Nevers

by Sara Cassidy

  “In Nevers, readers will be spellbound by the magic and mayhem of Odette and Anneline’s life in motion. Against a rich background of post-Revolutionary France, they’ll learn of perseverance, friendship and love in many forms. Cassidy is a master storyteller, and her fresh imagery and wordplay, along with a well-paced plot and a diverse cast of characters, are a real delight.”

  —Julie Paul, author of Meteorites and The Pull of the Moon

  “Nevers is a marvelous and magical book with an unforgettable heroine—prepare to be transported!”

  —Esta Spalding, author of the Fitzgerald-Trouts series

  “Odette’s drawn to the fascinating sights of Nevers, and readers will be as well…This brief sojourn in an alternative 18th-century France is an unexpectedly rich one.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Nevers is a funny story, simply told, with a delightful heroine. It has been a long time since I read such a convincing, relevant historical novel for children. Highly Recommended.”

  —CM: Canadian Review of Materials

  Copyright © 2019 Sara Cassidy

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Nevers / Sara Cassidy.

  Names: Cassidy, Sara, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190066172 Canadiana (ebook) 20190066199 | ISBN 9781459821637 (softcover) ISBN 9781459821644 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459821651 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8555.A7812 N48 2019 | DDC jC813/.54—dc23

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019934045

  Simultaneously published in Canada and the United States in 2019

  Summary: In this magical middle-grade novel, Odette unlocks a mysterious spell.

  Orca Book Publishers is committed to reducing the consumption of nonrenewable resources in the making of our books. We make every effort to use materials that support a sustainable future.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Edited by Barbara Pulling

  Cover design by Rachel Page

  Cover artwork by Serena Malyon

  Author photo by Katrina Rain

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  22 21 20 19 • 4 3 2 1

  Pour Donald, et à la mémoire de Carol

  Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Here follow the adventures of resourceful, fourteen-year-old Odette and her beautiful but mortally clumsy mother, Anneline, on their arrival by cheese cart to the small city of Nevers, in a part of France where the fields are green and rolling, the houses are built stone upon stone, castles rise over the landscape and rabbits raid gardens on moonlit nights.

  Radishes are especially sweet and soporific when the moon is full. Clover is too. I know these things because I know things that most mortals do not. I know the smell of clover when the moon glints like a silver coin tossed aloft by Fortune deciding whom to favor.

  I tell this story because Odette is too modest to speak of herself. She is having a well-deserved rest now, and when she opens her eyes again, she will be too busy to dwell on the past. After the marvels that have exhausted her, Odette is poised to enter her own life.

  Why is it that we want to know what others think and feel? To dip our buckets into their silence? Why do others’ stories seem more colorful than our own? Perhaps each of us knows our own story too well. It is erased, as it were, as soon as we turn the page.

  I understand what it is to yield to silence. To have words clot in your throat and to choke when you mean to speak. These days, though, words flow through me as easily as water released down riverbeds in spring. The snow has melted, and the ice has thawed. I will do my best to share all that I have seen and heard.

  For a long time the people of Nevers laughed at me. They threw rocks at me, dead fish, the spokes from a broken carriage wheel once. But late at night, when they were lonely and afraid, some of them confided in me.

  I will miss a few details—that is inevitable. But I’ll embellish here and there to balance things out. Not to worry. The main facts of the story are sturdy. Its bones, its timbers. Time to step into its chapters. Time to set sail for a corner of France in the very last year of the eighteenth century.

  One

  “Whoa!”

  The carriage halts suddenly, startling Odette from a dream in which she was a large wheel of soft cheese about to be rolled off a cliff. She has spent several hours as a stowaway in the back of a dairy delivery carriage, with a block of Comté cheese for a pillow and a ragged length of damp cheesecloth for a blanket. Is it any wonder she is dreaming about Camembert?

  Odette listens as the milkman steps down the carriage’s creaky steps to the muddy road. Footsteps approach, sucking at the muck. “Bonjour,” says the milkman. A man with a gravelly voice responds. The two discuss the unseasonal downpour that occurred just before dawn and fall into conversation about the best remedy for an aching bunion. One swears by boiled chamomile flowers mashed with leopard-slug slime. The other recommends manure from black pigs, collected in a thunderstorm.

  The two strike a deal for a dozen wheels of Brie for an impending wedding feast. They then agree that it isn’t too early for a glass of wine.

  Odette elbows her mother, who snores wetly beside her. “We’ve arrived somewhere.”

  Anneline raises her head and scowls at the murky surroundings. She closes her eyes again. Odette raises the carriage’s canvas cover a thumb and watches as the milkman hitches his horse to a post and bumbles into the tavern with his friend. Odette tugs her mother’s loose braid. “Now.”

  “Ouch.” With much grumbling, Anneline unfolds herself from the crush of cream jugs and butter logs while Odette gathers up their few belongings. Anneline points to a basket brimming with small goat cheeses. “Grab some trouser buttons. And a round of Morbier. That’s the one striped with black ash.”

  “I won’t thieve.”

  Odette leaps down to the mucky road and puts out her hand to help her mother.

  Daylight powders the darkness. A woman in rags struggles past, pushing a wheelbarrow heaped with cauliflowers. A man lugs reed cages; inside them heavy rabbits move warily, the X’s of their noses twitching for a familiar smell.

  “Market day,” Odette observes. “I wonder what town this is.”

  Anneline turns to a man draped in sausages. “Excuse me…”

  Odette grabs her mother’s grimy sleeve. “Mother, you can’t just ask a stranger, ‘Where am I?’”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s the one thing
you’re supposed to know—where you are.”

  “I suppose. But I know a lot of things people aren’t supposed to know, such as what a man’s finger looks like lying on a paisley carpet. That toothy dog was far too protective of me. And the cruelty of nuns. And the sweet ache in a woman’s lungs as she exhales her last wretched breath of air—”

  “It was not your last breath of air, Mother.”

  “It could have been.”

  “Except, of course, you’d flirted with a fireman earlier that day.”

  “Is it my fault he fell in love? Or that he chose to dive into the cold water to save me?”

  “Drowning himself.”

  “Yes. Poor man.”

  “And now you’ve gotten another person killed. I saw legs sticking out from the rubble. Mr. Pannet, I’m quite sure, judging by the expensive shoe leather.”

  Anneline giggles. “The tax collector. Finally some luck.” But then, to Odette’s surprise, her mother’s face crimps with concern. “Was there anyone else?”

  “Crushed? I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  Anneline peels off a white glove and waves it in the air. “I surrender.”

  Odette grits her teeth. She has little patience this morning for Anneline’s potion of charm and helplessness. “Surrender from your life, Mother?” she asks. “Not possible. Not with that dirty glove anyway.”

  The rising sun has cast the sky in pink, bringing light to the faces of the farmers and artisans preparing their market stalls. The shadow thrust by the massive cathedral at the edge of the marketplace begins to retreat. Odette takes in the buildings around her and glimpses in the distance a wide river busy with boats. She and her mother have arrived in a sizable town.

  As they walk through the wakening marketplace, Odette remembers to keep a close eye on Anneline, who has a dismaying habit of taking fruit from the bottom of fruit sellers’ carefully stacked pyramids. But Anneline isn’t eyeing the fruit. Instead, she is staring up at the cathedral walls.

  “Now those are flying buttresses!” Anneline points to the row of high stone arches that keep the cathedral walls from collapsing sideways. “I could have used a couple of them last night.”

  “Why did you push over that wall?”

  “I only leaned against it. I was tired. Light-headed from the wine.”

  Anneline giggles, but to Odette the giggle sounds forced. Hollow. Does her mother actually feel shame? That would be new. And she hasn’t sent apples rolling into the street, nor is she chatting with everyone they pass, flashing her white teeth. Perhaps Anneline is changing. Perhaps, Odette dares to hope, in this unfamiliar city there will be no misadventure, no chaos—

  “Thief!”

  A bony woman in a dirty pinafore pulls forcefully on Anneline’s cloak.

  “Let my piglet go!” the woman screeches.

  Anneline, rattled, lifts her skirt. A glistening pink snout protrudes from underneath. “Get out of there, you silly beast!” Anneline warbles. But the piglet only disappears again beneath her petticoats.

  “The rich are cockroaches,” the bony woman squawks to the gathering crowd. “The Revolution did not stamp them all out.”

  Anneline lifts her skirt again. Odette notices that her knees are scratched from scrabbling in the castle rubble the evening before. The small pink creature snuffles at her feet.

  “Oooh. Her ankles must smell like truffles,” titters a large man with ink-stained fingers and an impressive nose.

  Odette reaches for her mother’s hand. “You need to get away from it. Jump!”

  Anneline tries to hop over the piglet, but she trips and lands on the small beast, making it squeal like a set of wounded bagpipes. As the creature squirms beneath her, Anneline flails and falls backward. Her head strikes a cobblestone with a CRACK that echoes off the cathedral wall.

  “Ohhh,” the crowd murmurs.

  The skinny woman in the dirty pinafore snatches up her piglet and wags a finger in Anneline’s face. “Serves you right!”

  But Anneline does not respond. She is unconscious.

  A man who has been applying paint the color of the local red wine to a nearby window shutter hurries down his ladder and strokes Anneline’s head with his paint-spattered hand. “Her ladyship, so radiant, so ravishing, so shapely,” he coos.

  “Hey!” Odette yells. “My mother is not shapely.”

  Anneline stirs. “Actually, Odette, I am. All of my husbands have said so.”

  “Divine angel,” the painter sings. “Do you know where you are?”

  Anneline raises her head and looks about, dazed. “No,” she says. “I haven’t ever been here before.”

  “I will tell you. You are in the town of Nevers.”

  Two

  It is difficult to shake the painter. Odette finally points to the paint hardening on his paintbrush and says, “You’d better get those shutters finished.”

  The painter looks wounded. “It is true,” he admits. “I must return to my labors.” He reaches for Anneline’s hand. “If you ever need something painted—a room, a wall, a bedstead—ask for Guillaume. I am at your service.” He climbs back up his ladder, shouting “Adieu!” from the top rung as Odette and her mother head into a maze of narrow streets.

  “What would I want with a piglet?” Anneline complains. “It was a cute little thing, though, wasn’t it? Those freckles like soot spots. Oh, my head. What did that odd-looking painter call this town?”

  “Nevers,” Odette answers.

  “It’s an English word, isn’t it? For nowhere? Or nothing?”

  “It means ‘not ever.’”

  “That sounds promising. Like oblivion or something.”

  “Oblivion is promising?”

  “From the Latin oblivio, meaning ‘obliteration,’” says Anneline. Anneline’s fourth husband had been a polyglot, a morose one, who taught the children of the wealthy and undertook to teach Odette and her mother Latin and Greek. Odette had done well, but Anneline had not—she had bristled at having to sit like a schoolgirl. “Complete forgetfulness. Wouldn’t that be restful?”

  “No!” Odette cries.

  But maybe it would be. Odette could forget all of the calamities her mother had wrought, and her parade of awful husbands. Maybe she could forget the questions posed by her own pale, lopsided face whenever she caught sight of her reflection, questions about the “ugly husband,” as her mother referred to the first husband, who had engendered her. He was a librarian who, though not dashing, was rumored to have had a half ounce of royal blood in his veins. Odette had never met him. Anneline had not learned she was pregnant until the day after he died.

  “If we forgot everything, I believe I would be young again,” Anneline muses. “I am beautiful now, but you should have seen me at your age, Odette. Once, in the town of Cluny, spying me from high in the tower, the abbey bell ringer was unable to ring the Angelus bell, he was so hypnotized by my elegance. It was the first time in a thousand years the bell was silent…”

  An onlooker might have wondered how mother and daughter could be so at ease walking the streets of a strange town with nothing but the clothes on their backs and their worldly belongings in a single bag —which Odette carried. Inside the bag were their identity papers, a needle and thread, Anneline’s face powder and Egyptian oil, Anneline’s favorite book and Odette’s knife.

  The truth was that Odette and Anneline were practiced at being uprooted. “Time to change addresses,” Anneline had announced more than a dozen times in the fourteen years since Odette was born.

  When she was little Odette had cried and felt fearful when she and her mother had to move along, but for many years now she had accepted her lot. Her mother couldn’t help being herself. Moving was expected. Staying was unexpected.

  But this time is different. Odette feels it in her bones. The evening before, hiding in the bushes by the castle rubble, she had noticed stunned strands of white in Anneline’s black braid and a weariness in her eyes. There was sorrow in her voice,
too, possibly regret. Her mother is changing.

  Odette always keeps a sharp eye on her mother. Anneline is “a danger,” as one husband put it. “Accident prone,” said another. She has many times been the cause of injury—or worse. Her second to last husband, a healing-salts magnate, had called her a “saboteur.” At a dinner party, the president of a competing salts company had discovered Anneline’s love of wine and proceeded to fill her glass over and over until she whispered her husband’s recipes into the man’s hairy ear. Her husband was bankrupt within a year.

  Her most recent husband, Marcel, an archeologist, had thought her merely “clumsy.” Well, now he had seen the full extent of her clumsiness.

  Odette, Anneline and Marcel had spent nearly a year in the sleepy town of Sigy-le-Châtel, where Marcel had bought the castle ruins overlooking the town. Their restoration was to be his life project, and Anneline his helpmate.

  Anneline had overseen a party the night before, which was to raise money to refurbish the ruins. She’d drawn up the menu and hired the band. (She’d arrived home from their first meeting drunk, in a hay cart pulled not by a horse but by a wild-haired musician who periodically blew into a dented French horn, sending magpies flapping out of the trees.)

  The party was Anneline’s vision, but Odette, of course, had kept it all afloat, delivering the invitations, ordering the food, even swinging a scythe at dawn to clear a field for dancing.

  The event had been planned for a full moon, when the ruins would be “bathed in moonlight,” a phrase Anneline loved to repeat. It had begun gloriously. Silver trays polished like mirrors. Glistening oysters on thin slices of baguette. Tall glasses of fizzing champagne. Men in tuxedos, their beards trim. Women in gowns and long necklaces.

  The crowning glory of the ruins was the remaining side of the castle keep. It towered over the local countryside, its ghostly remnant height enthralling. It was a marvel, nearly miraculous, that the single wall stood, unsupported stone on top of stone on top of stone. Marcel’s first planned project was to bolster it. Indeed, the evening would raise the funds to do so.