Luc ducked his head. “We…we aren’t prepared for visitors.”
“Luc, don’t be impolite,” Madame said. “I’ll have Yvette set for tea in the salon.”
In Madame Crépet’s salon, each wall was a different color, like a riotous fruit bowl. Strawberry red, plum purple, pear yellow, the deep orange of a nectarine. Embroidered pillows piled on every surface, beneath paintings of long-haired women on tropical beaches, as bright as Gauguin. Her salon was like falling into a paint box.
“Mr. Bauer,” she said, with a sudden, coy smile, “I’m sure you’ll permit me my Earl Gray. I am not wholly French, after all.”
He bowed, but Luc shook his head. “The salon, Maman, it’s…the rugs are being cleaned.”
The rugs scattered throughout Mille Mots had been there since the Crusades, I was sure, faded, patterned things that always put me in mind of a Turkish harem.
“Today?” Madame blinked. “I didn’t order that.”
“Papa did,” Luc said, which was a patent lie. Monsieur Crépet scarcely noticed if he was indoors or out. He didn’t care a toss for the rugs.
“Well, then.” She tugged at an earring. “I suppose it will have to be the rose garden.”
“Perhaps Bauer doesn’t have time for tea.”
“Frau Crépet, I am most delighted for tea.” Mr. Bauer bowed. “And Crépet, you may not expel me so quickly. My racket is strapped to my motorbike.”
“You’ve come for the afternoon, then?” Luc looked dismayed.
“If it is to be tennis, I will have Marthe send sandwiches and beer,” Madame declared.
Mr. Bauer grinned. “Beer? Frau Crépet, you may not be wholly French, but you are, I think, a little bit German.”
Madame Crépet actually blushed and set off to give her instructions to the cook and maid.
“Your mother, she is more charming than you, Crépet.” Mr. Bauer touched his hat and nodded in my direction. “As is the fräulein here.”
Luc ran a hand through his hair. His friend wore a tweed cap; Luc was bare-headed and in need of a haircut. “Mademoiselle Ross, this is Stefan Bauer, my grand adversaire.” This last was said with a raise of his eyebrows.
“Grand adversaire.” Stefan Bauer laughed at this. “Do we have such a grand rivalry? Of course, I am usually winning.” He winked at me.
There was a set to Luc’s jaw. “Not always. Sometimes I win.”
His friend still watched me, until I looked away. “For now,” he said.
I wanted Luc to follow me back to the chestnut tree. I wanted to finish my drawing. I wanted to finish whatever was begun when I took his face in my hands.
Instead he pushed ahead with his introduction. He didn’t look at me as he did. “And, Bauer, this is…” He faltered.
This is the girl I almost kissed a minute ago, I filled in. This is the girl I fed honey and cheese, the girl I wrote letters to in Paris, the girl I waited for outside of a cave. This is Clare, my friend.
But “…this is Clare Ross, my mother’s ward,” is how he finished. He looked away. “She is staying here…until…until another situation can be found.”
I blinked and, through stinging eyes, watched them walk away towards the rose garden. Stefan leaned towards Luc and said, “So that is what you have been hiding?” He looked back over his shoulder at me, a long, appraising glance.
“The demoiselle?” Luc didn’t even turn around. “She’s nothing.”
Madame left me at the table in the rose garden while she went to give instructions to Marthe on refreshments. I pulled on my gloves, straightened my hat, sat back-straight on the crooked wooden chair. Not that it mattered. Luc and his friend didn’t look my way at all. I could have been crying my eyes out and no one would have noticed.
On a rectangle of lawn, Luc had ranged out a net and pounded it into the ground, amid apologies that the grass wasn’t clipped short enough.
“I thought you were joking when you said you did not have a proper court here,” Mr. Bauer said, opening a case with a polished racket. “At the weekends, do you not come here to practice?”
“I come…” He glanced at me, barely. “I come to help my maman.”
To help my maman. I tightened my fingers on the sketchbook on my lap.
“I know why you really come each weekend,” his friend said. “Crépet, perhaps we can teach the fräulein to swing a racket, eh?”
“With the tournament next week?” Luc bounced the ball. He’d changed into duck trousers and a white shirt like Mr. Bauer, though Luc’s were unpressed. He’d combed back his hair with pomade. He looked far too respectable. “I hardly have time to play schoolteacher.”
Though I hadn’t the slightest interest in learning tennis, at that moment I wanted nothing more. “I didn’t realize I was such an inconvenience.” I stood. “I’ll try.”
Luc glowered but Mr. Bauer grinned. “Fräulein, if you will come and take this racket, I will show you what to do.”
“This is really a waste of time,” Luc said, but I walked out onto the lawn and took the offered racket.
“Now, two hands, please, like this. Hold tight.”
Luc rolled his eyes.
Mr. Bauer was explaining how to keep my back straight, how to extend my elbow, how to keep my arms just like that, when Madame came out of the house with her writing case tucked under an arm.
“Mademoiselle!” Her voice was sharp, and I jumped away from where Mr. Bauer held the racket.
“Madame, I was just…”
She strode across the lawn to me. “Perhaps you’ve been in the sun for long enough.” Madame, who dug in the rose garden until she was as brown as a Gypsy, didn’t worry about the sun. And yet her brow was creased in a worry that I couldn’t explain. “Please gather your things.”
“Fräulein.” Mr. Bauer touched his hat. “I regret your departure.”
Luc, concentrating on his shoelaces, didn’t say a word.
Madame Crépet escorted me upstairs, leaving both me and my sketch pad in my tower room. She nodded, once, and said, “Perhaps it’s best if you stay up here the rest of the afternoon. The day has grown warm.” With no other explanation than that, she left.
The windows were open and I threw myself onto the bench beneath one. The breeze cooled my face. I hadn’t done a thing, and here both Luc and Madame were acting as though I’d done something awful. Why couldn’t they just explain things to me? Why couldn’t Luc just look me straight in the eye and tell me what I’d done? I leaned out and saw the stretch of green lawn and the river, but no sign of him or Mr. Bauer or their tennis match.
I took off my hat and gloves, pushed up my sleeves, and climbed out of my bedroom window.
I could hear the thwap of the tennis ball against rackets, punctuated by the occasional laugh and shout in French. I pressed my back against the wall and inched up the roof towards the ridgepole. The tiles were slick with moss, and my boots were worn on the bottom. I swallowed down any thoughts of how far it was to the ground and edged up, sidestep by sidestep.
But it was worth the climb. I could see clear around the house, from the river to the linden-lined drive in the front. Down the other side of the ridgepole was a window bordered in faded blue drapes. Through the window I could see a burnished tennis racket hanging on the wall. Luc’s room.
Over there, down on the wide back lawn, was the impromptu tennis match. Mr. Bauer moved, loose-limbed and nonchalant. He was the one laughing and calling out French insults. Luc played rigid and intense. Even from my perch on the roof, I could tell that he was silent.
I didn’t know what it was, why, in a breath, Luc had changed. When Madame and the sophisticated Stefan Bauer crossed the lawn, reminding us that the world was bigger than our quiet moment, Luc pushed me away. He acted the way he had that day he’d come home from the train station and saw me in my new white dress.