"Come join us!" Ben shouted as soon as they walked in.
They threaded their way between the tables. "I don’t know; you look pretty crowded already," Gideon said with a smile.
"Oh, no, please, we can easily make room," Ray said, looking glad to see them, and Claire murmured something similar.
"Sure," Ben said. "Unless you’re rubbin’ elbows, eatin’s just stokin’."
"And who said that?" Sophie asked.
"I believe it was my cousin Bobby Will."
"I thought your cousin was Billy Rob."
Ben looked thoughtfully at her. "No, Billy Rob’s my uncle on my mother’s side; married to Clara Bea. Bobby Will’s my cousin on my father’s side-Willie Bob’s boy."
Amid general laughter, a couple of chairs were taken from nearby tables and Gideon and John squeezed in. No one had ordered food yet, but they were almost through a bottle of white wine, and a new bottle with two more glasses was brought. Selection de l’Hotel, Vin de Table, the modest label said, but it turned out to be a better-thanordinary Chablis.
Gideon lifted his glass in a salute. "So," he said, "what brings you to Mont St. Michel?"
He felt at ease with these four. Of all the people at Rochebonne they were the ones he trusted most: Ray, sweet-tempered and earnest, and altogether above suspicion; gentle Claire Fougeray, thin and pallid, but with a ruddy heat in her cheeks that he guessed was due less to the wine than to Ray’s proximity; Sophie Butts, frank and solid; Ben, with his easy way of meandering between homespun adages and lawyerly good sense. If one of them turned out to be a murderer, he was going to be awfully annoyed. And surprised.
It was Ben who answered. "We came down to pick up Guillaume’s car and take it back. Seemed like a good excuse for us all to get out of the house for a while, take a train ride, see the Mont before we left." Smiling, he raised his glass to toast the others.
"Are you taking off?" John asked. "I thought Joly wanted you to stay."
"Can’t," Ben said. "There are big things on the menu at Southwest Electroplating. Two-million-dollar comparable-worth suit coming up. Anyway, Joly told us from the start we could go after tomorrow. He knows where to find us if he needs us."
"Ben and I are catching a ten o’clock flight from Paris tomorrow night," Sophie said. "These two will be leaving the next morning, by train from Dinan."
Gideon looked with interest at Ray and Claire. "You’re going together?"
"They certainly are," Sophie said happily.
"Oh," said Ray, and cleared his throat. "Well."
"Raymond is being kind enough to accompany maman and me to Rennes," Claire explained primly, looking down at her glass. "After that he will be our guest for a few days."
"Well, you know, I don’t have to be back at Northern Cal until next week," Ray said, "so I thought…you know." He tugged at the ends of his bowtie and shone with inarticulate happiness.
Sophie took a healthy swallow of wine and put down her glass. "I don’t know about anyone else, but I could eat a horse. Claire, dear, why don’t you order for us? Is that all right with everyone?"
That was fine with everyone, and Claire, who seemed in her retiring way to be pleased with a role in the limelight, consulted at length with the waiter before settling on a three-course meal of traditional Norman cuisine. By the time the ordering was done, most of the new bottle of wine had been drunk and the level of conviviality was high. There was a blaze in the fireplace, and outside a passing rain had left the cobblestones of the Grand Rue gleaming, making it easy for Gideon to enjoy the pleasant illusion of being a sixteenth-century traveler, warmly ensconced in a fine inn among companionable comrades.
"I tell you, kids," Ben said, playfully addressing Ray and Claire, "if you’re not going to ask him, I will."
"Oh, Uncle," Claire murmured with her eyes down, then turned a little rosier. Blushing looked good on her, Gideon decided.
"All right, then, I will," Ben declared. "We have a technical question for you, Professor. Genetically speaking, just how closely related are these kids? The reason they want to know-"
"Ben," Sophie said, "I think Gideon can figure out why they want to know."
"I could make a pretty good guess," Gideon said. "What are you two anyway, cousins?"
"It’s precisely that which we can’t determine," Ray said with donnish perplexity. "We know we’re not first cousins at any rate, but after that it gets extraordinarily confusing."
"I’ll tell you what," Gideon said. "Why don’t you draw up a family tree for a few generations, showing who begat who-"
"Whom," murmured Ray automatically, then winced. "Sorry, force of habit."
"-and I’ll try and work out the genetic relationships from that."
This was well received, and they set to reconstructing the du Rocher genealogy, with Ben drawing it step-by-step on the back of a paper placemat. In the meantime, the first course arrived: fruits de mer varies, carried to the table on three broad metal platters, arranged as identically and as prettily as a set of postcards. Three big crayfish and four prawns alternating in a circle in the center, a neat mound of small, salty sea snails to be poked out of their shells with pins that came embedded in a cork, and a pile of perhaps a hundred tiny gray shrimp that Claire showed them how to eat. One held the head between thumb and forefinger, then briskly snapped off the tail with the other hand, revealing a nubbin of pale meat that had almost no flavor but nevertheless bathed the palate in a faint, luscious essence of the ocean itself.
It was slow eating, what with pins and fingers, so that John and Gideon were able to entertain themselves contentedly while the others haggled good-humoredly over the more obscure corners of the family’s history. Then, as two black kettles of moules mariniere were put on the table, the neatly printed chart was handed to Gideon, who got out a pen of his own and started to work while he ate.
By the time the mussels had been reduced to shining, blue-black heaps of empty shells, and the last of the shallot-flavored broth soaked up with sliced baguettes, he announced his findings. "You’re fifth cousins."
"What does that mean for…for children?" Claire asked, then looked down and blushed again.
Gideon smiled at her. It was nice to know there were still women like Claire left. He liked the idea of Claire and Ray as a team; there weren’t too many Ray Schaefers around either.
"It means," he said, "that you two are separated by eleven degrees of consanguinity-"
"Aren’t you glad you asked?" John said.
"Which means that the probability of your sharing any particular gene, nasty or otherwise, is. 00049. And even if you did, the chance of any of your children getting a double dose of a recessive is only a quarter of that."
Understandably enough, Claire still looked confused, and on impulse Gideon reached out to put his hand on the back of hers. It was cool and dry. He could feel her fragile tendons through the thin skin. "For all practical purposes," he said, "you aren’t related at all. There isn’t anything to worry about."
Her brow finally relaxed. "Thank you, Professor Oliver," she said with a smile and took her hand back.
"Gideon." He noticed that her hand slipped under the table and Ray’s moved stealthily towards it. One more glass of wine and he’d probably have said: "Bless you, my children."
The main course of leg of lamb-famous, Claire told them, for its delicate, spicy flavor that came from having been raised in the nearby coastal salt pastures-and white beans and fried potatoes was consumed in an atmosphere of increasing camaraderie that was enhanced by the fresh bottle of Medoc. Once Ben began to ask about the murder investigation, but Claire’s sudden, visible shrinking (or more likely a crisp kick in the shins from Sophie) quieted him. Mostly, they talked about the history and architecture of the Mont, about which Claire was shyly knowledgeable.