curved the words: Quivi s’incomincia.

  As exposed as he’d been to Latin, through all the old-fashioned Masses his grandmother took them to, and Italian, through their own proximity to the border, and Provençal, with its roots sunk deep into both languages, and of course, French, it was easy enough to make out the translation, however archaic the wording: It all starts here.

  He could only stare at it, as the words seemed to expand and expand inside him until they pressed against the hills that framed the valley, until they pressed against the outermost limits of his heart and still kept trying to make it expand even bigger.

  It all starts here.

  Not where he was bound, but where he began.

  I’ll give my family roots, Niccolò’s seal said. And from them, they’ll grow as big as they can.

  He ran his thumb over the words, over the roses rising out of the ground, up to the bloom, pressing that smooth enamel of the valley on the other side more deeply into his skin.

  “I’d like to give it to her, but now I think I can’t,” Tante Colette said softly. “I think if she ever receives a gift like that, it will have to come from you.”

  He looked from the pendant to his old aunt, trying so hard not to flush, trying so hard not to let his eyes sting.

  Colette reached out an old, old hand and closed his big, young, strong fist around the seal. “Because it’s your valley,” she said quietly. “And it’s you.”

  “Aww, hell.” Matt bent his head into his hands, the seal and chain pressing against his forehead. “Tante Colette.”

  She patted his shoulder, this rare, precious touch from a woman who was not that emotive. “It’s all right, Matthieu. You’re strong enough to be a valley and to be bigger than a valley, and I’ve always been very proud of you, that inside that much strength, you keep such a tender heart.”

  Chapter 21

  Peace pressed up against Layla from the ancient village. Matt had brought her to the top of the world. They strolled through little cobblestone streets. A wall of ivy framed pale blue shutters. A sundial was painted dusty gold against an ochre wall, with some saying in Provençal she couldn’t understand. Flowers grew up the walls between old painted doors and in pots on balconies and on the edge of fountains. Children ran through streets with cartables, those square French book bags, as they came home from school, stopping to play in a playground set in the middle of a garden off the central place. A sign over a shuttered shop proclaimed Huiles d’olive de région.

  She and Matt reached a little church at the top of the town, surrounded by an old cemetery, and stood on a stone terrace beyond the cemetery, gazing over the Côte d’Azur.

  Ageless stone quiet brushed against her with the soft wind, the air so clean of everything but stone and cedar that the light up here seemed to work its way into every stress-darkened part of her soul and breathe it clean. The slope plunged steeply away below the stone terrace, giving a view of the Mediterranean, its azure deepened by distance.

  Matt stood beside her, gazing out at the view. His valley lay below them to the right, the river through it a fine thread, the limestone cliffs through which it cut to enter the valley a thumbnail-size patch of gray. He had showered after he finished with the harvest work for the day, before he took her on this date, so that if a woman wanted to seek refuge from all that clean, pure air and find a more intimate scent of roses, she would have to nuzzle her nose in a quest for it all over his body.

  She smiled, reassured by the thought. Reassured by how, every day, after he finished up, he took her to some new amazing spot in his world and offered it to her like the special gift that it was. Ancient hill towns, and Roman bridges, and hikes through the maquis. And this view right now.

  “It’s beautiful here,” she whispered.

  He gave her a curious, marveling look. “You always do that,” he murmured. “It’s as if you take everything I know, wrap it up in wonder, and hand it back to me like this bright, shiny new present. It’s like my whole life is Christmas when you’re looking at it.”

  “Well, it’s just that…it’s so beautiful,” Layla said helplessly, a little confused. How odd to have such an extraordinary life, to be part of, lord of, such incredible beauty, and take it for granted.

  “He would have stood right here, once,” Matt said low. “This church would already have been four hundred years old. He would have stood here, looking down into that valley, deciding he would make it his.”

  “Your first patriarch?” Layla guessed. “Niccolò Rosario?” What an incredible feeling, to know that you stood in the same spot your ancestor once had when he founded a dynasty. And that even though it had been four hundred years, the place where you stood would have felt old to that ancestor, too, when he was here.

  Matt’s hand shifted in his pocket, as if he was rubbing change or something.

  Her mother was wrong, she thought. She had to give that land back. It was a hole in him, for her to have it. You couldn’t leave a hole in a man’s heart and ask him to trust you with it.

  And if she needed this place to write music, then maybe she also had to trust that he would let her stay.

  “I worked on a new song today,” she said. Does my world matter to you, too? Do you understand how important this is to me?

  “Yeah?” He abandoned the change in his pocket to take her hand, rubbing his thumb over her fingertips as if he could still catch the tingles from her guitar strings. “You going to sing it for me?”

  She shrugged, embarrassed in that way she was never embarrassed when standing on a stage. “It’s not ready yet.”

  He smiled a little. “I’ll just pretend to be asleep tomorrow morning and listen to you toying with it.”

  “Hey! Have you been pretending this whole week?” She often woke up in a dreamy mood beside him, pulling her guitar to her and propping herself against the headboard while he slept, testing chords and lyrics softly, trying to catch that dreaming.

  He shrugged, his smile deepening.

  “I should have suspected something, when you started sleeping in late.” But it felt kind of…sweet, too, to know she’d given him that pleasure of lingering in bed, listening to music, as if he, too, had other facets to his being than fixing problems and making things work. It felt sweet to know he pretended so he could listen to her, as if that was something special to him.

  “That’s not the only reason I like to ‘sleep’ in late now.” He rubbed his thumb up the edge of her palm, the curve of his lips a little wicked.

  “Shh.” She ducked away to push open the door of the little twelfth-century church, pointing up at the solemn saints carved above it. “Behave.”

  He smiled, following her into the church’s profound quiet. Nothing moved inside but time and their own hushed footsteps.

  Simplicity greeted them: bare stone walls, almost no decoration at all but a cross and a statue of Mary behind the altar. Worn wood pews led to that altar, under the simple barrel nave above them and the old round columns that supported its arches. Layla stopped in front of a marble sarcophagus. Fourth-century Roman, a little bronze sign proclaimed. She crouched down to trace the forms of the Latin letters that covered the marble and read their translation. An inscription from parents to their eighteen-year-old son, dead on the day he was due to start his military career for Rome.

  She straightened, her throat tightening suddenly for those parents seventeen centuries ago. “One of your ancestors?”

  “Well, probably not on Niccolò’s side. But on Laurianne’s, who knows?”


  “Hey.” Such a strange, intense thought struck Layla that she had to reach out and grab Matt’s hand again. “He might be one of my ancestors.”

  “Well, probably not him,” Matt admitted. “Since he died when he was eighteen, and the inscription doesn’t mention a wife and kids. But…yeah.” He reached out and took her other hand, too, holding her face to face with him, his eyes warm and his body so solid in front of her. “You have ancestors around here. We could probably track them down, the Dubois gravestones. Élise’s name must be on some of the plaques to World War II heroes. And on the lists of the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’, if she died saving children. I think I remember now seeing her photo in the Musée de la Résistance.”

  Layla stood very still, her hand over her lips, shaky suddenly with this sense of time. Of weight. As if she was part of this great sweep of existence that made her mortal and immortal both, as if she had existed before she ever played a note, and she would exist after those notes stopped.

  Which was what her music did—made immortality out of her mortal human experience, turned it into something that would outlast her life. But…she’d always had to rely entirely on that music to anchor her into human history. She’d never been able to be a part of it just by being herself.

  “And then, of course, you have the Rosiers and the Delatours.” Matt curled the tips of his fingers into hers for a gentle squeeze. “By adoption. So yeah…you have roots here.”

  Her eyes stung a little. She bent her head.

  Matt loosed her hand to reach into his pocket again.

  She took a deep breath of that peace and time. “I’ll give it back. Your land. I don’t need it.”

  Matt froze. “You…don’t?”

  She shrugged, trying to do this lightly, so that he didn’t see how much it cost her to give it up to him. “It’s not important to me like it is to you.”

  Matt rocked back a step, almost as if she’d hit him.