The Tenth Chamber (41 page)

She sighed and nodded.

He took her hand and tugged. ‘Come on, you know where I want to go.’

In the tenth chamber, they stood in front of the giant bird man and embraced. For the first time, Luc imagined the bird man’s beak was open in a triumphant laugh, a very human expression of joy.

‘This feels like our place,’ Luc said. ‘I want to keep coming here forever to work and learn. I think it’s the most amazing place in the world.’

She kissed him. ‘I think so too.’

‘I’ll be good to you this time,’ he promised.

She looked up into his eyes in an effort. ‘Once burned, twice shy. Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I’m sure. I’ll be good to you for a very long time. As long as I live.’

From her wry smile he wasn’t sure she believed him.

Nicholas Durand dried while his wife washed.

He’d faithfully helped with the dishes ever since they were first married. Creatures of habit, they always did them by hand. He couldn’t recall ever using the dishwasher their daughter had bought and installed for them. Husband and wife were white-haired, stooped with age, moving through their chores slowly and deliberately.

‘Tired?’ his wife asked.

‘Nope. I feel good,’ he replied.

It was night-time. They’d had a late supper following an afternoon nap, their usual routine on barn nights.

Rochelle was a speck of a town in central Pennsylvania, a farming town nestled in rolling hills. It was founded in 1698 by Huguenots, French Protestants who couldn’t abide the Catholic Church. It was off the beaten path, just like the founders had wanted. There’d never been more than a few hundred residents, then or now.

Pierre Durand, the town’s founding father, had left his own village in France for the Huguenot hot-bed of La Rochelle on the Bay of Biscay back in the 1680s. He hadn’t wanted to leave his village in the Périgord but there’d been a terrible dispute involving the village’s leading family over money and there was violence in the air. Although he’d never been religious, he settled upon a Huguenot woman in La Rochelle and she wound up turning his head and his beliefs. They set sail for North America in 1697.

The couple finished stacking the plates and returning the cutlery to the drawer. They sat back at the kitchen table and watched the clock tick for a while. There was an
USA Today
newspaper half-folded on the counter. Nicholas reached for it and put his reading glasses on.

‘I still can’t get over it,’ he said to his wife.

The front page of the paper was mostly devoted to the explosion that had destroyed a place in France named Ruac. ‘Are you sure your father was from there?’ she asked.

‘That’s what I understand,’ the old man said. ‘He never wanted to talk about it. He had a blood feud with a man in Ruac named Bonnet. Bonnet apparently got the best of him and that was that.’

‘You think they were our sort of people?’ she asked.

The man shrugged his narrow shoulders. ‘According to the paper, there’s no one left to ask.’

Through the kitchen window they saw head lights in the distance coming down their mile-long lane. One car, then two, then a steady stream.

‘They’re coming,’ he said, pushing back his chair.

‘How’s the tea tonight?’ she asked.

‘Good and strong,’ he said. ‘It’s a good batch. Come on, let’s get up to the barn.’