The Virgin Blue (15 page)

After ten minutes he reappeared with a large box and dumped it onto the desk. Then without a word or glance he walked out.

The box held a book similar to the
compoix
in Mende, but even bigger and in worse shape. The calfskin binding was so ragged it no longer held the pages together. I handled the book as carefully as I could, but even so bits of corners crumbled and broke off. I hid the fragments furtively in my pockets, worried that Monsieur Jourdain might find them and yell at me.

At noon he threw me out. I'd only been working an hour when he appeared in the doorway, glared down at me and growled something. I could only work out what he meant because he tapped his watch. He stumped down the hall to open the front door, shutting it behind me with a thud and drawing the bolt. I stood blinking in the sunlight, dazed after the dark, dusty room.

Then I was surrounded by children, streaming out from a playground next door.

I breathed in. Thank God, I thought.

I bought things for lunch in the shops just as they were closing: cheese and peaches and some dark red bread the shopkeeper told me was a local specialty, made from chestnuts. I took a path up through granite houses to the church at the top of the village.

It was a simple stone building, almost as wide as it was high. What I took to be the front door was locked, but around the side I found an open door, the date 1828 carved over it, and stepped inside. The room was full of empty wooden pews. Balconies skirted the two long walls. There was a wooden organ, a lectern and a table with a large Bible lying open on it. That was all. No ornamentation, no statues or crosses, no stained glass. I'd never seen such a bare church. There wasn't even an altar to distinguish the minister's place from the people's.

I went over to the Bible, the only thing there with a use beyond the purely functional. It looked old, though not as old as the
compoix
I'd been looking at. I began to leaf through it. It took awhile – I didn't know the order of the books in the Bible – but at last I found what I was looking for. I began to read the thirty-first psalm:
J'ai mis en toi mon espérance: Garde-moi donc, Seigneur
. By the time I reached the first line of the third verse,
Tu es ma tour et forteresse
, my eyes were full of tears. I stopped abruptly and fled.

Silly girl, I scolded myself as I sat on the wall around the church and wiped my eyes. I made myself eat, blinking in the bright sun. The chestnut bread was sweet and dry, and stuck in the back of my throat. I could feel it there for the rest of the day.

When I got back Monsieur Jourdain was sitting behind his desk, hands clasped in front of him. He wasn't reading his paper; in fact it looked like he was waiting for me. I said carefully, ‘
Bonjour, Monsieur
. May I have the
compoix
, please?’

He opened a filing cabinet next to his desk, pulled out the box and handed it to me. Then he looked closely at my face.

‘What is your name?’ he asked in a puzzled voice.

‘Tournier. Ella Tournier.’

‘Tournier,’ he repeated, still scrutinizing me. He twisted his mouth to one side, chewing the inside of his cheek. He was staring at my hair. ‘
La Rousse
,’ he murmured.

‘What?’ I snapped loudly. A wave of goosebumps swept over me.

Monsieur Jourdain widened his eyes, then reached over and touched a lock of my hair. ‘
C'est rouge. Alors, La Rousse
.’

‘But my hair is brown, Monsieur.’

‘
Rouge
,’ he repeated firmly.

‘Of course it's not. It's –’ I pulled a clump of hair in front of my eyes and caught my breath. He was right: it
was
shot through with coppery highlights. But it had been brown when I'd looked at myself in the mirror that morning. The sun had brought out highlights in my hair before, but never so fast or so dramatically.

‘What is La Rousse?’ I asked accusingly.

‘It's a Cevenol nickname for a girl with red hair. It's not an insult,’ he added quickly. ‘They used to call the Virgin La Rousse because they thought she had red hair.’

‘Oh.’ I felt dizzy and nauseous and thirsty all at once.

‘Listen, Madame.’ He rolled his tongue over his teeth. ‘If you want to use that desk there –’ He gestured toward an empty desk across from his.

‘No thank you,’ I said shakily. ‘The other office is fine.’

Monsieur Jourdain nodded, looking relieved that he wouldn't have to share a room with me.

I began where I'd left off, but kept stopping to inspect my hair. Finally I shook myself. Nothing you can do about it right now, Ella, I thought. Just get on with the job.

I worked quickly, aware that Monsieur Jourdain's new tolerance could only be relied on for so long. I stopped trying to work out what the taxes were being levied for and concentrated on names and dates. As I got toward the end of the book I became more and more despondent, and began making small bets to keep myself going: there'll be a Tournier in one of the next twenty sections; I'll find one in the next five minutes.

I glared at the last page: it was a record for a Jean Marcel, and there was only one entry, for
châtaignes
, a word I'd seen often in the
compoix
. Chestnuts. The new colour of my hair.

I heaved the book into its box and walked slowly down the hall to Monsieur Jourdain's office. He was still sitting at his desk, typing fast with two fingers on an old manual typewriter. As he leaned forward a silver chain swung out of the V in his shirt; the pendant at the end of it clanked against the keys. He looked up and caught me staring at it. His hand moved to the pendant; he rubbed it with his thumb.

‘The Huguenot cross,’ he said. ‘You know it?’

I shook my head. He held it up for me to see. It was a square cross with a dove with outspread wings attached to the bottom arm.

I set the box on the empty desk opposite him. ‘
Voilà
,’ I said. ‘Thank you for letting me look at it.’

‘You found anything?’

‘No.’ I held out my hand. ‘
Merci beaucoup, Monsieur
.’

He shook hands with me hesitantly.

‘
Au revoir, La Rousse
,’ he called as I left.

It was too late to go back to Lisle, so I spent the night at one of the two hotels in the village. After supper I tried calling Rick but there was no answer. Then I called Mathilde, who had given me her number and made me promise to give her an update. She was disappointed that I hadn't found anything, even though she knew the odds were against me.

I asked her how she got Monsieur Jourdain to be nicer to me.

‘Oh, I just made him feel guilty. I reminded him you were looking for Huguenots. He's from a Huguenot family himself, a descendant of one of the Camisard rebellion leaders, in fact. René Laporte, I think.’

‘So that's a Huguenot.’

‘Sure. What were you expecting? You mustn't be too hard on him, Ella. He's had a difficult time lately. His daughter ran off with an American three years ago. A tourist. Not only that, a Catholic too! I don't know which made him angrier, being American or being Catholic. You can see how it's affected him. He was a good worker before, a smart man. They sent me over last year to help him sort things out.’

I thought of the room full of books and papers I'd worked in and chuckled.

‘Why are you laughing?’

‘Did you ever see the back office?’

‘No, he said he'd lost the key and there was nothing in it anyway.’

I described it to her.

‘
Merde
, I knew he was hiding something! I should have been more persistent.’

‘Anyway, thanks for helping me.’

‘Bah, it's nothing.’ She paused. ‘So, who's Jean-Paul?’

I turned red. ‘A librarian in Lisle, where I live. How do you know him?’

‘He called me this afternoon.’

‘He called
you
?’

‘Sure. He wanted to know if you had found what you were looking for.’

‘He did?’

‘Is that such a surprise?’

‘Yes. No. I don't know. What did you tell him?’

‘I told him he should ask
you
. But what a flirt!’

I flinched.

I took the scenic route back to Lisle, following the Tarn through winding gorges. It was an overcast day and my heart wasn't in the drive. I began to feel carsick from all the curves. By the end I was wondering why I'd bothered with the trip at all.

Rick wasn't in when I got home and there was no answer at his office. The house felt lifeless, and I moved from room to room, unable to read or watch television. I spent a long time examining my hair in the bathroom mirror. My hairdresser in San Francisco had always tried to get me to dye my hair auburn because he thought it would go well with my brown eyes. I'd always dismissed the suggestion, but now he had his way: my hair was definitely going red.

By midnight I was worried: Rick had missed the last train from Toulouse. I didn't have the home phone numbers of any of his colleagues, the only people I could imagine him being out with. There was no one else I could call nearby, no sympathetic friend to listen and reassure me. I briefly considered phoning Mathilde, but it was late and I didn't know her well enough to inflict distressed calls at midnight on her.

Instead I called my mother in Boston. ‘Are you
sure
he didn't tell you where he was going?’ she kept saying. ‘
Where
were you again? Ella, have you been paying enough attention to him?’ She wasn't interested in my research into the Tournier family. It wasn't her family anymore; the Cévennes and French painters meant nothing to her.

I changed the subject. ‘Mom,’ I said, ‘my hair's turned red.’

‘What? Have you hennaed it? Does it look good?’

‘I didn't –’ I couldn't tell her it had just turned that way. It made no sense. ‘It looks OK,’ I said finally. ‘Actually it
does
look good. Kind of natural.’

I went to bed but lay awake for hours, listening for Rick's key in the door, fretting about whether or not to be worried, reminding myself that he was a grown-up but also that he always told me where he would be.

I got up early and sat drinking coffee until seven-thirty when a receptionist answered the phone at Rick's firm. She didn't know where he was, but promised to get his secretary to call the moment she got in. By the time she called at eight-thirty I was wired with coffee and slightly dizzy.

‘
Bonjour, Madame Middleton
,’ she sang. ‘How are you?’

I'd given up explaining to her that I hadn't taken Rick's name.

‘Do you know where Rick is?’ I asked.

‘But he is in Paris, on business,’ she said. ‘He had to go suddenly the day before yesterday. He'll be back tonight. Didn't he tell you?’

‘No. No, he didn't.’

‘I'll give you his hotel number if you want to call him there.’

When I reached the hotel Rick had already checked out. For some reason that made me angrier than anything else.

By the time he got home that night I could barely speak to him. He looked surprised to see me, but pleased too.