So when, early the next morning, I looked through my window and saw Luc stealing through the kitchen door with a small rucksack and Bede by his side, I didn’t even think. I pulled my hat from the wardrobe and slipped from the house after him.
He’d been heading for the stand of trees that ran along the river, so I picked up my skirts in one hand and ran in that direction. There was no sign of him among the trees, but I jogged along the tree line, peering through the branches to where they thinned out along the bank. When a bevy of larks startled from a tree up ahead, where the staggering tree line met the denser forest, I knew I’d found him. I darted into the woods.
He walked and I followed for what felt like hours. I stayed close enough to see the back of his brown jacket but far enough behind that I could stay out of sight. As he hiked, he stabbed the ground ahead of him with a found walking stick and sang American jazz songs. Even though I didn’t know the words, I wanted to sing along with him. I stepped over rocks, edged around trees, and stayed quiet. I didn’t want him to turn around and send me home.
I was just wondering if he was ever going to stop when the trees opened up onto a clearing, bordered by a rock face. It was empty. The face was high—maybe as tall as it was up to my tower window in the château—and jagged, as though someone had carved it away with a chisel. I crossed the clearing and put my hand against the rock, but there was no way Luc could have climbed it.
To the right, the rock face curved down to, unbelievably, a railroad track, grown over with weeds. I peered down the track, narrow and straight as a ruler, but didn’t see him or his rucksack.
So I followed the rock face to the left, past crumbles of rocks that soon began resolving themselves into old, battered-down walls and doorways. I was seeing the outlines of long-gone rooms butting up against the face, with charred stone and dirt floors grown over with matted grass.
The face sloped down and I passed more rooms and then little pockets, carved clear out of the rock. Shallow little caves, tucked in at regular intervals, with wood violets scattered in front. Overhead, trees spread shade over the entrances. Luc could be in any one of them. And I could be walking home alone.
But then I spotted him, stretched beneath a plane tree. He’d shucked his jacket and his hat and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. It was white, coarse, tucked into a pair of loose blue pants. On his feet, braided leather sandals. He lay on his stomach, surrounded by curls of orange peels. But he wasn’t eating. With a wide pad spread out before him and a red Conté crayon in hand, Luc Crépet was drawing.
He’d once tucked a sketch into a letter, a quick, breathless Paris café scene, yet I’d never seen him with a pencil. I wanted to see more of his world, of the restless city where he lived during the week. It was the City of Light, the city of love, the city where revolutionaries stormed the Bastille and Impressionists stormed the Académie. I had been waiting, with each meeting, with each letter, for another glimpse of Paris. I had to be content with his words; they painted nearly as vibrant a picture.
I stepped closer, breath held. I wanted a peek at his sketch pad. Luc, away from his black suit, away from his studies and tennis, away from his maman, away from the château dripping with art, he was drawing. I wanted a peek at this private, stolen moment.
But it wasn’t Paris or even Mille Mots, those crumbling stones I always drew. It wasn’t the trees or the caves in this solemn little clearing or the carpet of wood violets. It wasn’t the orange peels. On his paper, Luc drew me.
This drawing, it wasn’t casual, like the inked Paris café, dashed off over, I imagined, glasses of wine and heady conversation. This one was careful, lines overlapped, erased, drawn in again. In sanguine, the drawing glowed. It was me and not me. My hair was pinned up, for one. My neck longer. My shoulders bare above a froth of lace.
I took another step and a branch cracked under my foot. “That’s not me,” I said.
Luc spun at my voice. An elbow crushed into his sketch pad as he pushed upright, leaving a streak of red on his shirt.
“I said it’s not me.” My face was hot. “You’ve made me look much older.”
Something about it—whether the upswept hair, the bare shoulders, the challenging expression—made me think of Mother and the painting I’d found in Monsieur Crépet’s studio. A forbidden pose, something undoubtedly adult, and it made me furiously embarrassed.
Luc looked every bit as furious. He flushed, then scrambled to his feet, snapping the book closed so quickly the cardboard cover tore. “Who asked you anyway?”
“That’s exactly it. Nobody asked me.” I rubbed my cheeks. “Did you? Did you ask if you could draw my likeness?”
He didn’t look the least bit apologetic. Rather, just discomfited at being caught out. “You’re the daughter of an artist, aren’t you? You should be used to it.”
Maybe the son of Claude Crépet would be used to posing. I’d seen the hallways of portraits. But my own mother, she never let me near while she was at her easel. I asked her more times than I could count if she’d paint me, draw me, trace me in the dust on the piano, but she always refused.
I parroted the response Mother always gave. “Artists do not choose what to paint. They are chosen.” It’s what she said as she sat in front of blank canvases, waiting for inspiration to strike. She looked so beautiful, so confident, so artistic, that what could I do but believe her?
“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “The world is full of things to capture on the page. To say otherwise is to ignore a world of beauty.”
His scornful tone incensed me. As though, as a Crépet, he was the expert. “And how do you know what inspires someone?” I asked. “Are you the keeper of the muse?”
“If you wait for inspiration to strike, you sit before an empty canvas. And then what have you gained?”
“Greatness.”
“Wasted time.”
I shook my head. He was wrong. Mother knew what she was doing. Her empty canvases, her discarded studies, they were waiting for perfection. “The masters were patient. They created, they perfected, and they achieved.”
“Even the masters had to put bread on the table.”
“And where is the romance in that?” I protested. “In painting for money rather than painting for art’s sake?”
“What is romantic about starving in a Paris garret? About begging rent from friends ‘for just one more week’? About waiting for that next big commission that might never come?” He tossed the crayon aside. “In the meantime, you eat soup and lentils, if that’s all there is in the kitchen. You stop up the leaks in the roof with old canvases that you’ll never sell. You chase your children out into the world to pick up education as they can.” He drew in a broken breath. “You tell yourself that it is all in the name of art. You tell yourself that it’s worth it.”
I looked to the red crayon lying in the leaves. “Clearly we don’t agree.”
“Mademoiselle,” he said, “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
I left, before he could see hot tears in my eyes. I was upset by his secretive sketch, by his disagreement, by his assertion that, all along, my mother had somehow been failing. I furiously kicked a rock.
As I wound back around the stone face, past the dark openings of the little caves, he called out behind me.
“Wait, mademoiselle.” Dry leaves crunched. “Clare.”
Back to the “Clare” of that quiet moment in the hallway of paintings, the “Clare” of the letters. I turned.